Communication From One Feminist

In James P. Sterba's new collection of papers on justice, one of the contributions comes from Alison Jaggar. It is an essay written in the tradition of sociolinguistic theorizing, whereby a major problem with the relationship between men and women concerns their different uses of language, their distinctive ways of communicating, arguing, and talking.     

Optimizing preoperative expectations in cardiac surgery patients is moderated by level of disability: the successful development of a brief psychological intervention

Patients’ expectations have shown to be a major psychological predictor of health outcome in cardiac surgery patients. However, it is unclear whether patients’ expectations can be optimized prior to surgery. This study evaluates the development of a brief psychological intervention focusing on the optimization of expectations and its effect on change in patients’ expectations prior to cardiac surgery. Ninety patients scheduled for coronary artery bypass graft were randomly assigned to (1) standard medical care, (2) additional expectation manipulation intervention (EMI), and (3) additional attention control group. Therapists’ fidelity to intervention manuals and patients satisfaction with the intervention were assessed for both active intervention conditions. Patients’ expectations about post-surgical disability, treatment control, personal control, and disease duration were assessed before and after the psychological intervention. Demographical, medical, and psychosocial characteristics and disability were assessed at baseline. Treatment fidelity and patient satisfaction was very high in both intervention conditions. Only patients receiving EMI developed higher personal control expectations and longer (more realistic) expectations of disease duration. The effect of intervention group on patients’ disability expectations and patients’ personal control expectations was moderated by patient’s level of disability. EMI patients with low to moderate disability developed positive expectations whereas patients with high disability did not. This study shows the successful development of a short psychological intervention that was able to modify patients’ expectations, especially in those with low to moderate disability. Given the robust association of expectations and surgery outcome, such an intervention might offer the opportunity to enhance patients’ health following cardiac surgery.     

Phonetic priming, neighborhood activation, and PARSYN

Perceptual identification of spoken words in noise is less accurate when the target words are preceded by spoken phonetically related primes (Goldinger, Luce, & Pisoni, 1989). The present investigation replicated and extended this finding. Subjects shadowed target words presented in the clear that were preceded by phonetically related or unrelated primes. In addition, primes were either higher or lower in frequency than the target words. Shadowing latencies were significantly longer for target words preceded by phonetically related primes, but only when the prime-target interstimulus interval was short (50 vs. 500 msec). These results demonstrate that phonetic priming does not depend on target degradation and that it affects processing time. We further demonstrated that PARSYN--a connectionist instantiation of the neighborhood activation model--accurately simulates the observed pattern of priming.     

Phonotactics, neighborhood activation, and lexical access for spoken words.

Probabilistic phonotactics refers to the relative frequencies of segments and sequences of segments in spoken words. Neighborhood density refers to the number of words that are phonologically similar to a given word. Despite a positive correlation between phonotactic probability and neighborhood density, nonsense words with high probability segments and sequences are responded to more quickly than nonsense words with low probability segments and sequences, whereas real words occurring in dense similarity neighborhoods are responded to more slowly than real words occurring in sparse similarity neighborhoods. This contradiction may be resolved by hypothesizing that effects of probabilistic phonotactics have a sublexical focus and that effects of similarity neighborhood density have a lexical focus. The implications of this hypothesis for models of spoken word recognition are discussed.     

Representation for reciprocal agent–environment interaction

Declarative modelling approaches in principle assume a notion of representation or representational content for the modelling concepts. The notion of representational content as discussed in literature in cognitive science and philosophy of mind shows complications as soon as agent and environment have an intense reciprocal interaction. In such cases an internal agent state is affected by the way in which internal and external aspects are interwoven during (ongoing) interaction. In this paper it is shown that the classical correlational approach to representational content is not applicable, but the temporal-interactivist approach is. As this approach involves more complex temporal relationships, formalisation was used to define specifications of the representational content more precisely. These specifications have been validated by automatically checking them on traces generated by a simulation model. Moreover, by mathematical proof it was shown how these specifications are entailed by the basic local properties.     

Formalization of Damasio's theory of emotion, feeling and core consciousness

This paper contributes an analysis and formalization of Damasio's theory on core consciousness. Three important concepts in this theory are 'emotion', 'feeling' and 'feeling a feeling' (or core consciousness). In particular, a simulation model is described of the dynamics of basic mechanisms leading via emotion and feeling to core consciousness, and dynamic properties are formally specified that hold for these dynamics at a more global level. These properties have been automatically checked for the simulation model. Moreover, a formal analysis is made of relevant notions of representation used by Damasio. As part of this analysis, specifications of representation relations have been verified and confirmed against the simulation model.     

Granulocyte activation in humans is modulated by psychological stress and relaxation

Our aim was to study the possible relationship between psychological stress and granulocyte activation primarily in healthy students during an examination period (n = 11) and also in chronically anxious patients (n = 15). We employed cell surface markers: lactoferrin, L-selectin, alphaMbeta2-integrin and CD15s and flow cytometry to detect changes in the activation state of granulocytes, with the start of the stressed state in students at the beginning of an examination period, which was associated with elevated blood plasma cortisol level, and following relaxation hypnosis in both students, during their examination term, and patients. The ratios of all four types of marker-carrier granulocytes increased at the start of the examination period in students; an especially dramatic (ca. 5-fold) enhancement was observed in the proportion of lactoferrin-bearing cells relatively to the pre-examination term value. After hypnosis, the percentage of lactoferrin-exposing granulocytes decreased considerably both in students and in patients, by about half; a similar decrease was observed in the ratio of CD15s-carrier cells in patients. No significant alteration was observed during the study in state or trait anxiety levels, and in total or differential leukocyte counts. Thus, granulocyte activation could be associated with stress, while relaxation may facilitate reducing activation of these cells. In both groups of subjects, granulocyte surface lactoferrin appeared to be a sensitive "stress indicator". This needs further evaluation.     

Are needs to manage uncertainty and threat associated with political conservatism or ideological extremity?

Three studies are conducted to assess the uncertainty- threat model of political conservatism, which posits that psychological needs to manage uncertainty and threat are associated with political orientation. Results from structural equation models provide consistent support for the hypothesis that uncertainty avoidance (e.g., need for order, intolerance of ambiguity, and lack of openness to experience) and threat management (e.g., death anxiety, system threat, and perceptions of a dangerous world) each contributes independently to conservatism (vs. liberalism). No support is obtained for alternative models, which predict that uncertainty and threat management are associated with ideological extremism or extreme forms of conservatism only. Study 3 also reveals that resistance to change fully mediates the association between uncertainty avoidance and conservatism, whereas opposition to equality partially mediates the association between threat and conservatism. Implications for understanding the epistemic and existential bases of political orientation are discussed.     

Sin and bioethics.

The essay starts out with defining the biblical concept of sin in the Old and the New Testaments. The literal knowledge of divine truth is distinguished from its truthful and spiritual interpretation. A further distinction should be made between the Creator of life (God) and the medium or "intermediary creator" (man) of life. I argue for the "single wholeness" of the human race and for the unity of human responsibility in bioethics. In delineating the teaching of the Church on abortion and family planning, I show that the healing of all human diseases, from traditional interventions to genetic ones, is a Christian duty and is in accordance with Christ's mission on earth as long as one has not been directly or indirectly involved in "reproducing" or "designing" one's descendants or destroying or damaging human life even at its very beginnings.