A Wake-Up Call? Issues With Plagiarism in Transnational Higher Education

The views on plagiarism of 574 students at four Australian universities operating in Singapore were investigated through a survey and interviews. Analysis of students’ responses to different plagiarism scenarios revealed misconceptions and uncertainties about many aspects of plagiarism. Self-plagiarism and reuse of a friend’s work were acceptable to more than one quarter of the students, and nearly half considered collusion to be a legitimate form of collaboration. One quarter of the students also indicated that they would knowingly plagiarize. This should serve as a wake-up call regarding plagiarism in transnational higher education. Seven measures are recommended to curb plagiarism and foster academic integrity.     

Anomalous control: when 'free-will' is not conscious

The conscious feeling of exercising 'free-will' is fundamental to our sense of self. However, in some psychopathological conditions actions may be experienced as involuntary or unwilled. We have used suggestion in hypnosis to create the experience of involuntariness (anomalous control) in normal participants. We compared a voluntary finger movement, a passive movement and a voluntary movement suggested by hypnosis to be 'involuntary.' Hypnosis itself had no effect on the subjective experience of voluntariness associated with willed movements and passive movements or on time estimations of their occurrence. However, subjective time estimates of a hypnotically-suggested, 'involuntary' finger movement were more similar to those for passive movements than for voluntary movements. The experience of anomalous control is qualitatively and quantitatively different from the normal conscious experience of a similar act produced intentionally. The experience of anomalous control may be produced either by pathology, or, in our case, by suggestion.     

Outcomes of teen parenting programs in New Mexico

Although teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. have recently declined, the need for programs for pregnant and parenting teens remains. This report presents information from 53 programs that served pregnant and parenting teens in New Mexico between 1997 and 2000. Data on 3,194 teens, including their characteristics, the services they received, and several key outcomes, are examined. These data indicate that the programs were successful in promoting educational attainment as well as gains in employment. Prevalence of late prenatal care and low birth weight babies was lower than statewide averages, and the rate of repeat pregnancy was lower than that reported by many other programs. How these programs achieved these results is discussed.     

Mapping the Hierarchical Structure of Coping: Unifying Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives

Consumer researchers have become increasingly interested in the study of coping. This research contributes to this emerging paradigm by investigating structural theories of coping using a hierarchical modeling approach to better understand the basic dimensional properties of this multifaceted construct. This research makes gains along several fronts. First, the authors empirically examine a new lower order theory of coping based on a comprehensive synthesis of the literature, reconciling nomenclatural and conceptual redundancies found in the structure of coping literature. Analyses across 2 studies using different methods offer support for a 2‐dimensional higher order model of coping. Finally, a third study using an experimental approach validates these findings by showing unique effects relating an approach‐avoidance based higher order model to theoretically predicted emotional antecedents. By examining the mapping of lower order coping strategies onto several higher order coping theories, this research addresses the extant disjuncture between coping theory and measurement found in the literature and offers reconciliation between these 2 perspectives. The findings suggest the need for future coping research to focus on other 2‐dimensional theories beyond problem‐focused versus emotion‐focused coping. The findings build on the synergies among the many coping perspectives, and the implications of a better understanding of coping's hierarchical structure for consumer researchers is discussed.     

Diagnosing true virtue? Remote scenarios,warranted virtue attributions,and virtuous medical practice

Immanuel Kant argues in the Foundations that remote scenarios are diagnostic of genuine virtue. When agents commonly thought to have a particular virtue fail to exhibit that virtue in an extreme situation, he argues, they do not truly have the virtue at all, and our propensities to fail in such ways indicate that true virtue might never have existed. Kant’s suggestion that failure to show, say, courage in extraordinary circumstances necessarily silences one’s claim to have genuine courage seems to rely on an implausibly demanding standard for warranted virtue attributions. In contrast to this approach, some philosophers—such as Robert Adams and John Doris—have argued for probabilistic accounts of warranted virtue attributions. But despite the initial plausibility of such accounts, I argue that a sole reliance on probabilistic approaches is inadequate, as they are insufficiently sensitive to considerations of credit and fault, which emerge when agents have developed various insurance strategies and protective capacities against their responding poorly to particular eventualities. I also argue that medical graduates should develop the sorts of virtuous dispositions necessary to protect patient welfare against various countervailing influences (even where such influences might be encountered only rarely), and that repeated failures to uphold the proper goals of medicine in emergency scenarios might indeed be diagnostic of whether an individual practitioner does have the relevant medical virtue. In closing, I consider the dispositions involved in friendship. I seek to develop a principled way of determining when remote scenarios can be illuminating of genuine friendship and genuine virtue.     

Autoshaping in the rat: Effects of omission on the form of the response

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of an omission contingency on behavior related to and characterizing autoshaped lever contacts in the rat. In Experiment I an omission contingency imposed on autoshaped lever contacts forceful enough to produce a press (.078N) resulted in a significant decrease in lever presses, but had no effect on frequency of lever touches (contacts of insufficient force to produce a press) or rate of food tray entry during lever presentation. In contrast, rats which received a similar number of lever-food pairings, but whose behavior had no programmed consequences (yoked control subjects), showed an increase in lever press rate, a significant decrease in rate of food tray entry, and no change in rate of lever-touches. In Experiment II, the effect of a similar omission contingency on the topography of lever contact responses was investigated. Prior to omission training subjects contacted the lever primarily by pawing it. Following omission training this behavior was suppressed, with a subsequent increase in lever contacts characterized as nosing. Yoked control subjects showed no significant changes in lever contact topography. The results indicate that (1) an omission contingency does not simply eliminate wholesale those topographies which incur the contingency but produces subtle adaptive changes in lever contact topography; and (2) the nature of the autoshaped response in the rat does not appear to be rigid enough to depend solely upon the nature of the unconditioned stimulus or the conditioned stimulus, but can also be determined by the relationships existing between the animal's behavior and these stimuli.     

Increased response time of primed associates following an “episodic” hypnotic amnesia suggestion: A case of unconscious volition

Following a hypnotic amnesia suggestion, highly hypnotically suggestible subjects may experience amnesia for events. Is there a failure to retrieve the material concerned from autobiographical (episodic) memory, or is it retrieved but blocked from consciousness? Highly hypnotically suggestible subjects produced free-associates to a list of concrete nouns. They were then given an amnesia suggestion for that episode followed by another free association list, which included 15 critical words that had been previously presented. If episodic retrieval for the first trial had been blocked, the responses on the second trial should still have been at least as fast as for the first trial. With semantic priming, they should be faster. In fact, they were on average half a second slower. This suggests that the material had been retrieved but blocked from consciousness. A goal-oriented information processing framework is outlined to interpret these and related data.     

Quantifying violence in mental health research

Research into mental illness and its relationship with violence has been constrained by inconsistencies in the definition and measurement of violent behavior. We conducted a systematic literature search of Scopus, EMBASE, PsycINFO, and Ovid Medline with search terms relating to the measurement, rating and quantification of violent behavior in mentally disordered populations. We identified nine tools designed to assess violence and critically evaluated them. Broadly, measurement tools tended to focus on multiple, but different, facets of violence, which included: severity of act, severity of outcome, frequency and intent, with each suggested as a valid outcome measure for violent acts. The use of multiple sources of information to inform assessment appears to provide detail; however, that detail is then often diluted as a result of dichotomization of sample groups. This presents methodological challenges for the field. Future studies should give consideration to the trade-off between preserving the richness of data and the difficulties associated with recruiting large patient samples. Studies should move from simply defining violence towards quantification across different dimensions of violence and using multiple sources of information.