The juncture of law and morality in prohibitions against torture

Conclusion The right to be secure from torture, a right that encompasses moral as well as legal strictures against the practice, is supported by increasingly stringent human rights instruments. In this essay, I have discussed the principal instruments and their place in the anti-torture field considered broadly. The phenomenon of these international instruments foreshadows an ever-widening range of legal initiatives against torture, and is emblematic of the increasing importance attached to respect for human life and human dignity. The diversity of international treaties providing against torture such as, for example, The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), The Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery (1956), The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1965), and The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973), indicates the interconnectedness of a wide range of human rights issues.The boundaries that have been drawn around the violation constituted by torture are clearer at present than are those bounding many other rights. Rights commonly categorized as of an economic nature - the right to food and to development, for example - are undergoing processes of definition and implementation. One challenge of this paper is to generate procedures presently attached to such specific human rights violations as torture to rights with less clear parameters. In this way, the growing effectiveness of procedures against torture can serve in the long term to strengthen the bases of international human rights law while in the short term helping to expand the armory of procedures for the protection of less clearly-defined, rights. International human rights law offers a practical tool towards eliminating torture from states' instruments for governing and provides a model for the development of procedures in other categories of rights, while bringing universally declared moral aspirations and legal authority into closer alignment.     

Family processes,resourcefulness, coping,and stress: A prospective study

A review of the family therapy literature indicates that few studies have investigated the complex relationship among family processes, coping, and stress in understanding how people manage stressful events and conditions. The purpose of the present study was to utilize a prospective research design to systemically explore the impact of family processes on an individual's ability to use effective coping responses when faced with a stressful situation. The results did indicate that individuals experienced greater strain at Time 1 (awaiting exam). However, no differences were found between family process variables and an individual's coping responses between Time 1 and Time 2 (awaiting results). Suggestions for further research on intergenerational family systems theory and implications for family therapy practice are provided.     

Client gender and sex-typed nonverbal behavior: Impact on impression formation

The influence of sex-typed nonverbal behavior of male and female clients on college students' perceptions was investigated. In a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design, 156 male and female college students were exposed to a videotaped interview during which either a male or female client displayed either masculine or feminine sex-typed nonverbal behaviors. Subjects rated the perceived characteristics, prognosis for improvement, and problems of the client. Hypothesized main effects for client gender and sex-typed nonverbal behavior did not obtain. However, the hypothesized client gender by sex-typed nonverbal behavior interaction was found. This result was due primarily to a pervasive tendency to stigmatize the female clients displaying masculine sex-typed behaviors, in comparison to male clients displaying these same behaviors. Possible explanations and implications for these observed effects were discussed.     

Threat,Knowledge, and Support for a Collective Response to Urban Flooding1

The most realistic solution to recurring urban flooding in most American cities is some form of land use planning (zoning), i.e., an integrated, collective response to this type of threat to the community. Yet there is frequently little public support for such action. The present study surveyed persons living in and around a notorious urban floodplain to assess support for such land use planning as a function of (a) threat, i.e., the motivational effect of proximity to the floodplain, ownership of property at risk, personal flooding history, perceived likelihood of one's home being flooded in the next 5 years, and the presence of small children in the home; and (b) amount of knowledge about variables affecting flooding, i.e., the cognitive element. Although proximity was related strongly to expressions of concern, none of the measures of threat was related to support for land use planning. Knowledge of the variables involved, however, was positively related to support for a planning solution. The findings are discussed in terms of theoretical implications of the cognitive element in collective responses to environmental hazards.     

The selective impairment of phonological processing: A case study

A case study is reported of an aphasic patient with fluent speech and markedly superior comprehension of written vs. spoken words. Results of extensive testing supported the hypothesis that the patient suffers from a phonological processing deficit that affects performance in all tasks that require the generation of a phonological code. This selective deficit is interpreted as the underlying cause of diverse symptoms such as asyntactic comprehension of written sentences, the commission of spelling errors in writing, and the production of literal paraphasias and neologisms in spontaneous speech. Alternative possibilities for the classification of this patient are discussed.     

Sex and becoming eminent as a political/organizational leader

Using 317 randomly selected eminent personalities, this study seeks to determine if female political and/or organizational eminents differ systematically from other female eminents, to ascertain how similar the socialization data and patterns are for eminent political males and females, and to determine how these patterns compare with those of male and female eminents in other areas of endeavor. The data indicate that to have the possibility of becoming a political/organizational leader, females seem to need to become more similar to males psychosocially. However, the socialization structures and agents needed to promote such comparable psychosocial developments are different from what have existed in the past. The female political/organizational eminents studied did come from a different type of family structure and background. In this sense, they differ in their socialization from what we know about the “average woman,” the other eminent females, and the male eminents. But the psychosocial product of such socialization is more like the male political/organizational eminent in terms of career and public role expectations. One implication of these findings is that the United States is likely to see more politically and organizationally eminent women in the future. The trend toward two-career households (because of economic conditions, as well as the women's movement) is likely to socialize more girls toward such positions.     

The semantic deficit hypothesis: Perceptual parsing and object classification by aphasic patients

Many aphasic patients are impaired in their ability to provide or to recognize the names of objects, but little is known about the processing deficits that underlie these difficulties. In this report, a model of object naming/name recognition is proposed, and a prediction is tested concerning one possible functional locus of impairment in name-recognition and object-naming disorders. A subgroup of aphasic patients is found to be impaired in the ability to perform perceptual similarity judgments for pairs of stimulus objects, and to be unable to classify the objects into one of two lexical categories. It is concluded that the classification disorder suffered by these patients results from an impairment at the level of the semantically guided perceptual parsing of objects.