Emergency Research without Consent under Polish Law

Although Directive 2001/20/EC of the European Parliament and of Council of 4 April 2001 on the approximation of the laws regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States relating to the implementation of good clinical practice in the conduct of clinical trials on medicinal products for human use does not contain an exception for emergency situations, and requires the informed consent of a legal representative in all cases where research is conducted on legally competent individuals who are unable to give informed consent, in Poland, emergency research can be conducted without consent. Polish regulations on emergency research can hardly be treated as a result of intentional legislative policy. Our provisions arise from multiple and sophisticated interpretations of different regulations that govern medical experiments on human subjects and clinical trials. These interpretations can be summarized as follows: (1) There are two categories of medical experiments: therapeutic and non-therapeutic experiments. Emergency research without consent may be conducted in the category of therapeutic experiment only (therapeutic experiment consists of the introduction by the physician of new or only partially proven diagnostic, therapeutic or preventive methods in order to achieve direct benefit to the health of the patients, and it can be carried out when hitherto applied methods were ineffective or their effectiveness was insufficient). (2). Emergency research may be conducted without consent if there is a situation of great urgency in which the research subject's life is in danger and there is no possibility of obtaining immediate consent from the research subject him or herself, or from his or her legal representative or guardianship court, and the research subject has not refused to give consent for the participation in an emergency therapeutic experiment. The legal representative or guardianship court shall be provided with all the relevant information concerning subject's participation in an experiment as soon as possible. All projects of emergency research with intent to be done without the research subject's consent must be approved by an independent bioethics committee. Because these five requirements seem to provide insufficient protection for a subject's autonomy and rights it is necessary to add to them two other conditions: (1) the emergency research could not be conducted using other research participants capable of giving informed consent; and (2) informed consent for continued participation in the emergency research shall be obtained from either the participant him or herself or the legally authorized representative as soon as possible (requirement of obtaining deferred consent). A consolidated single Act that will govern all aspects of medical experiments on human subjects, including emergency research, should be prepared and enacted as soon as possible.     

A Preliminary Study for Exploring Different Sources of Guilt in a Sample of Veterans Who Sought Chaplaincy Services

Limited research has suggested that experiencing guilt may contribute to the risk of suicidal behavior in some veteran populations. Using data collected by chaplains, this study compared the frequency with which 94 veterans with a history of suicide ideation experienced guilt relative to 670 veterans without a history of ideation. We then compared main sources of guilt reported by ideators and nonideators. Ideators reported experiencing guilt significantly more often than nonideators. No differences were noted for the source of guilt among those who reported frequently experiencing this emotion. Ideators with an infrequent experience of guilt significantly more often named life and the military as the main source of this emotion. Clinicians should be mindful of the need to appropriately assess for and address guilt among veterans at increased risk of suicide. A variety of sources, not limited only to military experiences, may contribute to a veteran’s sense of guilt.     

The Face of the Chameleon: The Experience of Facial Mimicry for the Mimicker and the Mimickee

This research addressed three questions concerning facial mimicry: (a) Does the relationship between mimicry and liking characterize all facial expressions, or is it limited to specific expressions? (b) Is the relationship between facial mimicry and liking symmetrical for the mimicker and the mimickee? (c) Does conscious mimicry have consequences for emotion recognition? A paradigm is introduced in which participants interact over a computer setup with a confederate whose prerecorded facial displays of emotion are synchronized with participants’ behavior to create the illusion of social interaction. In Experiment 1, the confederate did or did not mimic participants’ facial displays of various subsets of basic emotions. Mimicry promoted greater liking for the confederate regardless of which emotions were mimicked. Experiment 2 reversed these roles: participants were instructed to mimic or not to mimic the confederate’s facial displays. Mimicry did not affect liking for the confederate but it did impair emotion recognition.     

Emotional contagion of distress in young pigs is potentiated by previous exposure to the same stressor

This study tested whether emotional contagion occurs when piglets directly observe a penmate in distress (restraint) and whether there is an effect of previous experience on the response to subsequent restraint or exposure to conspecific distress. Piglets (49.7 ± 0.7 days) were exposed in pairs to two stress phases (SP1 and SP2) in an arena divided into two pens by a wire mesh wall. During SP1, one of the pigs of a pair was either restrained (Stress treatment) or sham-restrained (Control treatment), while the other pig was considered observer. During SP2, the previous observer was restrained, while its penmate took the observer role. Heart rate variability, locomotion, vocalizations, body/head/ear and tail postures were monitored. During SP1, observer pigs responded to conspecific distress with increased indicators of attention (looking at, proximity to and snout contacts with the distressed pigs) and increased indicators of fear (reduced locomotion, increased freezing). During SP2, the observer pigs that had been restrained previously reacted more strongly (through higher proximity, decreased locomotion, increased freezing) to observing the penmate in restraint than pigs without the previous negative experience. This study suggests that young pigs are susceptible to emotional contagion and that this contagion is potentiated by previous exposure to the same stressor. These findings have implications for pig welfare in practical animal husbandry systems.     

No Substances in a Substance

Philosophia - In this paper I analyze the most controversial thesis of Aristotelian substantialism, namely, that substances cannot be composed of other substances. I call this position the...     

Effects of pictorial context reinstatement on correct and false recognition memory: insights from the simplified conjoint recognition paradigm

We used the Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT) perspective to investigate the role of context switching or reinstatement on correct and false recognition in Deese–Roediger–McDermott (DRM) and simple false memory for occurrence (FMO) tasks. In two experiments, participants studied words presented against unique picture backgrounds. The results indicated that providing specific item-context associative information in the reinstated-context test condition enhances verbatim trace retrieval of targets but does not influence their gist retrieval. In the case of false recognitions of related distracters, manipulations of retrieval context resulted in different effects across experiments, putatively because the DRM and FMO tasks involve different latent-processes implied by FTT. The results confirmed the critical role of retrieval conditions for false and correct recognition memory and showed the insights that can be gained from the process-level multinomial modelling analyses of data obtained in particular experimental paradigms.     

Context‐Constrained Judgment of the Perceived Risk of HIV/AIDS1

This study introduces a computer method for assessing perception of stimuli presented in a constrained context. The method is illustrated through experiments on perception of the risk of becoming infected with HIV and AIDS. In five experiments, context‐constrained judgments (CCJ) or context‐independent judgments were obtained from 258 undergraduates. Participants judged the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS for a variety of target populations, including themselves. The CCJ method results in greater response discrimination among the salience of perceived risk factors than does a context independent method. This outcome has potential implications for education and intervention programs to control the spread of HIV.     

Reception and willingness to share pseudo‐profound bullshit and their relation to other epistemically suspect beliefs and cognitive ability in Slovakia and Romania

Propensity to judge randomly generated, syntactically correct (i.e., bullshit) statements as profound is associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style and supernatural beliefs). Besides generalizing these findings to a different cultural setting, we examined the relationships to sharing the bullshit on social media. Rating nonsense as profound was associated with a lower cognitive ability; a stronger belief in the paranormal, alternative medicine, and conspiracies; and ontological confusion. The more profound a statement was rated to be, the more likely it was to be shared, and propensity for sharing bullshit was predicted by ontological confusion and religious beliefs. Bullshit receptivity and sharing may be closely related to several dimensions of epistemically suspect beliefs; people with these propensities are relatively open to vague statements resembling New Age spirituality.     

Head rotations in the play of Hanuman langurs (Semnopithecus entellus): description and analysis of function

Although head rotations are frequent patterns in play behavior in many mammalian species and differ from head movements used in other contexts, they have not been quantitatively described and their function remains unclear. The head rotations occurring in the play behavior of free-ranging Hanuman langurs (Semnopithecus entellus) were described from videotaped sequences. The authors tested 2 possible hypotheses about their function. Either the head rotations serve to create unexpected situations and should therefore occur in both solitary and social play and also be very variable, or they serve as play signals and should therefore occur only in social play and be ritualized. If head rotations have both functions, they should be less variable in social play. The data revealed that head rotations were very variable and were present both in solitary and social play. Furthermore, there was no difference in the variability between the head rotations present in the 2 types of play. The results do not support the function of head rotations as play signals but, rather, suggest that head rotations may serve to create unexpected situations in play.