Whose Gene Is It? A Case Discussion About Familial Conflict over Genetic Testing for Breast Cancer

A multidisciplinary group of genetic and other professionals discuss a complex case of familial conflict over access to genetic information. One twin wishes to know the results of her deceased mother's tests for BRCA1 mutations; a second twin objects to researchers making this information available. As the case discussion unfolds, the apparent facts of this case are called into question and the lines of ethical certainty become less clear.     

Reversal of Relative Thresholds for Synaptic Facilitation and Increased Excitability Induced by Serotonin and Tail Nerve Stimulation inAplysiaSensory Neurons

Tail shock induces reflex sensitization inAplysiaand, in parallel, induces a number of modulatory effects in central neurons, such as increased excitability in tail sensory neurons (SNs) and facilitation of synaptic transmission from SNs to motor neurons. Both of these modulatory effects are mimicked by exogenous application of serotonin (5HT) or electrical stimulation of the tail nerve P9. In the present study we examined the activation thresholds for increased excitability and synaptic facilitation induced by either 5HT or P9 stimulation. We found that the concentration of 5HT sufficient to produce a significant increase in excitability produced no significant synaptic facilitation and, conversely, that the intensity of nerve stimulation sufficient to produce significant synaptic facilitation produced no excitability changes. This reversal of relative thresholds for these modulatory effects may reflect the differential access of exogenous 5HT and endogenous 5HT (released by tail nerve stimulation) to the SN cell body and synaptic terminals, respectively.     

Isoluminance and contingent color aftereffects

In the typical induction of the orientation-contingent color aftereffect (CCAE), the stimuli are composed of elements that differ in both color and luminance. Three experiments are reported that show that chromatic contrast between stimulus elements is insufficient for the induction of the orientation-CCAE and that luminance contrast is necessary. These experiments expand on previous research concerned with the role of luminance contrast in the induction of orientation-CCAEs by eliminating alternative explanations.     

Causal Attributions for Poorly Performing Projects: Their Effect on Project Continuation Decisions

This study examined the escalation problem within an attribution theory framework. Students read a case scenario containing causal attribution information that described a poorly performing project under their supervision. They made estimates of its future success, as well as a decision whether to continue it. Perceived stability of causality had the primary effect on expectancy of success. A project whose performance downturn was attributed to a stable cause had a lower expectancy. Locus of causality had a smaller but still significant effect. Project downturns attributed to internal causes had a lower expectancy. Expectancy of success was significantly correlated with project continuation decisions. Discrepancies between these results and those reported by Staw and Ross (1978) are accounted for in terms of Weiner's (1985, 1986) attributional analysis.     

De Re Language,De Re Eliminability,and the Essential Limits of Both

De re modality is eliminable if there is an effective translation of all wffs into non-de re equivalents. We cannot have logical equivalence unless logic has odd theses, but we can have material equivalence by banning all essences, something the non-de re facts let us do, or by giving everything such humdrum essences as self-identity and banning the more interesting ones. Eliminability cannot be got from weaker assumptions, nor independent ones of even modest generality. The net philosophical import is that, quite apart from the merits of essentialism, de re language has scant utility.     

Politeness and memory for the wording of remarks

Three experiments were conducted to examine whether people spontaneously remember the wording used to convey politeness. In all experiments, subjects heard statements varying in politeness that had been made by either a high-status (e.g., a professor) or equal-status (e.g., another student) speaker. Subjects’ incidental memory for these statements was then tested with either a recognition (Experiments 1 and 3) or a recall (Experiment 2) procedure. As expected, there was evidence of significant memory for wording that conveyed politeness, and subjects were more likely to remember forms that were incongruous with the speaker’s status. There was also some evidence that subjects encoded the politeness of a remark even when they were unable to recall the specific remark. The results demonstrate the role of the interpersonal dimension in the processing of language in context.     

End-Weight from the Speaker's Perspective

Explanations of the tendency to put long, complex constituents at the ends of sentences (end-weight) usually take the listener's perspective, claiming it facilitates parsing. I argue for a speaker-oriented explanation of end-weight, based on how it facilitates utterance planning. Parsing is facilitated when as much tree structure as possible can be determined early in the string, but production is easiest when options for how to continue are kept open. That is, listeners should prefer early commitment and speakers should prefer late commitment. Corpus data show that different verbs exhibit different rates of word-order variation that are systematically related to differences in subcategorization possibilities in just the way predicted by a strategy of late commitment. Thus, a speaker-based account of lexical preferences in word ordering does a better job of explaining variation in weight effects than a listener-based account.     

Deconstructing Dispositional Bias in Clinical Inference: Two Interventions

In this study, the authors examined the effectiveness of instruction in attribution processes and practice in empathic perspective taking in deconstructing dispositional bias of counselor trainees. Videotaped stimulus cases and a clinical attribution scale were used to assess the treatment effects when compared with a placebo control condition. Results revealed significant differences among groups. Counselor trainees receiving either of the 2 interventions showed significantly lower dispositional bias in responding to videotaped clinical cases than did their counterparts in the placebo condition. The study points to a need for a paradigm shift from a person-focused to a system-focused approach in counseling practice. Implications also point to the need for including critical thinking and empathic experiencing in clinical training     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.