Claudia Card's Concept of Social Death: A New Way of Looking at Genocide

Scholarship in the multidisciplinary field of genocide studies often emphasizes body counts and the number of biological deaths as a way of measuring and comparing the severity and scope of individual genocides. The prevalence of this way of framing genocide is problematic insofar it risks marginalizing the voices and experiences of victims who may not succumb to biological death but nevertheless suffer the loss of family members and other loved ones, and suffer the destruction of relationships, as well as the foundational institutions that give rise to and sustain those relationships. The concept of social death, which Claudia Card offers as the central evil of genocide, marks a radical shift in conceptualizing genocide and provides space for recovering the marginalized voices of many who suffer the evils of genocide but do not suffer biological death. Here her concept of social death is explored, defended, and criticized.     

Assessing outcome in smoking cessation studies.

Outcome measures for smoking cessation are reviewed and evaluated, including 3 self-report measures and 3 biochemical validation measures. Point prevalence reflects the percentage of participants taking action, prolonged abstinence reflects those in the maintenance stage, and continuous abstinence reflects those who progress from action to maintenance without lapsing or relapsing. Biochemical assessments are primarily measures of point prevalence abstinence. The desirability of biochemical validation is a particularly controversial and critical issue. Three factors affect the accuracy of self-report: Type of Population, Type of Intervention, and Demand Characteristics. False-negative rates are generally low. Three broad issues impact on decisions to use biochemical validation: (a) alternative explanations for false positives, (b) refusal rate problems, and (c) the effect of inaccuracy on intervention assessment.     

Effects of type of center fixation stimulus on visual-field preferences: a preliminary study

60 normal subjects (30 males and 30 females) viewed bilateral presentations of pairs of CVC or CVVC English words high in imagery. Three types of central fixation stimuli were studied: numbers, letters, and geometric forms. A significant main effect for kind of fixation was found, but not for sex, visual fields, or their interactions. Results are discussed relative to the processing of high imagery words by both the left and right hemispheres.     

Mothers' speech in three social classes

Functional and linguistic aspects of the speech of Dutch-speaking mothers from three social classes to their 2-year-old children were studied. Mothers' speech in Dutch showed the same characteristics of simplicity and redundancy found in other languages. In a free play situation, both academic and lower middle class mothers produced more expansions and used fewer imperatives, more substantive deixis, and fewer modal verbs than working-class mothers. These differences were not present while mothers were reading books with their children. In general, the mothers' speech was more complex in the book reading situation than during free play.     

The ethic of caring: the moral response to suffering

An ethic of care can be distinguished from an ethic based on autonomous rights, utilitarian principles, or indeed principles of any kind, since care has less to do with intellect than with emotions and will. Moreover, an ethic of care is consistent with the example of Jesus and the virtues advocated by the apostle Paul. Emily A. Hitchens and Lilyan S. Snow make their case with particular reference to accounts by Civil War nurses, who developed the skills of care without precedent and without the expectation of cure that scientific medicine has aroused.     

Recovery from aphasia: Spontaneous speech versus language comprehension

Seventy-four aphasic patients, subdivided into four groups (fluent, mixed, nonfluent, and severely nonfluent), were tested three times in the course of 1 year to assess recovery of spontaneous speech and sentence comprehension. Although 12 of the 28 spontaneous speech variables employed showed significant time changes, some of these changes indicated improvement and others deterioration. There was no overall clinical improvement in spontaneous speech in any group. On the sentence comprehension tests, however, all four groups did show considerable, significant improvement. There were no qualitative or quantitative differences among the groups in the course of recovery, despite the fact that the groups differed in the severity of aphasia as well as on the fluency dimension. In certain patients there was also some improvement in spontaneous speech, but this did not in most cases correlate with an improvement in either fluency or sentence comprehension. Possible reasons why receptive abilities improved more than expressive abilities are discussed.