The ethics of funding embryonic stem cell research: a Catholic viewpoint

Stem cell research that requires the destruction of human embryos is incompatible with Catholic moral principles, and with any ethic that gives serious weight to the moral status of the human embryo. Moreover, because there are promising and morally acceptable alternative approaches to the repair and regeneration of human tissues, and because treatments that rely on destruction of human embryos would be morally offensive to many patients, embryonic stem cell research may play a far less significant role in medical progress than proponents believe.     

Premise Misinterpretation and Syllogistic Reasoning

A study by Ceraso and Provitera (1971) found that elaboration of the premises used in syllogistic reasoning led to substantially improved performance. This finding is of considerable importance because of the implications it has for mental logic and mental models theories of reasoning. Three experiments are reported, which replicated and extended the original findings. It was found that elaboration led to a significant improvement in performance, but that this was confined to multiple model syllogisms, where the elaboration has the effect of reducing the number of models involved. A fourth experiment indicated that elaboration can vary within the same syllogism depending on the direction of the conclusion drawn. These findings are best explained under the assumption that reasoners build mental models when solving problems and that elaboration can reduce the number of possible models.     

The Relationship of Imperatives and Self-Efficacy to Indices of Social Anxiety

Seventy-three college students participated in a study to assess the role of self-efficacy and imperatives in social anxiety. The students were asked to speak in front of a small group of their peers and their anxiety and length of time talking were measured. Neither lower self-efficacy nor higher levels of imperative thinking at Baseline were correlated with higher levels of anxiety. The critical finding was that subjects who showed higher levels of imperative thinking at Baseline spoke for a significantly shorter period of time. This suggests that the participant's anxiety was moderated by the performance of an instrumental response, in this situation by choosing to limit the amount of time spent talking. The results suggest the centrality of imperative thinking in shaping behavior in the domain of social anxiety.     

The effects of temporal modulation and spatial location on the perceived spatial frequency of visual patterns

The perceived spatial frequency of a visual pattern can increase when a pattern drifts or is presented at a peripheral visual field location, as compared with a foveally viewed, stationary pattern. We confirmed previously reported effects of motion on foveally viewed patterns and of location on stationary patterns and extended this analysis to the effect of motion on peripherally viewed patterns and the effect of location on drifting patterns. Most central to our investigation was the combined effect of temporal modulation and spatial location on perceived spatial frequency. The group data, as well as the individual sets of data for most observers, are consistent with the mathematical concept of separability for the effects of temporal modulation and spatial location on perceived spatial frequency. Two qualitative psychophysical models suggest explanations for the effects. Both models assume that the receptive-field sizes of a set of underlying psychophysical mechanisms monotonically change as a function of temporal modulation or visual field location, whereas the perceptual labels attached to a set of channels remain invariant. These models predict that drifting or peripheral viewing of a pattern will cause a shift in the perceived spatial frequency of the pattern to a higher apparent spatial frequency.     

Medical hermeneutics: Where is the “text” we are interpreting?

The present paper is a commentary on an article by Drew Leder [1]. Leder identifies a series of texts in the clinical encounter, emphasizes the central role of interpretation in making sense of each of these texts, and articulates ordering principles to guide the interpretive work.The metaphor of clinical work as textual explication, however, creates the expectation that there is a text somewhere to be found. Such an expectation invites doctors and patients to search for the text and runs the risk of conceptualizing patients as more static than they are. If one is to use the textual metaphor, one must appreciate the radical extent to which the clinical encounter is a mutually produced and shifting entity. The qualities of mutuality and indeterminacy are not those one usually associates with texts. One might ultimately be better served by a different metaphor based more directly on uncertainty.