The Participation and Motivations of Grant Peer Reviewers: A Comprehensive Survey

Science and Engineering Ethics - Scientific peer reviewers play an integral role in the grant selection process, yet very little has been reported on the levels of participation or the motivations...     

Correcting the Brain? The Convergence of Neuroscience,Neurotechnology, Psychiatry,and Artificial Intelligence

Science and Engineering Ethics - The incorporation of neural-based technologies into psychiatry offers novel means to use neural data in patient assessment and clinical diagnosis. However, an...     

Social citizenship and social psychology

This paper outlines the concept of social citizenship, which was first theorized in the late 1940s alongside the creation of the UK welfare state and concerns citizens' rights to a basic income and standard of living. It suggests that social citizenship—particularly welfare provision—is a useful and important topic for social psychological research, albeit one that has been largely overlooked. We provide an overview of key developments in social citizenship and consider the impact of 30‐plus years of neoliberal governance in Western democracies, which has resulted in ongoing changes to how welfare rights and responsibilities are configured, such as policies that make social citizenship rights contingent on conduct. We outline social scientific work that examines these shifting ideas of citizenship, personhood, welfare, and conditionality and make the case for a critical discursive psychological approach, which we illustrate with a brief empirical example. We suggest that critical discursive social psychology is particularly well‐placed to examine how psychological assumptions are built into both policy and lay discourse and how these can legitimate interventions designed to work on the conduct of the unemployed, such as therapeutic and behavior change initiatives. Finally, we argue that psychology is faced with a choice; while there are opportunities for the discipline to contribute to the design and implementation of such initiatives, to do so requires accepting the basic values of the underpinning neoliberal agenda. Instead, it is vital to place these assumptions under the critical microscope and explore how they work to obscure structural disadvantage.     

An examination of the effectiveness of multiple summary scoring procedures of the BNBAS in detecting group differences

The Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale is the most widely used and accepted tool in the study of the behavior of the human newborn; yet there remains some controversy over the most appropriate way to score the results. The present research compares three a priori methods of scoring. The sample consisted of 43 infants: (a) 11 preterms, (b) 10 fullterms in intensive care, (c) 7 fullterms with sick mothers, and (d) 15 healthy fullterms. BNBAS exams administered to these four groups of infants were scored using the Als (1978), Lester, Als, and Brazelton (1982), and Jacobsen, Fein, Jacobsen, and Schwartz (1984) clusters. The data from these three methods were analyzed by means of one-way ANOVAs for group differences. In addition, a factor analysis on the BNBAS scores was also completed. These three approaches all detected differences between medically at-risk and healthy infants on those items assessing motor maturity and orientation. These results suggest that at this time no one scoring system can capture the richness of behavior of the newborn and address the question by researchers, clinicians, and parents.     

A comparison of multiple reinforcer assessments to identify the function of maladaptive behavior

Functional analysis results indicated that maladaptive behaviors displayed by a 25-year-old man with profound mental retardation were maintained by attention from caregivers and possibly, to a lesser degree, by access to tangible items. A concurrent-schedules procedure was then used to study the relative reinforcing value for maladaptive behavior of attention versus tangible items. Results of the concurrent-schedules assessment and subsequent functional communication training indicated that preference for attention versus access to a tangible object varied.     

The impact of cross-training on team effectiveness

The authors examined the role of cross-training in developing shared team-interaction mental models, coordination, and performance in a 2-experiment study using computer simulation methodology (for Experiment 1, N = 45 teams; for Experiment 2, N = 49 teams). Similar findings emerged across the 2 experiments. First, cross-training enhanced the development of shared team-interaction models. Second, coordination mediated the relationship between shared mental models and team performance. However, there was some inconsistency in the findings concerning the depth of cross-training necessary for improving shared mental models. Results are discussed in terms of the impact of different levels of cross-training on team effectiveness.