Competency,and other constructs,in right to die cases

Subjects had to make a “remove” or “do not remove” life-sustaining measures decision in three right to die cases where the patients differed in competence; for half the subjects, a living will was present in all the cases, whereas, for the other half, it was not. Subjects also gave their determinative reasons for their decisions. Support for the right to die varied by case, but not by competency, or by the presence of a living will. The subjects' reasons were highly predictive of their decisions, and related to the way case-specific facts were construed, revealing a number of disparities between the way courts and citizens construe whether the patient's condition is “terminal,” “irreversible,” and “painful,” or not. Beyond construing facts differently, the results also revealed a disparity between evolving case law and the community's “common sense justice” over a fundamental belief: whether dying is seen as private matter, outside the bounds of State intervention, or not.     

Unit price as a useful metric in analyzing effects of reinforcer magnitude.

In this paper, we applied the behavioral-economic concept of unit price to the study of reinforcer magnitude in an attempt to provide a consistent account of the effects of reinforcer magnitude on behavior. Recent research in the experimental analysis of behavior and in behavioral pharmacology suggests that reinforcer magnitude interacts with the schedule of reinforcement to determine response rate and total consumption. The utility of the unit-price concept thus stems from its ability to quantify this interaction as a cost-benefit ratio (i.e., unit price = characteristics of the schedule of reinforcement divided by magnitude of reinforcement). Research employing the unit-price concept has shown that as unit price increases, a positively decelerating function exists for consumption (i.e., a function with an increasingly negative slope, when plotted on log coordinates) and a bitonic function exists for response rate. Based on these findings, the present analysis applied the unit-price concept to those studies of reinforcer magnitude and drug self-administration that examined the effects of reinforcer magnitude on response rate using simple schedules of reinforcement (e.g., fixed-ratio schedule). This resulted in three findings: (a) Reinforcer-magnitude manipulations and schedule manipulations interact in a manner that can be quantified in terms of unit price as benefit and cost factors, respectively; (b) different reinforcer-magnitude manipulations are functionally interchangeable as benefit factors in the unit-price ratio; and (c) these conclusions appear warranted despite the differences in reinforcers (food or drug), species (dogs, monkeys, or rats), and schedules (interval or ratio), and despite the fact that these studies were not designed for a unit-price analysis. In methodological terms, these results provide further evidence that employing the unit-price concept is a parsimonious method for examining the effects of reinforcer magnitude. In theoretical terms, these results suggest that a single process may underlie the effect of combined reinforcer-magnitude and schedule manipulations.     

Using focus groups to facilitate culturally anchored research

Scholars have acknowledged the need to anchor scientific knowledge about social and psychological processes in the norms, values, and experiences of the partticular population under study. This article describes how focus groups can be incorporated into the planning stages of a research pogram to facilitate these goals. After a brief overview of teh central components of focus group research, and example from a program of research involving dual-earner African American families is used to as an illustration. The article describes how (a) the identification of cultural knowledge and (b)access to the language participants use to think and talk about a topic can help researchers formulate a conceptual framework, identify important constructs, and develop appropriate instruments for assessing constructs. Some strengths and limitations of focus group research are discussed.     

Operators in the paradox of the knower

Predicates are term-to-sentence devices, and operators are sentence-to-sentence devices. What Kaplan and Montague's Paradox of the Knower demonstrates is that necessity and other modalities cannot be treated as predicates, consistent with arithmetic; they must be treated as operators instead. Such is the current wisdom.A number of previous pieces have challenged such a view by showing that a predicative treatment of modalities neednot raise the Paradox of the Knower. This paper attempts to challenge the current wisdom in another way as well: to show that mere appeal to modal operators in the sense of sentence-to-sentence devices is insufficient toescape the Paradox of the Knower. A family of systems is outlined in which closed formulae can encode other formulae and in which the diagonal lemma and Paradox of the Knower are thereby demonstrable for operators in this sense.I am deeply indebted to Robert F. Barnes and Evan W. Conyers, without whom these ideas might not have germinated and certainly would not have grown. Many of the results offered here evolved in the course of mutual discussion and correspondence. I am also grateful to an anonymous reviewer forSynthese for many very helpful suggestions.The current paper contains the technical results promised in Footnote 25 of Grim (1988) and Footnote 26, Chapter 3, of Grim (1991).     

An asymmetry in transmodal perceptual learning

Transmodal perceptual learning was examined in a canonical same/different paradigm. Subjects naive to vibrotactile stimulation and unfamiliar with the task were asked to discriminate sequentially presented shapes moving laterally across an aperture. On all trials, the shapes were presented either visually and then vibrotactually or in the opposite modality order, and on all trials the shapes moved in opposite directions. Analyses of the data revealed that although perceptual learning was evident in both groups, the rate of the learning was more rapid in the visual-vibrotactile group. This interaction of modality order and practice was significant and was considered in terms of E.J. Gibson's theory of perceptual learning and in terms of the constructs, suggested by J.J. Gibson, of available and accessible information-in-stimulation and the education of attention.     

A coding of the countable linear orderings

Associate to any linear ordering on the integers the mapping whose value on n is the cardinality of {k<n; kn}: a purely combinatorial characterization for the mappings associated to the well-orderings is established.This work was partially supported by a CNRS grant PRC mathématiques and informatique.     

The role of compliance in hypnotic and nonhypnotic analgesia

We modified the standard procedure for administering finger pressure pain in order to assess the extent to which subjects biased their reports of pain reduction when exposed to compliance-inducing instructions. Experiment 1 used only highly hypnotizable subjects and found that compliance-induced reductions in reported pain were about half as large as the reported reductions produced by hypnotic analgesia suggestions. Experiment 2 used low as well as high hypnotizables and administered hypnotic or nonhypnotic analgesia instructions and compliance instructions to the same subjects on separate pain trials. Reported pain reductions produced by hypnotic and nonhypnotic analgesia suggestions and those produced by compliance instructions were substantially and significantly correlated. Furthermore, hypnotizability correlated with compliance-induced reported pain reductions as highly as it correlated with the reported reductions produced by hypnotic analgesia suggestions. Among high hypnotizables (but not low hypnotizables) compliant responding was predicted by social desirability. The findings of both studies indicate that compliance strongly influences the reports of hypnotic and nonhypnotic analgesia proffered by high hypnotizables. The role of compliance in the pain reductions reported by low hypnotizables is less clear-cut.     

Psychosocial predictors of stress associated with the male midlife transition

This study was designed to examine the correlates of developmental psychological stress for 36 middle-aged professional men. Based on sex role convergence and role adjustment theories, two sets of predictor variables were hierarchically entered into a multiple regression equation with a third set of variables entered to control for individual stressors. Controlling for individual stressors, midlife stress outcome was found to be influenced only by role adjustment (R²=.3593). The sex role convergence cluster did not account for a significant increase in variance. Controlling for individual stressors, the best univariate predictors of stress outcome associated with the midlife transition were (a) the quality of the parent-adolescent relationship and (b) marital satisfaction.