Teaching suffering: The testimonial-commentary method

Attempts to define professionalism and humanism suggest that qualities such as compliance to values, patient access, doctor-patient relationship, demeanor, professional management, personal awareness, and motivation are prominent thematic components. In this communication, we present a method for instruction in the values of humanism that may help to overcome the "curricular inertia that plagues medical education." Our approach is structured around a technique of testimonial-commentary as a novel approach to teaching humanism that does not rely upon the traditional role-modeling format. To develop effective medical school curricula for teaching humanism, we cannot rely upon the textbooks of normal and abnormal human anatomy and physiology. We must delve into the "unscientific" realms of human identity ranging from sensuality to brutality: self-preservation to sacrifice. Underneath it all, we must acknowledge that there are the ties that bind us together as people. The Seminar on Human Suffering challenges medical school educators to work with the community at large to insure that physicians will be able to serve those that seek their counsel.     

The critical role of the research question, inclusion criteria, and transparency in meta-analyses of integrity test research: a reply to Harris et al. (2012) and Ones, Viswesvaran, and Schmidt (2012)

We clear up a number of misconceptions from the critiques of our meta-analysis (Van Iddekinge, Roth, Raymark, & Odle-Dusseau, 2012). We reiterate that our research question focused on the criterion-related validity of integrity tests for predicting individual work behavior and that our inclusion criteria flowed from this question. We also reviewed the primary studies we could access from Ones, Viswesvaran, and Schmidt's (1993) meta-analysis of integrity tests and found that only about 30% of the studies met our inclusion criteria. Further, analyses of some of the types of studies we had to exclude revealed potentially inflated validity estimates (e.g., corrected validities as high as .80 for polygraph studies). We also discuss our experience trying to obtain primary studies and other information from authors of Harris et al. (2012) and Ones, Viswesvaran, and Schmidt (2012). In addition, we address concerns raised about certain decisions we made and values we used, and we demonstrate how such concerns would have little or no effect on our results or conclusions. Finally, we discuss some other misconceptions about our meta-analysis, as well as some divergent views about the integrity test literature in general. Overall, we stand by our research question, methods, and results, which suggest that the validity of integrity tests for criteria such as job performance and counterproductive work behavior is weaker than the authors of the critiques appear to believe.     

The criterion-related validity of integrity tests: an updated meta-analysis

Integrity tests have become a prominent predictor within the selection literature over the past few decades. However, some researchers have expressed concerns about the criterion-related validity evidence for such tests because of a perceived lack of methodological rigor within this literature, as well as a heavy reliance on unpublished data from test publishers. In response to these concerns, we meta-analyzed 104 studies (representing 134 independent samples), which were authored by a similar proportion of test publishers and non-publishers, whose conduct was consistent with professional standards for test validation, and whose results were relevant to the validity of integrity-specific scales for predicting individual work behavior. Overall mean observed validity estimates and validity estimates corrected for unreliability in the criterion (respectively) were .12 and .15 for job performance, .13 and .16 for training performance, .26 and .32 for counterproductive work behavior, and .07 and .09 for turnover. Although data on restriction of range were sparse, illustrative corrections for indirect range restriction did increase validities slightly (e.g., from .15 to .18 for job performance). Several variables appeared to moderate relations between integrity tests and the criteria. For example, corrected validities for job performance criteria were larger when based on studies authored by integrity test publishers (.27) than when based on studies from non-publishers (.12). In addition, corrected validities for counterproductive work behavior criteria were larger when based on self-reports (.42) than when based on other-reports (.11) or employee records (.15).     

Working Out the Interstitial and Syncopic Nature of the Human Psyche: On the Analysis of Verbal Data

Psychology studies the human mind and its development. Although it is often recognized that the human mind needs to be understood as a temporal (developmental) phenomenon between past and future and at the interstices between the idealities of pure Self and Other, the analytic methods interpretive researchers use tend to reify ahistorical and solipsist conceptions of the human being. In this article, I provide examples of an approach to the analysis of verbal data that immediately gets us to the interstitial and syncopic nature of the human psyche.     

Why it doesn’t matter to metaphysics what Mary learns

The Knowledge Argument of Frank Jackson has not persuaded physicalists, but their replies have not dispelled the intuition that someone raised in a black and white environment gains genuinely new knowledge when she sees colors for the first time. In what follows, we propose an explanation of this particular kind of knowledge gain that displays it as genuinely new, but orthogonal to both physicalism and phenomenology. We argue that Mary’s case is an instance of a common phenomenon in which something new is learned as the result of exploiting representational resources that were not previously exploited, and that this results in gaining genuinely new information.     

Diagnosis of Schizophrenia by Rorschach Patterns

In the belief that the diagnostic validity of Rorschach methods would gain from formalizing the judgmental processes of clinicians, 14 score patterns were constructed from eight Rorschach variables, each pattern designed to characterize patients in one of three broad diagnostic categories, Schizophrenic, Borderline Psychotic, or “Other.” A random sample of 196 patients of a VA mental hygiene clinic was drawn from clinic files. The “pattern diagnoses” obtained by applying the pattern system to their Rorschach scores were found significantly related to diagnoses formulated by the examining psychologists and by the clinic intake staff. More patients diagnosed schizophrenic by the pattern method engaged in autistic behavior than patients with other pattern diagnoses. The diagnostic efficiency of the pattern method, measured in terms of ability to reach a definite diagnosis, proportion of correct diagnoses, and proportion of false positive errors, did not differ significantly from the diagnostic efficiency of the psychological examiners, and differed significantly from the psychiatrists' diagnostic efficiency only in producing more “indeterminate” diagnoses. The diagnostic validity of the patterns was considered to be established, but their usefulness as a clinical tool depends heavily on population base rates and the relative costs of false positive and false negative diagnostic errors.     

The relationship between apparent motion and object files

Object files (OFs) play an important role in theories of mid-level vision. On some influential views, OFs operate and persist only via spatiotemporal continuity. One open question concerns what occurs when direct spatiotemporal continuity is absent: Do OFs move in accordance with any motion correspondence ultimately resolved? Specifically, do OFs accord with apparent motion (AM) correspondences, which arise despite a lack of continuous spatiotemporal stimulation? In Experiment 1, subjects were presented with an AM display consisting of two circles that, across two frames, were seen as moving between two noncontiguous locations. The two objects were primed with two symbols and were then moved in a single step; a third symbol appeared, and could either match the symbol from the closer or the further object. We found a robust object specific preview benefit (OSPB) for the shorter path, in other words, the path along which AM was perceived. In order to control for the possibility that priming occurs at any nearby object, in Experiment 2, the original two objects never disappeared, but two new objects appeared in the would-be AM locations. No AM was perceived, and no OSPB obtained. In the third experiment the OSPB effect persisted even when motion along the shorter path included an unlikely featural transformation (circles turning into squares). In Experiment 4, which was nearly identical to Experiment 2, no OSPB obtained despite unique featural matches between the initial and new objects, seemingly because no AM was perceived. In Experiment 5, we failed to find an effect of featural priming, even when distance between the objects was equated. Finally, we extended the OSPB effect to two additional kinds of AM—line motion (Experiment 6) and phi motion (Experiment 7), supplying strong evidence that AM correspondences and OF correspondences are controlled by the same basic rules.