Cross‐Species Chimeras: Exploring a Possible Christian Perspective

Various entities that combine material from humans and other animals at either the cellular or subcellular level have attracted growing public interest. I explore the controversy by considering both the scientific rationale behind creating various entities that have prompted the greatest public concern and possible ethical implications. I note a number of potentially relevant biblical passages and reflect on the imago Dei and considerations of telos in order to prompt wider discussion regarding how Christians might respond to such emerging bioethical issues.     

Neural Systems Mediating American Sign Language: Effects of Sensory Experience and Age of Acquisition

ERPs were recorded from deaf and hearing native signers and from hearing subjects who acquired ASL late or not at all as they viewed ASL signs that formed sentences. The results were compared across these groups and with those from hearing subjects reading English sentences. The results suggest that there are constraints on the organization of the neural systems that mediate formal languages and that these are independent of the modality through which language is acquired. These include different specializations of anterior and posterior cortical regions in aspects of grammatical and semantic processing and a bias for the left hemisphere to mediate aspects of mnemonic functions in language. Additionally, the results suggest that the nature and timing of sensory and language experience significantly impact the development of the language systems of the brain. Effects of the early acquisition of ASL include an increased role for the right hemisphere and for parietal cortex and this occurs in both hearing and deaf native signers. An increased role of posterior temporal and occipital areas occurs in deaf native signers only and thus may be attributable to auditory deprivation.     

Personality correlates of adjustment in isolated work groups

Twenty-five personnel from two Antarctic research stations spent the austral winter (February-October) confined in small, isolated stations located on the Antarctic ice cap. At the end of this confinement, they completed two questionnaires. The first asked about alcohol and marijuana use and self-rated adjustment to the living conditions; it also asked for nominations of others with whom each would most like and least like to spend another Antarctic tour. The second questionnaire was a recently developed personality inventory. Personality scale scores were correlated with self-rated adjustment and peer nominations. The results were consistent with previous research, and indicated that adjustment was a function of narrow interests and a low need for stimulation. More importantly, the findings also demonstrated that personality inventories are useful for predicting adjustment to working conditions in such isolated settings.     

Sense, nonsense, and the use of personality measures

Criticize measurement-based personality research by recounting a well-known limitation: indices of relationship are often inflated because of the similarity of content across measures of presumably different constructs. In this paper we endorse the major contention of Nicholls et al. that measurement-based research may be conducted thoughtlessly, and we extend their thinking by pointing out an important underlying issue—the problem of defining what constitutes a “syndrome.” In contrast to them, however, we argue that the problems in measurement they cite do not entail the consequences they foresee and, in addition, have limited application.     

Narcissism, Self-Esteem, and Defensive Self-Enhancement

This study investigates the relationships among narcissism, self-esteem, and defensive self-enhancement in samples of 60, 84, 300, and 57 subjects. Using various self-report indices of these constructs we found that (a) defensive self-enhancement is composed of two orthogonal components: grandiosity and social desirability; (b) grandiosity and social desirability independently predict self-esteem and may represent distinct confounds in the measurement of self-esteem, (c) narcissism is positively related to grandiose self-enhancement (as opposed to social desirability), (d) narcissism is positively associated with both defensive and nondefensive self-esteem, and (e) authority, self-sufficiency, and vanity are the narcissistic elements most indicative of nondefensive self-esteem. The results are consistent with several theories that postulate a two-component model for self-esteem regulation and personality development.     

On the choice between eating and aggressive display in the Siamese fighting fish (Betta splendens)

In Expt 1, male Betta splendens were given a choice between food and a mirror image in a T-maze. All fish consistently preferred food. In Expt 2, the choice of fish that lived in the T-maze for the duration of the experiment was compared with the choice of fish that were transferred to the T-maze for each experimental session. Fish that lived in the T-maze consistently preferred food, but fish that were transferred showed a shift in preference toward mirror image. Differential inhibition of hunger and aggression by fear is suggested as the cause of the preference shift.     

Shadowing and monitoring for selective attention

Although shadowing has been assumed to hold attention strongly (e.g. Hochberg, 1970) this has not been demonstrated, and the incidence of errors and intrusions suggest that it is not as powerful a technique as might have been supposed. An alternative, simpler, technique would be monitoring, but Kahneman (1970) maintains that selectivity fails in the absence of a continuous response. The experiments here compare the shadowing and monitoring tasks when attentional selectivity was required, and when it was not required, and indicate that similar attentional strategies operate during the monitoring and shadowing of brief messages. The shadowing paradigm is criticized in terms of an interaction between the relative resemblance of the stimuli and the shadowing voice. It is not demonstrated that an absolute interaction takes place, but more importantly that relatively greater interference is apparent when the shadower's voice and the stimuli to be shadowed are similar than when they are distinct. It is suggested that low target detections in the unattended message may be an artifact of the processing requirements of the shadowing task.     

Electrodermal measures of attention and effort to stimulus onset and offset for intramodal and intermodal tasks.

Two experiments were designed to assess the relationship between task difficulty and arousal. Electrodermal measures of tonic and phasic arousal to four levels of task difficulty at stimulus onset and offset were studied in college students for intramodal and intermodal tasks. The students were presented for 18 trails with visual-auditory or visual-visual stimuli with either 2.0-, 0.2-, or 0.02-sec difference between stimuli onset or offset, and asked to judge which stimulus came on or went off first or merely to observe the stimuli. Both frequency and amplitude of skin conductance responses reliably differentiated the levels of task difficulty for both the intramodal and the intermodal task. None of the measures of tonic level of arousal was reliable. Electrodermal measures of phasic responses accurately reflected the task demands.