Helping: The Influence of Anticipated Social Sanctions and Self-Monitoring

ABSTRACT A field experiment was conducted to examine the influence of social sanctions and self-monitoring on willingness to help handicapped persons Compared to low self-monitoring individuals, those high in self-monitoring tendencies were more likely to offer help if told that significant social rewards were attached to the act of helping, but were less likely to help if led to believe that these consequences were weak Implications for research on helping and self-monitoring are considered with particular attention being given to the relationship between social sanctions and self-monitoring     

Individuation and attachment in personality development: Extending Erikson's theory

The question of whether Erikson's theory of psychosocial development is a complete and coherent view of development in males and females is considered After a thorough review of Erikson's views on the role of sex in psychosocial development, the authors suggest that an important element is neglected in Erikson's account of personality development in both sexes That is, due to his focus on issues of identity, Erikson does not account fully for the development of intimacy or other expressions of interpersonal attachment The authors conclude that the major shortcoming of Erikson's theory is not, as some feminists have argued, that it is a male theory but that it fails to account adequately for the processes of interpersonal attachment that are essential to the development of both males and females Preliminary elements of a two-path model of development are proposed     

The futures of physicians: Agency and autonomy reconsidered

The corporatization of U.S. health care has directed cost containment efforts toward scrutinizing the clinical decisions of physicians. This stimulated a variety of new utilization management interventions, particularly in hospital and managed care settings. Recent changes in fee-for-service medicine and physicians' traditional agency relationships with patients, purchasers, and insurers are examined here. New information systems monitoring of physician ordering behavior has already begun to impact on physician autonomy and the relationship of physicians to provider organizations in both for-profit and ‘not-for-profit’ sectors. As managed care practice settings proliferate, serious ethical questions will be raised about agency relationships with patients. This article examines health system dynamics altering the historical agency relationship between the physician and patient and eroding the traditional autonomy of the medical profession in the United States. The corporatization of medicine and the accompanying information systems monitoring of physician productivity is seen to account of such change, now posing serious ethical dilemmas.     

Hippocampus lesions impair landmark array spatial learning in homing pigeons: a laboratory study

Hippocampal (HF)-lesioned pigeons display impaired homing ability when flying over familiar terrain, where they are presumably relying on a map-like representation of familiar landmarks to navigate. However, research carried out in the field precludes a direct test of whether hippocampal lesions compromise the ability of homing pigeons to navigate by familiar landmarks. To examine more thoroughly the relationship between hippocampus and landmark spatial learning, control, neostriatum-lesioned, and HF-lesioned homing pigeons were trained on two open field, laboratory, conditional discrimination tasks. One was a visual landmark array task, and the other was a room color discrimination task. For the tasks, the correct of three differently colored food bowls was determined by the spatial relationship among a group of five landmarks and room color, respectively. Intact control birds successfully learned both tasks, while neostriatum-lesioned birds successfully learned the landmark array task-the only task on which they were trained. By contrast, HF-lesioned birds successfully learned the room color task but were unable to learn the landmark array task. The data support the hypothesis that homing performance deficits observed in the field following hippocampal lesions are in part a consequence of an impairment in the ability of lesioned pigeons to use familiar visual landmarks for navigation.     

Instructions for authors

Instructions for authors     

Curse of the qualia

In this paper I distinguish three alternatives to the functionalist account of qualitative states such as pain. The physicalist-functionalist₁ holds that (1) there could be subjects functionally equivalent to us whose mental states differed in their qualitative character from ours, (2) there could be subjects functionally equivalent to us whose mental states lacked qualitative character altogether and (3) there could not be subjects like us in all objective respects whose qualitative states differed from ours. The physicalist-functionalist₂ holds (1) and (3) but denies (2). The transcendentalist holds (1) and (2) and denies (3). I argue that both versions of physicalist-functionalism inherit the problem of property dualism which originally helped to motivate functionalist theories of mind. I also argue that neither version of physicalist-functionalism can distinguish in a principled way between those neurophysiological properties of a subject which are relevant to the qualitative character of that subject's mental states and those which are not. I conclude that the only alternative to a functionalist account of qualitative states is a transcendentalist account and that this alternative is not likely to appeal to the critics of functionalism.