Does the Narrative Style of Video Evidence Influence Judgements About Rape Complainant Testimony?

Four studies investigated lawyers' concerns that the narrative style of police interviews with adult rape complainants reduces the impact of this interview as video evidence. Study 1 (N = 96) compared mock juror perceptions of simulated evidence‐in‐chief either in traditional short‐answer or narrative style and found testimony style was not a predictor of complainant credibility. Studies 2 (N = 104), 3 (N = 102) and 4 (N = 102) examined different variables that change with testimony style—the number of questions asked, overall testimony length and response length. The number of questions asked was the only predictor of complainant credibility; more questions resulted in higher credibility ratings. These findings suggest that lawyers' concerns about narrative style interviewing are unwarranted. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distribution of Reported Durations of Behavior in Applied Behavioral Research

Duration is a commonly measured dimension of behavior in behavioral research and clinical practice. An approach to studies of measurement in behavior analysis is to simulate streams of behavior from which samples can be extracted. It is therefore important to establish a typical range and distribution of behavioral durations on which simulated behavioral data should be based. We conducted an analysis of behavioral durations reported in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis between 2008 and 2012. The range and distribution of data points across different durations will be presented, as well as an analysis of the reliability of the software used to measure each data point. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Queer Youth in Family Therapy

Trends in popular belief about same‐sex relationships have undergone noteworthy change in the United States over the last decade. Yet this change has been marked by stark polarizations and has occurred at varying rates depending upon regional, community, racial, religious, and individual family context. For queer youth and their families, this cultural transformation has broadened opportunities and created a new set of risks and vulnerabilities. At the same time, youth's increasingly open and playful gender fluidity and sexual identity is complicated by unique intersections of class, race, religion, and immigration. Effective family therapy with queer youth requires practitioner's and treatment models that are sensitive to those who bear the burden of multiple oppressions and the hidden resilience embedded in their layered identities. We present case examples of our model of family therapy which addresses refuge, supports difficult dialogs, and nurtures queerness by looking for hidden resilience in the unique intersections of queer youths' lives. These intersections provide transformational potential for youth, their families and even for family therapists as we are all nurtured and challenged to think more complexly about intersectionality, sexuality, and gender.     

Private-Sector Research Ethics: Marketing or Good Conflicts Management? The 2005 John J. Conley Lecture on Medical Ethics

Pharmaceutical companies are major sponsors of biomedical research. Most scholars and policymakers focus their attention on government and academic oversight activities, however. In this article, I consider the role of pharmaceutical companies’ internal ethics statements in guiding decisions about corporate research and development (R&D). I review materials from drug company websites and contributions from the business and medical ethics literature that address ethical responsibilities of businesses in general and pharmaceutical companies in particular. I discuss positive and negative uses of pharmaceutical companies’ ethics materials and describe shortcomings in the companies’ existing ethics programs. To guide employees and reassure outsiders, companies must add rigor, independence, and transparency to their R&D ethics programs.     

Human and Animal Subjects of Research: The Moral Significance of Respect versus Welfare

Human beings with diminished decision-making capacities are usually thought to require greater protections from the potential harms of research than fully autonomous persons. Animal subjects of research receive lesser protections than any human beings regardless of decision-making capacity. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely animals’ lack of some characteristic human capacities that is commonly invoked to justify using them for human purposes. In other words, for humans lesser capacities correspond to greater protections but for animals the opposite is true. Without explicit justification, it is not clear why or whether this should be the case. Ethics regulations guiding human subject research include principles such as respect for persons—and related duties—that are required as a matter of justice while regulations guiding animal subject research attend only to highly circumscribed considerations of welfare. Further, the regulations guiding research on animals discount any consideration of animal welfare relative to comparable human welfare. This paper explores two of the most promising justifications for these differences␣between the two sets of regulations. The first potential justification points to lesser moral status for animals on the basis of their lesser capacities. The second potential justification relies on a claim about the permissibility of moral partiality as␣found in common morality. While neither potential justification is sufficient to justify the regulatory difference as it stands, there is possible common ground between supporters of some regulatory difference and those rejecting the current difference.