NSGC Foundations—Then,Now, and Tomorrow

This 2004 Presidential Address was presented at the annual education conference of the National Society of Genetic Counselors in Washington DC on October 9, 2004.     

CONFESSIONS OF A LATE‐BLOOMING, “MISEDUCATED” PHILOSOPHER OF SCIENCE

This article provides a survey of Walker Percy's criticism of what Pope Benedict XVI calls “scientificity,” which entails a constriction of the dynamic interaction of faith and reason. The process can result in the diminishment of ethical considerations raised by science's impact on public policy. Beginning in the 1950s, Percy begins speculating about the negative influence of scientificity. The threat of a political regime using weapons of mass destruction is only one of several menacing developments. The desacrilization of human life from cradle to grave leads Percy to assert that modern science's impact is often radically incoherent. In The Moviegoer, Percy finds his existential and theistic voice that would enable him to advance his critique of science.     

Developmental differences in short-lived auditory memory for various classes of speech sounds

Spoken serial recall by second-grade children of aurally presented lists of digits, synthetic stop consonants, and synthetic vowels showed a significant suffix effect (selective debilitation of recall at the final position under the stimulus suffix condition) only for the lists of digits and not for either consonants or vowels. Making the synthetic syllables more distinctive by simultaneously covarying the consonant and vowel failed to produce a suffix effect under a strict scoring criterion which required both consonant and vowel to be recalled correctly; however, when subjects were given credit for partially correct answers the suffix effect emerged. Adults given the redundant consonant-vowel syllables showed a significant suffix effect with the strict scoring criterion. However, when consonants and vowels varied orthogonally, the adults' performance showed the suffix effect only under the lenient scoring criterion. An argument is made for equivalence of basic memorial processing between children and adults, the difference being in the number of features needed to disambiguate the target items and in the ability to integrate these features to exploit interstimulus redundancy.     

Right-hemispheric damage and verbal problem solving behavior.

Patients with right-hemisphere damage, who ostensibly have no linguistic impairment, are relatively incapable of solving two-term series problems in which comparative adjectives in the premise and question are antonymic. This finding suggests that such verbal reasoning depends, in part, upon nonlinguistic imaginal processes subserved by the right hemisphere. In this manner, the right hemisphere is often required for the full elaboration of linguistic input.     

Human medial temporal-lobe stimulation disrupts both formation and retrieval of recent memories

Disrupting medial temporal-lobe (MTL) activity for less than a second, either during the initial presentation of a complex scene or when it is presented again 1 min later, severely impairs recognition at the second presentation. MTL disruption during both presentation and recognition periods produces further impairment. These results are not consistent with views limiting MTL function solely to encoding or solely to retrieval mechanisms.     

Attenuated hypothesis or attenuated test of hypothesis?

After discussing several of the criticisms made by Professor Jensen, it is concluded that the Spearman hypothesis, as currently worded, has been disconfirmed. The near-zero correlation between blacks and low socio-economic status (SES) whites is not an artifact of the methodology. Neither is it a sampling fluke. The logic of sampling error does not apply to the arbitrary selection of intercorrelated tests from an undefined population. It is important also that low and high SES white differences are highly correlate with general factor loadings in a very heterogeneous selection of tests. Research attention should be turned to the difference in outcome of the race and SES comparisons.     

Cue exposure and response prevention with alcoholics: a controlled trial

Ten severely alcohol-dependent subjects were divided into two groups, one of which received only 6 sessions of in-vivo cue exposure and response prevention and the other of which received 6 sessions of imaginal cue exposure, followed by 6 sessions of in-vivo cue exposure and response prevention. The in-vivo cue exposure produced significant decrements on behavioural and subjective measures for both experimental groups on Desire to Drink and Difficulty to Resist Alcohol. Imaginal cue exposure produced trivial changes on these measures. The implications for both theory and practice are discussed.     

“Consistency” and “contradiction” in the development of gender role characteristics

There is currently an increasing amount of theoretical and empirical work arguing that stereotyped sex role behavior is maladaptive in our culture and that “androgyny” or “sex role transcendence” is a preferred mode of being. The latter, however, seems to require individual inconsistency and self-contradiction in behaviors and attitudes (since the individual is both active and passive, both independent and dependent, etc.). Theories of cognitive consistency maintain that individuals avoid self-contradiction and inconsistency, and therefore that androgyny runs counter to important motivational principles. This article examines this issue in some detail, and concludes that theories of cognitive dissonance and consistency reflect particular socio-cultural conditions rather than universal motivation principles. There is nothing inherently uncomfortable or “inconsistent” about androgyny and sex role transcendence.