Verbal versus olfactory cues: affect in elicited memories

Verbal processing has a reduced role for olfactory stimuli. It is difficult to provide a label for an odor experience. Odor perception can retrieve memories of life events with personal meaning and elicit affective experiences. Odors that have emotionally loaded content could produce older memories. Common odors with well-known names have been used. In Exp. 1 the names were shown, and the subjects were asked to imagine the corresponding odors; subsequently those odorants were presented. In Exp. 2 at first the odorants were presented and subsequently their names, printed one each per white card. The subjects were requested to provide written free associations. At the end of each session they scored a semantic differential. The hypothesis that emotionally loaded associations are more frequent when evoked by odorants seems confirmed, supported also by some reliable differences between the profiles for olfactory verbal stimuli. The evaluation of olfactory stimuli did not differ from one experiment to the other; verbal stimuli, on the contrary, are differently evaluated if the corresponding odorants were presented before or after their labels.     

Long-term memory for the emotional gist and the emotional essence of an experience

We investigated accuracy in recalling past emotional behaviours and emotionality. Male couples discussed the history of their relationship, and coders rated the extent to which each partner engaged in behaviours such as complimenting or criticising. These ratings were combined into dimensions representing the deeper, emotional essence of that partner's discussion (expressions of We-ness, Fondness, Negativity, and Disappointment). Four years later, participants accurately recalled some of their own and some of their partner's emotional gist-level behaviours, but their answers indicated that they also remembered the emotional essence of the conversation. We conclude that individuals can retain the emotional essence of an experience for a long time, and that they may use this memory to infer, in part, gist-level details of the experience.     

Emergency Research without Consent under Polish Law

Although Directive 2001/20/EC of the European Parliament and of Council of 4 April 2001 on the approximation of the laws regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States relating to the implementation of good clinical practice in the conduct of clinical trials on medicinal products for human use does not contain an exception for emergency situations, and requires the informed consent of a legal representative in all cases where research is conducted on legally competent individuals who are unable to give informed consent, in Poland, emergency research can be conducted without consent. Polish regulations on emergency research can hardly be treated as a result of intentional legislative policy. Our provisions arise from multiple and sophisticated interpretations of different regulations that govern medical experiments on human subjects and clinical trials. These interpretations can be summarized as follows: (1) There are two categories of medical experiments: therapeutic and non-therapeutic experiments. Emergency research without consent may be conducted in the category of therapeutic experiment only (therapeutic experiment consists of the introduction by the physician of new or only partially proven diagnostic, therapeutic or preventive methods in order to achieve direct benefit to the health of the patients, and it can be carried out when hitherto applied methods were ineffective or their effectiveness was insufficient). (2). Emergency research may be conducted without consent if there is a situation of great urgency in which the research subject's life is in danger and there is no possibility of obtaining immediate consent from the research subject him or herself, or from his or her legal representative or guardianship court, and the research subject has not refused to give consent for the participation in an emergency therapeutic experiment. The legal representative or guardianship court shall be provided with all the relevant information concerning subject's participation in an experiment as soon as possible. All projects of emergency research with intent to be done without the research subject's consent must be approved by an independent bioethics committee. Because these five requirements seem to provide insufficient protection for a subject's autonomy and rights it is necessary to add to them two other conditions: (1) the emergency research could not be conducted using other research participants capable of giving informed consent; and (2) informed consent for continued participation in the emergency research shall be obtained from either the participant him or herself or the legally authorized representative as soon as possible (requirement of obtaining deferred consent). A consolidated single Act that will govern all aspects of medical experiments on human subjects, including emergency research, should be prepared and enacted as soon as possible.     

PRENATAL AND POSTNATAL MATERNAL REPRESENTATIONS IN NONRISK AND AT‐RISK PARENTING: EXPLORING THE INFLUENCES ON MOTHER–INFANT FEEDING INTERACTIONS

The aim of this study was to investigate the mother–infant relationship in depressive, psychosocial, and cumulative‐risk parenting by assessing prenatal and postnatal maternal representations and mother–infant interactions during feeding at 4 months of age. The sample consisted of 167 mother–infant pairs: 41 nonrisk women, 40 depressive‐risk women, 40 psychosocial‐risk women, and 46 cumulative‐risk women. During pregnancy, the women were interviewed about psychosocial‐risk variables. Maternal representations and depressive symptoms were evaluated during pregnancy and again when the infants were 3 and 4 months old, respectively. All mother–infant pairs were observed in 20‐min video recordings during breast‐feeding. Maternal Integrated/balanced representations were more frequent in the nonrisk group whereas the maternal Nonintegrated/ambivalent category was more represented in the cumulative‐risk group during pregnancy and after the infant's birth. At 4 months, the cumulative‐risk group of mothers and infants showed a lack of reciprocity, conflictual communicative exchanges, and higher food refusal behavior. Moreover, at 4 months, differences between the quality of mother–infant feeding interactions and the quality of prenatal and postnatal maternal representations emerged, showing less adequate maternal scaffolding in the Nonintegrated/ambivalent and Restricted/disengaged women. This study has rich implications for intervention to support the affective and communicative caregiving system and to prevent infant feeding problems and mother–infant relational disturbances in childhood.     

Randomized controlled trials versus rough set analysis: two competing approaches for evaluating clinical data

The present paper deals with the problem of evaluating empirical evidence for therapeutic decisions in medicine. The article discusses the views of Nancy Cartwright and John Worrall on the function that randomization plays in ascertaining causal relations with reference to the therapies applied. The main purpose of the paper is to present a general idea of alternative method of evaluating empirical evidence. The method builds on data analysis that makes use of rough set theory. The first attempts to apply the method show that it is an interesting alternative to randomized controlled trials.     

SCIENCE,RELIGION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE: “AMALGAM” NARRATIVES OF POLISH NATURAL SCIENTISTS

This article deals with phenomena occurring at the interface of the existential, the religious, and scientific inquiry. On the basis of in‐depth interviews with Polish physicists and biologists, I examine the role that science and religion play in their narrative of the meaning of the Universe and human life. I show that the narratives about meaning have a system‐related (“amalgam") character that is associated with responses to adjacent metaphysical questions, including those based on scientific knowledge. I reconstruct the typical amalgam questions of Polish scientists and come to a conclusion about the stability of religious and nonreligious amalgams in this group. Critically referring to the thesis concerning the secularizing impact of science, I conclude that science by itself does not have a destructive effect on Polish scientists’ confidence that life and the Universe are meaningful, but is rather an exacerbating factor of the existing worldview system.