Provider gender and moral reasoning: The politics of an “ethics of care”

Women constitute 35% of providers in genetics at the doctoral level. A survey of 682 geneticists in 19 nations showed that gender was the single most important determinant of ethical decision making. Women were less directive and more observant of patient autonomy than men. In the United States, women were twice as likely as men to accede to patient requests for prenatal diagnosis for sex selection. Women now constitute 30% of all medical students, about half of all obstetrical residents, and 94% of master's-level genetic counselors. Evidence that women providers respond differently to some ethical problems suggests that in the future, as more women enter the field, provider-patient relationships may become more egalitarian.     

The Five Flavors and Taoism: Lao Tzu's Verse Twelve

In verse twelve of the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu makes a curious claim about the five flavors; namely that they cause people not to taste or that they jade the palate. The five flavors are: sweet, sour, salt, bitter (these four are the elements of taste in the West, recognized by the science of taste) and spicy or hot as in ‘heat’ (or picante, not caliente). To the Western mind, the claim, ‘The five flavors cause them [persons] to not taste,’ is counterintuitive; on the contrary, the presence of the five flavors in a dish or in a meal would expand or enhance the senses and the palate, i.e., taste would be augmented by the five flavors. So what is the plausible meaning of the Taoistic claim? To answer this question, I look very briefly at the history of the doctrine of the five flavors and the history of Chinese cuisine. Lao Tzu probably has Confucian feasts in mind in making such a claim, but other interpretations are discussed.     

Belief-desire reasoning in the explanation of behavior: do actions speak louder than words?

The mechanisms underwriting our commonsense psychology, or 'theory of mind', have been extensively investigated via reasoning tasks that require participants to predict the action of agents based on information about beliefs and desires. However, relatively few studies have investigated the processes contributing to a central component of 'theory of mind' - our ability to explain the action of agents in terms of underlying beliefs and desires. In two studies, we demonstrate a novel phenomenon in adult belief-desire reasoning, capturing the folk notion that 'actions speak louder than words'. When story characters were described as searching in the wrong place for a target object, adult subjects often endorsed mental state explanations referencing a distracter object, but only when that object was approached. We discuss how this phenomenon, alongside other reasoning "errors" (e.g., hindsight bias; the curse of knowledge) can be used to illuminate the architecture of domain specific belief-desire reasoning processes.     

Effects of nicotine deprivation on craving response covariation in smokers

Most models of craving propose that when cravings are strong, diverse responses--thought to index an underlying craving state--covary. Previous studies provided weak support for this hypothesis. The authors tested whether nicotine deprivation affects degree of covariation across multiple measures related to craving. Heavy and light smokers (N = 127) were exposed to smoking cues while either nicotine deprived or nondeprived. Measures included urge ratings, affective valence, a behavioral choice task assessing perceived reinforcement value of smoking, and smoking-related judgment tasks. Results indicated higher correlations in the nicotine-deprived than in nondeprived group. The measures principally responsible for this effect loaded onto a single common Craving factor for nicotine-deprived but not nondeprived smokers. These findings suggest that, under certain conditions, measures of craving-related processes covary.     

BRIEF REPORT

The emotional Stroop task has been widely used to examine attentional bias in a variety of psychological disorders. In one format of this task, words are presented to participants in a mixed randomised or quasi-randomised sequence. We present data from two independent studies involving smokers, the results of which show that words appearing after smoking-related items in the mixed sequence are responded to more slowly than words appearing after neutral items. These carry-over effects may reduce the size of emotional Stroop effects on the mixed Stroop task. We discuss the implications of these carry-over effects for research using the emotional Stroop task.