The Ethics Code Does Not Equal Ethics: A Response to O’Donohue

ABSTRACT

O’Donohue has identified 37 criticisms of the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (Ethics Code), although many of his criticisms go far beyond what is found written in the APA Ethics Code, to include the process of adjudicating ethics complaints by the American Psychological Association Ethics Committee, and the process by which the Ethics Code was developed. The authors claim that a major shortcoming of O’Donohue’s article is that he adopted an unrealistically expansive role for the Ethics Code that was not clearly linked to furthering the goals of the ethics code revision.     

Social-cognitive development: Domain distinctions and coordinations

Recent research on social-cognitive development has identified three conceptual domains which form the basis of the child's structuring of the social world: the moral, societal, and psychological domains. Research on distinct conceptual domains has thus far focused on events and actions that are clear examples of content for the domains. The issue of domain coordinations has not been addressed. This paper examines coordinations between conceptual domains in children's social judgments through a discussion of the experiential origins of the domains and judgments about mixed, second-order, and ambiguously multifaceted events. The utility of the conceptual domain model for understanding social judgments and social development is discussed.     

Religious education for spiritual bricoleurs? the perceptions of students in ten Christian-ethos secondary schools in England and Wales

ABSTRACT

Religious Education (RE) in England and Wales functions within a post-secular culture. In the last fifty years, approaches characterised by academic rigour, impartiality, and professionalism have been prioritised. In this post-secular culture, the notion of bricolage aptly describes how some young people seek meaning, explore the spiritual dimension of life, with fragmented understandings of, experiences and encounters with the religious traditions. This paper draws on data from an empirical research project involving 350 students, to explore why students in ten Christian-ethos secondary schools in England and Wales recognised Religious Education (RE) as a significant contributor to their spiritual development. The analysis is illuminated by employing the concept of a narthical learning space (NLS) as the lens with which to examine young people’s experiences. Three aspects of RE are explored: the debating of existential questions; opportunities to theologise and reflect; and encounters with the beliefs, practices, and opinions of others. This article argues that the concept of RE as a narthical learning space alongside the notion of young people as spiritual bricoleurs illuminates how the students in this study interpret the contribution of RE to their spiritual development.     

Empirical evidence for narrative structure

Three experimental tasks—spontaneous telling of a story, reading, and parsing the story—were used to determine whether empirical data reflect the narrative structure of stories and can be predicted by a plot unit analysis of the stories (Lehnert, 1981). It was found that spontaneous pause durations at sentence breaks were highly correlated with the importance of these breaks as predicted theoretically. Only low correlations were obtained, however, when reading pause durations were correlated with the model. As for parsing values, the value of the correlation coefficients depended on whether stories had sufficient superficial linguistic cues to help the subjects in parsing. It was concluded that spontaneous pausing not only reflects the narrative structure of stories, but can be used as a guide to constructing theories of narrative structure as well as for deciding between competing theories.     

Special Sciences: still a flawed argument after all these years

Jerry Fodor has argued that the multiple realizability argument, as discussed in his original “Special Sciences” article, “refutes psychophysical reductionism once and for all.” I argue that his argument in “Special Sciences” does no such thing. Furthermore, if one endorses the physicalism that most supporters of the “Special Sciences” view endorse, special science laws must be reducible, in principle. The compatibility of MR with reduction, however, need not threaten the autonomy of the special sciences.     

Field dependence/independence and mental capacity: A developmental approach

In this study we tested a central theoretical assumption of J. Pascual-Leone's (1970, Acta Psychologica, 32, 301–345) model of cognitive development, that same-age field-dependent and field-independent children have the same developmental mental capacity. The study was conducted on a very heterogeneous population, regarding both social class and age, to allow for a large variance of performance scores. The theoretical assumption was strongly supported.     

Commentary on social class differences in sociodramatic play in historical context: A reply to McLoyd

Historical origins of the research on the cultural correlates of imaginative behavior by the Israeli psychologists Feitelson, Smilansky, and Eifermann are presented. It is argued that despite McLoyd's searching analysis of the deficiencies in studies which attempt to relate level of imaginative play to social class, those earlier cross-cultural studies, together with some 50 years of prior research on social class and play in general, provide a context which gives support to those studies despite their particular methodological deficiencies.