Putative behavioral history effects and aggression maintained by escape from therapists

Differentially higher rates of aggression in treatment sessions occurred in the presence of two staff members who had previously worked with the participant at another facility. Adding an edible reinforcer for compliance and the absence of aggression in sessions conducted by these two staff members decreased aggression to rates similar to those obtained with less familiar therapists. Results suggest that embedding positive reinforcement within a demand context may reduce the aversiveness of therapists correlated with a history of demand situations.     

“I am the Author and Must Take Full Responsibility”: Abraham Verghese,Physicians as the Storytellers of the Body,and the Renewal of Medicine

Abraham Verghese proposes to renew medicine by training physicians to read the right texts—literary fiction and patients' bodies—with skilled attention. Analyzing Verghese's proposal with reference to Foucault's idea of the "clinical gaze," I find that Verghese conceives of patients as texts that only physicians can read, meaning that physicians become the storytellers of the bodies, lives, and deaths of the people they meet as patients. I conclude that Verghese's project is unsustainable and alternatively propose thinking analogically of physicians as ship captains who maintain therapeutic distance to reopen interpretative spaces for communities outside of medicine.     

Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?

Virtue ethics is standardly taught and discussed as a distinctive approach to the major questions of ethics, a third major position alongside Utilitarian and Kantian ethics. I argue that this taxonomy is a confusion. Both Utilitarianism and Kantianism contain treatments of virtue, so virtue ethics cannot possibly be a separate approach contrasted with those approaches. There are, to be sure, quite a few contemporary philosophical writers about virtue who are neither Utilitarians nor Kantians; many of these find inspiration in ancient Greek theories of virtue. But even here there is little unity. Although certain concerns do unite this disparate group (a concern for the role of motives and passions in good choice, a concern for character, and a concern for the whole course of an agent's life), there are equally profound disagreements, especially concerning the role that reason should play in ethics. One group of modern virtue-theorists, I argue, are primarily anti-Utilitarians, concerned with the plurality of value and the susceptibility of passions to social cultivation. These theorists want to enlarge the place of reason in ethics. They hold that reason can deliberate about ends as well as means, and that reason can modify the passions themselves. Another group of virtue theorists are primarily anti-Kantians. They believe that reason plays too dominant a role in most philosophical accounts of ethics, and that a larger place should be given to sentiments and passions -- which they typically construe in a less reason-based way than does the first group. The paper investigates these differences, concluding that it is not helpful to speak of virtue ethics, and that we would be better off characterizing the substantive views of each thinker -- and then figuring out what we ourselves want to say.     

How Should What Economists Call “Social Values” Be Measured?

Most economists and some philosophers distinguish individual utilities from interpersonal social values. Even if challenges to that conceptual distinction can be met, further philosophically interesting questions arise. I pursue three in this paper, using, as context for the discussion, health economics and its attempt to discern empirically a social welfare function to help guide rationing decisions. (1) To discern these utilities and values in a manner that is morally appropriate if they are to influence rationing decisions, who should be queried? To discern individual health state utilities, persons in precisely those states should be asked (generically, “patients”), but for social values, representatives of the general public should be. (2) To discern social values, what should representatives of the public be asked? They should be asked “person trade-off” (PTO) questions that encompass their own self-interest, not PTO questions that focus only on others. (3) What must public representatives understand before they respond to such questions? Despite the philosophically complex problem of patient adaptation, they should understand (among other things) the health state utilities elicited from actual patients with the conditions at issue.     

Family Therapy With Irish-Americans

This paper presents a paradigm for understanding the cultural values and family patterns of Irish-American families and offers suggestions for clinical intervention. Families' correspondence to the model described will depend upon their level of acculturation, socioeconomic status, and other contextual factors. The paradigm suggests a number of issues that may create difficulties for the therapist and for the family in therapy. In general, behavioral techniques, Bowen systems therapy, and strategic interventions may be more useful than techniques emphasizing expression of emotions in therapy or direct attempts to alter communication or family behavior in therapy sessions, as used in structural therapy.     

Combating Contagion and Injustice: The Shared Work for Public Health and Faith Communities During COVID-19

Journal of Religion and Health - Faith communities are uniquely positioned for essential public health work to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and address the chronic pre-existing health disparities...     

MEASUREMENT ERROR IN RESEARCH ON HUMAN RESOURCES and FIRM PERFORMANCE: HOW MUCH ERROR IS THERE AND HOW DOES IT INFLUENCE EFFECT SIZE ESTIMATES?

Studies of the relationship between human resource (HR) practices and firm performance typically use a single respondent to assess firm level HR practices or HR effectiveness. However, previous research in other substantive areas suggests that rater differences are a potentially important source of measurement error. We demonstrate analytically the potential consequences of both random and systematic measurement error in research on HR and firm performance. However, our main focus is on random error and we show how generalizability theory can be applied to obtain better estimates of reliability by simultaneously recognizing multiple sources (e.g., items, raters) of random measurement error. These more inclusive reliability estimates, in turn, offer the possibility of more precisely quantifying substantive relationships in the HR and firm performance literature. In our sample, reliabilities (as estimated by generalizability coefficients) for single-rater assessments of HR variables were generally below .50. This degree of measurement error, if present in substantive studies on HR and firm performance, could lead to considerable bias, given that an unstandardized regression coefficient is corrected for measurement error in the independent variable by dividing by its reliability coefficient (not its square root). We also found only limited convergent validity between HR and line managers ratings of a second type of HR measure, HR effectiveness. In general, our findings suggest that future researchers need to devote greater attention to measurement error and construct validity issues. Our study provides an example of how generalizability theory can be useful in this pursuit.