What’s Wrong with the Scrum Laws in Rugby Union? — Judgment,Truth and Refereeing

Officiating and the role of officials in sport is are crucial and often decisive factors in sports contests. Justice and desert of sport contests, in part, rely on officiating truths (performances) that arise from an appropriate admixture of epistemic (judgements) and metaphysical (actions) ingredients. This paper provides a rigorous and original philosophical analysis of the problems of obeying and applying the rules of sport. The paper focuses on a the scrum in rugby union. The scrum has become a focus of criticism and bewilderment. Elite rugby is damaged as a spectacle because too much time is wasted setting and re-setting scrums. Furthermore, trust in the fairness of games is eroded because the scrum is a ‘lottery’. In this paper, we identify two fundamental structural problems which contribute to the scrum controversy. First, we argue that officials cannot make reliable judgements about scrums because they cannot see what they need to see. Secondly, we argue that players cannot follow the laws of the scrum even if they have a strong desire to do so. Consequently, the scrum is not only potentially dangerous, but also flawed in terms of its capacity to actualise an intended part of the game.     

The Proof is in the Pudding: Commentary on Papers Updating Anna Freud’s Diagnostic Profile

ABSTRACT

This fine collection of articles documents efforts to bring Anna Freud’s diagnostic profile (1965) up to date by integrating more recent theory and research in attachment theory, inter-subjective theory, and theories deriving from the work of Bion on the process of “containing” (Bion, 1988). While some of the articles present the theoretical context for this integrative effort, Melandri’s (this issue) thoughtful and comprehensive clinical case shows us how an updated diagnostic profile can be put to work in the consulting room.     

Faces, flowers and football boots: capacity limits in distractor processing

While visual attention can be attracted by task-irrelevant stimuli, questions remain regarding how many irrelevant items can be processed simultaneously and whether capacity limits are equivalent for all types of stimuli. To explore these issues, participants were required to classify verbal stimuli that were flanked by either one or two response-matching or response-mismatching faces (Expts. 1 and 2) or objects (Expt. 2). The results revealed that when stimulus categorization was sufficient to trigger flanker interference, distractor processing was insensitive to the number of irrelevant stimuli. When, however, stimulus identification was needed to drive flanker interference, distractor processing was attenuated when two task-irrelevant items were presented. The theoretical implications of these findings are considered.     

Appropriate Spiritual Care by Physicians: A Theological Perspective

It is argued that when spiritual care by physicians is linked to the empirical research indicating the salutary effect on health of religious beliefs and practices an unintended degradation of religion is involved. It is contended that it is much more desirable to see support for the patient’s spirituality as part of holistic care. A proposal for appropriate spiritual care by physicians is offered.

Assessing a retrieval account of the generation and perceptual-interference effects

A number of memory phenomena are modulated by experimental design, with the effect (e.g., of bizarreness, generation, or perceptual interference) occurring in recall for mixed-list, but not pure-list designs. These effects have other similarities and have been treated in common theoretical frameworks, some focusing on encoding and others on retrieval. The typical paradigm for examining design effects confounds encoding and retrieval contexts, making it difficult to compare these accounts. Using a new paradigm, McDaniel, Dornburg, and Guynn (2005) concluded that retrieval processes contribute to the bizarreness effect. We applied this paradigm to the related perceptual-interference and generation effects. Participants were presented with two pure study lists and later recalled the lists separately (inducing pure retrieval sets) or together (inducing a combined or mixed retrieval set) in a single test. In four experiments, the combined recall condition consistently failed to enhance the size of the generation or perceptual-interference effect. Two additional experiments verified that perceptual interference and generation enhanced recognition memory, as predicted by the standard encoding accounts. The results provide no support for the retrieval account of these two variables but generally are consistent with an encoding locus.     

Anxiety sensitivity and obsessive--compulsive disorder

Anxiety sensitivity (AS), a cognitive risk factor for anxiety disorders, was evaluated in a homogeneous obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) sample. A total of 280 individuals with OCD completed measures. Evaluation of the Anxiety Sensitivity Index revealed a latent structure that was congruent with previous studies showing a single higher order and three lower order factors, although greater variance was accounted for by the general factor than in a previous study. AS was significantly associated with OCD symptom severity after controlling for other putative cognitive risk factors, although the additional variance explained was small. Variability in the relationship of AS to OCD symptom severity was found across OCD symptom subgroups. Results suggest that AS might be an important aspect of OCD-relevant cognition for specific OCD subgroups, and the need for experimental evaluation is discussed.