HIV: How Science Shaped the Ethics

AIDS is a debilitating and fatal disease that was first identified as an infectious disease syndrome in the 1970s. The discovery of a nearly universally fatal infectious and rapidly spreading disease in the post–antibiotics era created apprehension in the medical community and alarm in the general population. Questions about how patients should be handled in medical and nonmedical settings resulted in the ostracizing of many AIDS patients and inappropriate patient management. Scientific investigation into modes of disease transmission and control helped to shape the management of AIDS patient care in such a way that ethical and protective practices could be developed. In this article I discuss some of the ethical questions that were addressed by appropriate scientific inquiry.     

ABC-EBDI: An affective framework for BDI agents

The aim of this work is to improve the modelling of intelligent agents that reproduce realistic human behavior. BDI frameworks have been successfully used in this context and have evolved in recent years into EBDI frameworks, in which affective aspects are considered. In this work, an affective EBDI framework named ABC-EBDI is presented. The proposal integrates a well-known psychotherapeutic model, the ABC model, combined with other affective theories, to support the modeling of the agents’ behavioral and affective responses in a unifying and realistic manner. The distinguishing feature of the proposed framework is the classification of the agent’s cognitive-affective process as either rational or irrational. This process will lead to functional emotions and adaptive conduct in the first case and dysfunctional emotions and maladaptive behaviors in the second. The framework models affect by taking into account emotions, mood and personality. It also models human conduct regarding not only actions, but also the way those actions are expressed. A prototype has been implemented based on a bad news scenario and a first evaluation with users has been carried out with promising results.     

A typology of mid-life career changers

This study examines the motivations for and the outcomes of mid-life career change among a sample of 73 men who had left professional and managerial careers between the ages of 34 and 54. Measures of personal desire for change and external pressure to leave were dichotomized to produce a typology of career changers: Drift-outs, Opt-outs, Force-outs, and Bow-outs. The four types of changers were found to differ on a number of variables, including: amount of education completed, additional schooling undertaken to change careers, time taken to make the change, radicalness of change, and the importance of personal values in deciding to leave their former careers. Overall, respondents were found to be highly satisfied with their career redirection.     

The F word: The experiential construction of flooding in England

In England, flood risk management policy constructs flooding through its physical impacts. Whilst research is starting to reveal the mental health impacts of flooding, it stops short of understanding the experience of being flooded and what this means in terms of understanding the F-word, flooding. Yet for flood communities, the emotional impacts of flooding can prevail for years, if not a lifetime.For people who have been flooded, flooding seeps into every facet of life. It removes the security and safety of home creating instead places of fear, stress, and anxiety. Within this paper we lay bare the emotional impacts of flooding, demonstrating the effect that home unmaking and the cyclical need for home remaking, has on individuals, their quality of life, and revealing the long-term emotional impact of living at risk of flooding.We finish by seeking ways to support communities living at risk of flooding, challenging current flood risk management policy, and identifying how it could be strengthened through understanding these emotional impacts. We propose supporting communities through the emotional turmoil of flooding can help provide hope and restore quality of life to those who live at risk of flooding.     

Human pelvis motions when walking and when riding a therapeutic horse

A prevailing rationale for equine assisted therapies is that the motion of a horse can provide sensory stimulus and movement patterns that mimic those of natural human activities such as walking. The purpose of this study was to quantitatively measure and compare human pelvis motions when walking to those when riding a horse. Six able-bodied children (inexperienced riders, 8–12 years old) participated in over-ground trials of self-paced walking and leader-paced riding on four different horses. Five kinematic measures were extracted from three-dimensional pelvis motion data: anteroposterior, superoinferior, and mediolateral translations, list angle about the anteroposterior axis, and twist angle about the superoinferior axis. There was generally as much or more variability in motion range observed between riding on the different horses as between riding and walking. Pelvis trajectories exhibited many similar features between walking and riding, including distorted lemniscate patterns in the transverse and frontal planes. In the sagittal plane the pelvis trajectory during walking exhibited a somewhat circular pattern whereas during riding it exhibited a more diagonal pattern. This study shows that riding on a horse can generate movement patterns in the human pelvis that emulate many, but not all, characteristics of those during natural walking.     

Building Resilience in Families,Communities, and Organizations: A Training Program in Global Mental Health and Psychosocial Support

This article describes the Summer Institute in Global Mental Health and Psychosocial Support, a brief immersion training program for mental health, health, and allied professionals who work with populations that have endured severe adversities and trauma, such as domestic and political violence, extreme poverty, armed conflict, epidemics, and natural disasters. The course taught participants to apply collaborative and contextually sensitive approaches to enhance social connectedness and resilience in families, communities, and organizations. This article presents core training principles and vignettes which illustrate how those engaging in such interventions must: (1) work in the context of a strong and supportive organization; (2) appreciate the complexity of the systems with which they are engaging; and (3) be open to the possibilities for healing and transformation. The program utilized a combination of didactic presentations, hands‐on interactive exercises, case studies, and experiential approaches to organizational team building and staff stress management.     

Major personality traits and regulations of social behavior: Cheaters are not the same as the reckless,and you need to know who you’re dealing with

This research explores the hypothesis that major personality traits are systematically associated with social regulation response tendencies. Specifically, the adaptive function of specific traits from ‘Big-Five’ and HEXACO models were evaluated in terms of how they are understood and utilized in predicting the behaviors of others. Big-Five factors of agreeableness and conscientiousness track tendencies to obey or break social contract and precautionary rules, but not discriminatively nor as predicted. HEXACO traits, however, provided discriminative patterns of associations between personality and response tendencies (within individuals and for third-person associations, cross-culturally) in greater accord with previous work. Honesty–humility is associated with social contract behaviors and conscientiousness is associated with precaution behaviors, consistent with conceptualizations as psychological adaptations for tracking fitness-relevant individual differences.     

Human dignity – the foundation of political human rights? Empirical research among youth in Germany

This article focuses on political human rights and on the empirically assessed legitimation of these rights. This research considers the rights of refugees, the active and passive right to vote, and the right of protest. Given that the research is empirical research, respondents are requested to express agreement, disagreement or neutrality. The assumption is that contextual factors influence people’s assessment of rights. One contextual factor is, firstly, the concept of human dignity. International human rights covenants regard human dignity as the very foundation of all rights. That said, the concept of human dignity is subject to different understandings and – certainly in the past – the understanding of what constitutes human dignity has varied. Dignity can be related to the appreciation of the person given by others, to the moral behaviour of a person, and it can be understood as inherently related to the individual as a human being. It is this last understanding that forms the basis of modern declarations of human rights. Furthermore, the respondents’ value orientations and religious beliefs, along with society’s socio-political perception, will be examined to ascertain whether these factors have any influence on respondents’ attitudes towards political rights. The key question is: does human dignity influence people’s view of the legitimacy of political rights and do other factors also count? The empirical analysis was undertaken done with German youth (N=2244). Findings show that the concept of inherent human dignity is a strong predictor for respondents’ attitudes towards political rights, but that it is not the unique predictor; relevant concepts are the value orientation of youth and their socio-political orientation. The significance of religious beliefs as a predictor is low.     

The electric vehicle: A new driving experience involving specific skills and rules

The arrival of the electric vehicle (EV) on the market is one consequence of government measures to improve air quality and reduce CO² emissions. However, the EV has specific properties of use associated with its limited range and relative silence compared to normal vehicles, influencing the mobility behaviours of drivers and requiring them to develop some new driving abilities. This paper examines the behavioural modifications brought about by daily use of an electric vehicle at three different levels of driving activity: strategic, tactical and operational. The study collected and analyzed the self-reported behaviours (via questionnaires and travels dairies) of 36 Parisian private drivers, each of whom drove for six months an electric MINI E prototype. The results of the study show that driving an EV requires a learning phase to acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to operate the vehicle. At the strategic level of driving, drivers take into account the restricted range of the EV, implement a daily charge process, and develop new behaviours related to trip planning. The study also examines driver behaviour at the tactical level, in terms of driver interactions with other road users to deal with the silent nature of the EV, and at the operational level of driving, in terms of braking behaviour to master the regenerative braking function of the EV. The paper discusses the interactions between these three levels of driving activity.     

A systematic review of sexual satisfaction

The present theoretical study is a systematic review of research publications in which sexual satisfaction was the dependent variable. After conducting a literature search in major electronic databases and following a selection process, we provide a summary of the main findings of 197 scientific papers published between 1979 and 2012. The review revealed the complexity and importance of sexual satisfaction, which was associated with the following variables and factors: a) individual variables such as socio-demographic and psychological characteristics as well as physical and psychological health status; b) variables associated with intimate relationships and sexual response; c) factors related to social support and family relationships; and d) cultural beliefs and values such as religion. In conclusion, we observed that sexual satisfaction is a key factor in individuals’ sexual health and overall well-being. However, despite its importance, there is a lack of theoretical models combining the most important factors to explain sexual satisfaction.