Indecent Medicine: In Defense of the Absolute Prohibition against Physician Participation in Torture

In a recent article, Gross (2004) Gross, M. 2004. Doctors in the decent society: Torture, ill-treatment, and civic duty. Bioethics, 18(2): 181–203. [INFOTRIEVE][CSA][CROSSREF] [Google Scholar] argues that physicians in decent societies have a civic duty to aid in the torturing of suspected terrorists during emergency conditions. The argument presupposes a communitarian society in which considerations of common good override questions of individual rights, but it is also utilitarian. In the event that there is a ticking bomb and no other alternative available for defusing it, torture must be used, and physicians must play their part. In an earlier article, Jones (1980) Jones, G. 1980. On the permissibility of torture. Journal of Medical Ethics, 6: 11–13. [INFOTRIEVE][CSA] [Google Scholar] also argues in favour of physician participation in torture, going so far as to enthusiastically endorse the allocation of research resources as well to ensure that the ability to meet emergency situations is as efficient as scientifically possible. I argue against both these views and defend the absolute prohibition against torture generally, and against any participation by physicians in particular. I show that these arguments are incompatible with liberal or decent societies, and that the institutional requirements for making torture effective would constitute an unacceptable degradation both of medical ethics and practice, as well as of political institutions in general.     

C1调制效应的理论评述及影响因素

C1成分是对视觉刺激最早做出反应的视皮层诱发电位,C1调制效应是指注意等因素能够影响C1振幅的现象.以往多数研究未观察到注意等因素对C1振幅的影响,仅发现注意等因素对晚于C1的P1与N1等成分存在调制作用,并有研究者据此提出延迟反馈假说.但近期研究提示,注意等因素可能会对C1成分产生影响,提示初级视皮层(V1)可能在视觉信息加工初期直接受注意调制.目前,对C1调制效应的影响因素尚未完全确定,知觉学习、负载等因素的作用尚待考察.未来研究需进一步明确C1调制效应的影响因素及实验条件.     

When a product takes on characteristics of the person who created it: Sometimes it sounds sweeter

We investigated when consumers' judgments about a product reflect information about its product source (the person who creates the product). Three experiments manipulated congruence between the source's gender and the gender-typing of the source's product. When congruent with expectations (a male conductor played male-typed music), pre-trial source information had the same effect on post-trial product judgments as when source information was absent. Incongruence (a female conductor played male-typed music) distorted product attribute judgments when the source's competence was questioned. Her music was judged to be more delicate, less powerful and worse quality than his. This process of product experience being assimilated into incompetence stereotypes required minimal cognitive resources. When the incongruent source was undoubtedly competent, the amount of experiential evidence about an attribute influenced distortion. Consumers judged powerful music as powerful regardless of conductor gender, but, lacking much evidence about its delicacy, judged hers as more delicate than his. The selective effect of source gender information reflects consumers' cognitively effortful hypothesis testing of beliefs that gender expresses itself in a person's output against experiential evidence.     

Religiosity and fear of death: a three‐nation comparison

Numerous studies have sought to determine if religiosity is correlated with fear of death. Findings have been anything but consistent, with reports of negative relationships, positive relationships, no relationship, and even curvilinear associations. To shed light on this still contentious issue, the present study was undertaken among college students in three countries – Malaysia, Turkey, and the United States. Overall, the patterns in all three countries were similar. When linearity was assumed, there is a substantial positive correlation between most religiosity measures and fear of death. Assuming curvilinearity added slightly to the strength of the relationships in the US data and nothing to data from Malaysia or Turkey. Other findings were that on average females were more religious and feared death more than did males, and Muslims expressed considerably greater fear than did members of any other major religion. Results were discussed in the context of a new theory – called death apprehension theory. Among other things, it specifically predicts that death apprehension will be positively related to most religious beliefs and practices.     

Rats’ memory for time and relational responding in the duration-comparison procedure

Rats were trained in a duration-comparison task to press one lever if the comparison duration (c) was 1.2-s shorter than a standard duration (s), and another lever if c was 1.2-s longer than s. The interval between s and c duration was 1 s. The 10 duration pairs used during training controlled for the absolute duration of c and the total duration of an s-c pair. The total duration of an s-c pair was not predictive of the correct response. In Experiment 1, during equal-duration pair test trials, rats increasingly responded long (i.e., c > s) as the s-c delay was lengthened. In Experiment 2, long responding increased as the s-c delay was lengthened, even when the illumination condition during the s-c delay differed from that during the intertrial interval (ITI). In Experiment 3, transfer to novel duration pairs was assessed. Overall accuracy for the novel duration pairs was significantly above chance, but transfer performance was also affected by the absolute value of the novel c durations. This is the first study to demonstrate that rats can acquire relational duration discriminations. As in previous studies with pigeons the evidence was consistent with subjective-shortening of the standard duration and there was also evidence of a reliance on a mixture of absolute and relational strategies in responding.     

An individual differences analysis of the self-teaching hypothesis

The self-teaching hypothesis suggests that children learn orthographic structure of words through the experience of phonologically recoding them. The current study is an individual differences analysis of the self-teaching hypothesis. A total of 40 children in Grades 2 and 3 (7-9 years of age) completed tests of phonological recoding, word identification, and orthographic knowledge. The relation of phonological recoding and word identification was significantly mediated by orthographic knowledge. Furthermore, two aspects of orthographic knowledge (perhaps word-specific and general orthographic knowledge) mediated different variance shared between phonological recoding and word identification. Results support an individual differences version of the self-teaching hypothesis and emphasize the importance of phonological recoding in the primary curriculum.     

Context effects on orthographic learning of regular and irregular words

The self-teaching hypothesis proposes that orthographic learning takes place via phonological decoding in meaningful texts, that is, in context. Context is proposed to be important in learning to read, especially when decoding is only partial. However, little research has directly explored this hypothesis. The current study looked at the effect of context on orthographic learning and examined whether there were different effects for novel words given regular and irregular pronunciations. Two experiments were conducted using regular and irregular novel words, respectively. Second-grade children were asked to learn eight novel words either in stories or in a list of words. The results revealed no significant effect of context for the regular items. However, in an orthographic decision task, there was a facilitatory effect of context on irregular novel word learning. The findings support the view that contextual information is important to orthographic learning, but only when the words to be learned contain irregular spelling-sound correspondences.     

An investigation of the partial-assignment completion effect on students' assignment choice behavior

This study was designed to investigate the partial assignment completion effect. Seventh-grade students were given a math assignment. After working for 5 min, they were interrupted and their partially completed assignments were collected. About 20 min later, students were given their partially completed assignment and a new, control assignment that contained the same number of equivalent problems that were incomplete on their partially completed assignment. Students were told that they would have to complete an assignment but could choose which assignment they completed. Significantly more students chose their partially completed assignment. Theoretical and applied implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

How Many Mechanisms Are Needed to Analyze Speech? A Connectionist Simulation of Structural Rule Learning in Artificial Language Acquisition

Some empirical evidence in the artificial language acquisition literature has been taken to suggest that statistical learning mechanisms are insufficient for extracting structural information from an artificial language. According to the more than one mechanism (MOM) hypothesis, at least two mechanisms are required in order to acquire language from speech: (a) a statistical mechanism for speech segmentation; and (b) an additional rule-following mechanism in order to induce grammatical regularities. In this article, we present a set of neural network studies demonstrating that a single statistical mechanism can mimic the apparent discovery of structural regularities, beyond the segmentation of speech. We argue that our results undermine one argument for the MOM hypothesis.     

The statistical recommendations of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual: Effect sizes,confidence intervals,and meta‐analysis

Estimation based on effect sizes, confidence intervals, and meta‐analysis usually provides a more informative analysis of empirical results than does statistical significance testing, which has long been the conventional choice in psychology. The sixth edition of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual now recommends that psychologists should, wherever possible, use estimation and base their interpretation of research results on point and interval estimates. We outline the Manual's recommendations and suggest how they can be put into practice: adopt an estimation framework, starting with the formulation of research aims as ‘How much?’ or ‘To what extent?’ questions. Calculate from your data effect size estimates and confidence intervals to answer those questions, then interpret. Wherever appropriate, use meta‐analysis to integrate evidence over studies. The Manual's recommendations can assist psychologists improve they way they do their statistics and help build a more quantitative and cumulative discipline.