Ethics Issues with Private Research Ethics Boards: A Breakout Session at the 2009 NCEHR National Conference

Research Ethics Boards (REBs) provide oversight for Canadians that research projects will comply with standards of ethics if the studies are carried out as described in the documents that have been approved. While REBs have traditionally been affiliated with institutions such as universities and hospitals, a number of factors - including the increased volume of research being conducted outside academic centres - have resulted in the establishment of some private or independent REBs. This, in turn, has raised concerns about the credibility of REBs in the private sector and their capacity to handle issues around conflict of interest. This Breakout Session was an opportunity to hear the perspectives of people associated with institutional and private REBs and examine perceived problems with boards in the private sector, scrutinize theoretical and structural differences between types of REBs, and look at whether or not there is room for both institutional and private boards in the Canadian research review landscape.     

The Ethics of Conducting Community-Engaged Homelessness Research

This paper focuses on some of the ethical issues which may arise when conducting research in the context of homelessness. These issues are considered from the viewpoints of researchers, research coordinators and interviewers, drawing from their extensive real world experience. In addition to negotiating the complex context of homelessness, community-based homelessness researchers need to address a number of ethical issues in research conception, design, implementation and dissemination. Although these issues are commonly considered in community-engaged research, research with people who are homeless may raise exceptional challenges. Such challenges include determining the nature of informed consent; protecting research participants and researchers, and determining appropriate compensation for participation. Understanding the context of homelessness to conduct ethical research will require sharing information and joint decision-making, processes that must include members of communities within which the research participants live. Furthermore, researchers should be sensitive to the changing context of homelessness, and vigilant for new ethical challenges.     

The role of representation in computation

Reformers urge that representation no longer earns its explanatory keep in cognitive science, and that it is time to discard this troublesome concept. In contrast, we hold that without representation cognitive science is utterly bereft of tools for explaining natural intelligence. In order to defend the latter position, we focus on the explanatory role of representation in computation. We examine how the methods of digital and analog computation are used to model a relatively simple target system, and show that representation plays an in-eliminable explanatory role in both cases. We conclude that, to the extent that biologic systems engage in computation, representation is destined to play an explanatory role in cognitive science.

Age-related effects in prospective memory are modulated by ongoing task complexity and relation to target cue

Two experiments examined the puzzling variation in the age-related patterns for event-based prospective memory tasks. Both experiments involved a famous faces ongoing task with a feature of the famous face as the target for the prospective memory task. In Experiment 1, a substantial age deficit was found on the prospective memory task when the cue was nonfocal (wearing glasses) to the ongoing task, replicating previous research, but this deficit was significantly reduced with a focal cue (first name John). In Experiment 2, the prospective memory cue (wearing glasses) was held constant and the demands of the ongoing task of naming faces were varied. The substantial age differences found with a nonfocal cue were eliminated when the ongoing task was made less challenging. The findings help reconcile the divergent age-related findings reported in the literature.     

Concurrent associations between anxiety sensitivity and perceived health and health disability among young adult daily smokers

The aim of this investigation was to evaluate the incremental validity of anxiety sensitivity (fear of arousal-related physical and psychological sensations) relative to health factors (smoking variables, alcohol use and exercise level), in predicting perceived health and disability among a sample of 225 young adult daily smokers (102 females; M(age) = 23.9 years, SD = 8.8). Consistent with prediction, anxiety sensitivity, relative to smoking-relevant variables, alcohol consumption (a single frequency by quantity composite) and exercise activity, predicted lower perceived general health and impairments in mental health and social functioning; no incremental effects were evident for anxiety sensitivity for predicting impairments in physical functioning, role functioning, or increased healthcare usage. These findings are discussed with respect to better understanding cognitive factors that affect perceptions of health status and functioning among daily smokers.     

Psychological Treatments That Cause Harm

ABSTRACT— The phrase primum non nocere ("first, do no harm") is a well‐accepted credo of the medical and mental health professions. Although emerging data indicate that several psychological treatments may produce harm in significant numbers of individuals, psychologists have until recently paid little attention to the problem of hazardous treatments. I critically evaluate and update earlier conclusions regarding deterioration effects in psychotherapy, outline methodological obstacles standing in the way of identifying potentially harmful therapies (PHTs), provide a provisional list of PHTs, discuss the implications of PHTs for clinical science and practice, and delineate fruitful areas for further research on PHTs. A heightened emphasis on PHTs should narrow the scientist–practitioner gap and safeguard mental health consumers against harm. Moreover, the literature on PHTs may provide insight into underlying mechanisms of change that cut across many domains of psychotherapy. The field of psychology should prioritize its efforts toward identifying PHTs and place greater emphasis on potentially dangerous than on empirically supported therapies.     

Perceptual Bias in Speech Error Data Collection: Insights from Spanish Speech Errors

This paper studies the reliability and validity of naturalistic speech errors as a tool for language production research. Possible biases when collecting naturalistic speech errors are identified and specific predictions derived. These patterns are then contrasted with published reports from Germanic languages (English, German and Dutch) and one Romance language (Spanish). Unlike findings in the Germanic languages, Spanish speech errors show many patterns which run contrary to those expected from bias: (1) more phonological errors occur between words than within word; (2) word-initial consonants are less likely to participate in errors than word-medial consonants, (3) errors are equally likely in stressed and in unstressed syllables, (4) perseverations are more frequent than anticipations, and (5) there is no trace of a lexical bias. We present a new corpus of Spanish speech errors collected by many theoretically naïve observers (whereas the only corpus available so far was collected by two highly trained theoretically informed observers), give a general overview of it, and use it to replicate previous reports. In spite of the different susceptibility of these methods to bias, results were remarkably similar in both corpora and again contrary to predictions from bias. As a result, collecting speech errors “in the wild” seems to be free of bias to a reasonable extent even when using a multiple-collector method. The observed contrasting patterns between Spanish and Germanic languages arise as true cross-linguistic differences.