Senior capstone design and ethics: A bridge to the professional world

A senior level capstone design experience has been developed and offered with a particular emphasis on many of the professional issues raised in Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) Engineering Criterion IV. The course has sought to develop student awareness of the ethical foundation of the engineering profession, the global and societal framework within which engineers practice, and the environmental impact on engineering. The capstone design course also focused upon improving the technical communications skills of the graduating senior class with both extensive instruction in writing and multiple workshops dealing with the art of making an effective oral presentation. The effectiveness of the design course was assessed using Kirkpatrick’s model for evaluating training programs. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology” meeting, New Orleans, 2003.     

Acquisition, learning, or development of language? Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" revisited

In 1957, Skinner, in his "Verbal Behavior", proposed an explanation on how a language is learned. In 1959, Chomsky strongly argued the non-learnability of language, establishing in the field of developmental psycholinguistics the substitution of the term "learning" for that of "acquisition". Currently, the constructivist models describe language acquisition as a process of ontogenetic, gradual, complex, and adaptive change. This new theoretical framework has been especially useful for rereading Verbal Behavior because it facilitates recovering the Skinnerian learning mechanisms. This can be observed in the recent research trends that recapture reinforcement and imitation (echoic responses), although they are now located in the initial phases of the process and are included in a cognitive dynamic that, by gradually increasing its complexity, can achieve grammar. The new constructivist theoretical framework, by retrieving the functional and referential aspects of language, can also take advantage of the classic Skinnerian proposal about the pragmatic types of verbal behavior, providing it with new meaning.     

Informed consent and the use of placebo in poland: Ethical and legal aspects

The concept of informed consent was one of the most fruitful ideas that deeply changed the relationships between physicians and their patients from paternalism to respect for the personal autonomy of subjects needing professional medical care. The great progress in medicine, also involving the pharmaceutical industry, has created an increasing need to perform different clinical and experimental trials. The evolution of clinical research in the last decades has influenced strongly the design of these studies. One of the most important changes in this field has been the use of placebo groups in double-blind controlled studies. The controversies have involved not only the use of placebo when standard or proven treatment was available, but also some specific problems concerning the procedure of obtaining informed consent in such trials. This paper briefly presents the evolution of informed consent in Poland as well as different ethical and legal problems concerning informed consent and the use of placebo controls in clinical trials. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an international conference, “Placebo: Its Action and Place in Health Research Today,” held in Warsaw, Poland on 12–13 April, 2003.     

Temporal kinetics of prefrontal modulation of the extrastriate cortex during visual attention

Single-unit, event-related potential (ERP), and neuroimaging studies have implicated the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in top-down control of attention and working memory. We conducted an experiment in patients with unilateral PFC damage (n=8) to assess the temporal kinetics of PFC-extrastriate interactions during visual attention. Subjects alternated attention between the left and the right hemifields in successive runs while they detected target stimuli embedded in streams of repetitive task-irrelevant stimuli (standards). The design enabled us to examine tonic (spatial selection) and phasic (feature selection) PFC-extrastriate interactions. PFC damage impaired performance in the visual field contralateral to lesions, as manifested by both larger reaction times and error rates. Assessment of the extrastriate P1 ERP revealed that the PFC exerts a tonic (spatial selection) excitatory input to the ipsilateral extrastriate cortex as early as 100 msec post stimulus delivery. The PFC exerts a second phasic (feature selection) excitatory extrastriate modulation from 180 to 300 msec, as evidenced by reductions in selection negativity after damage. Finally, reductions of the N2 ERP to target stimuli supports the notion that the PFC exerts a third phasic (target selection) signal necessary for successful template matching during postselection analysis of target features. The results provide electrophysiological evidence of three distinct tonic and phasic PFC inputs to the extrastriate cortex in the initial few hundred milliseconds of stimulus processing. Damage to this network appears to underlie the pervasive deficits in attention observed in patients with prefrontal lesions.     

Death anxiety and death obsession in Spanish students

This study examined the dimensional structure of Templer's Death Anxiety Scale and Abdel-Khalek's Death Obsession Scale. The responses of 289 Spanish students to the Spanish forms of both scales were evaluated by means of a principal components analysis with varimax rotation. Three significant factors were identified: Death Obsession, Cognitive-Affective, and Death Anxiety. The distribution of the factor loadings for the items of both scales on Factors 1 and 3 supported the discriminant validity of the constructs specific to each of the scales, while Factor 2 showed a common component in both scales characterized by cognitive and affective aspects in relation to the idea of death.     

Iberian rock lizards (Lacerta monticola) assess short-term changes in predation risk level when deciding refuge use

Prey might assess that risk level estimated in the first encounter with a predator was fixed in subsequent responses, whereas prey using flexible behavior would track short-term changes in risk. The authors examined, in the field, refuge use of Iberian rock lizards (Lacerta monticola) after simulated predator attacks and tested (a) how risk was assessed when multiple sources of risk were present simultaneously, (b) how short-term changes in risk level of successive attacks affected refuge use, and (c) whether the interval between attacks was important, insofar as attacks were considered to be coming from the same or different predators. Results suggest that lizards have a flexible estimate of risk that is based on multiple sources and flexibly dependent on previous estimates.     

Ethnicity, expressed emotion, attributions, and course of schizophrenia: family warmth matters

The authors examined the role of family factors and the course of schizophrenia by carrying out additional assessments and analyses in 2 previously published studies of Mexican American and Anglo American patients and families. The authors found partial support for an attributional model of relapse for families who are low in emotional overinvolvement. Attributions of control, criticism, and warmth together marginally predicted relapse. The data also indicated that for Mexican Americans, family warmth is a significant protective factor, whereas for Anglo Americans, family criticism is a significant risk factor. These findings suggest that the sociocultural context shapes the pathways by which family processes are related to the course of illness. Moreover, the warmth findings suggest that families may contribute to preventing relapse.     

Psychological reactions in Icelandic earthquake survivors

The aim of this study was to explore the psychological consequences of two earthquakes in Iceland in two probability samples of subjects--residents in the exposed area and a control group from an unexposed area. The sample was composed of 52 adults exposed to the earthquakes and 29 adults in a control group. Three months after the earthquakes, both groups were approached with questions from a survey consisting of the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ), the Trauma Symptom Checklist (TSC), the Coping Styles Questionnaire (CSQ), the World Assumption Scale (WAS), and the Crisis Support Scale (CSS). The results revealed that 24% in the exposed group had Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and none in the control group had PTSD. Earthquake-related anxiety, inability to express one's thoughts and feelings, and emotional coping predicted 81% of the HTQ variance for both groups. Previous life events, low self-worth, and luck attributions, together with numbing and the feeling of being let down, predicted 56% of the symptom variance for both groups. When degree of traumatization and emotional coping were added to the model, another 30% of the variance could be explained.