The Development of a Code for Australian Psychologists

Section 35(1)(c) of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Act (2009 Health Practitioner Regulation National Law Act of 2009. (Queensland).  [Google Scholar]) requires the newly formed Psychology Board of Australia (PsyBA) “to develop or approve standards, codes and guidelines.” In 2010 the PsyBA decided to initially adopt the Australian Psychological Society's (APS) Code of Ethics (2007 Australian Psychological Society. 2007. Code of ethics, Melbourne, , Australia: Author.  [Google Scholar]) and develop a new code in the future with the involvement of key stakeholders without deciding what the nature of this code will be. The PsyBA now has to decide exactly how it will proceed in future. My aim in this article is to examine the options available to the PsyBA by exploring the definition and function of codes; presenting a history of the APS Code; and considering approaches that had been followed in Europe, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa.     

Number-processing skills in adults with dyslexia

The present study investigated basic numerical skills and arithmetic in adults with developmental dyslexia. Participants performed exact and approximate calculation, basic numerical tasks (e.g., counting; symbolic number comparison; spatial–numerical association of response codes, SNARC), and visuospatial tasks (mental rotation and visual search tasks). The group with dyslexia showed a marginal impairment in counting compared to age- and IQ-matched controls, and they were impaired in exact addition, in particular with respect to speed. They were also significantly slower in multiplication. In basic number processing, however, there was no significant difference in performance between those with dyslexia and controls. Both groups performed similarly on subtraction and approximate addition tasks. These findings indicate that basic number processing in adults with dyslexia is intact. Their difficulties are restricted to the verbal code and are not associated with deficits in nonverbal magnitude representation, visual Arabic number form, or spatial cognition.     

The Lessons of the Development of the First APA Ethics Code: Blending Science,Practice, and Politics

The Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association (APA) is a bedrock of the profession. The contextual factors of society affect the Ethics Code of the APA, resulting in an ever-changing document. The context of the reorganization of the APA after World War II created an initial impetus toward a formalized code. A key contextual feature of the Code's development was the use of the Critical Incident Technique, which was based in the empirical aspirations of the psychological field. This article explores the historical context around the APA's decision to draft an ethics code, reviews its development, and discusses its role for psychologists today.     

Ethical breaches and deviations of method in psychoanalysis: A heuristic model for the differentiation of boundary transgressions in psychoanalytic work

The boundary concept has been central to discussions on ethics and psychoanalysis over the past few decades. The main distinction has been between less malignant boundary crossings and more harmful violations. More recently, the concept has been criticized as not discriminating between technique and ethics. The author argues that these problems are connected to the way the boundary concept is defined. He suggests that it is specified to indicate a delimitation of an analytic area of conduct. In an analogous manner, an area of ethical conduct is framed by a boundary between ethical and unethical actions in the treatment situation. The analytic area has a narrower limitation than ethics and a stricter articulation of its concept of attitude; not all unanalytic actions are unethical. This simple model of interpersonally specified boundaries allows us to discriminate between different kinds of transgression in analytic work. In addition to violations and crossings, a third instance is described denoting a transgression of the analytic but not the ethical boundary. These can be called boundary stretchings, and are either intended or unintended deviations of method. The slippery slope mechanism of ethical misconduct is an imminent risk if boundary stretchings are ignored and not subject to scrutiny and analysis.     

Turning a Blind Eye: A Study of Peer Reporting in a Business School Setting

This article examines student peer reporting by extending the findings from the business ethics and higher education literature. In the conceptual model we propose that reflective moral attentiveness, subjective knowledge of the code of ethics, and academic dishonesty beliefs antecede ethical judgment of peer reporting, which impacts intentions to report peers’ unethical behavior. The relationships are tested using structural equation modeling. The findings indicate that moral attentiveness significantly influences ethical judgment, which in turn affects intention. The relationship between beliefs about academic dishonesty and ethical judgment is partially supported. Based on these results, suggestions for higher education institutions are provided.     

Do Programmers Prefer Predictable Expressions in Code?

Source code is a form of human communication, albeit one where the information shared between the programmers reading and writing the code is constrained by the requirement that the code executes correctly. Programming languages are more syntactically constrained than natural languages, but they are also very expressive, allowing a great many different ways to express even very simple computations. Still, code written by developers is highly predictable, and many programming tools have taken advantage of this phenomenon, relying on language model surprisal as a guiding mechanism. While surprisal has been validated as a measure of cognitive load in natural language, its relation to human cognitive processes in code is still poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the relationship between surprisal and programmer preference at a small granularity—do programmers prefer more predictable expressions in code? Using meaning-preserving transformations, we produce equivalent alternatives to developer-written code expressions and run a corpus study on Java and Python projects. In general, language models rate the code expressions developers choose to write as more predictable than these transformed alternatives. Then, we perform two human subject studies asking participants to choose between two equivalent snippets of Java code with different surprisal scores (one original and transformed). We find that programmers do prefer more predictable variants, and that stronger language models like the transformer align more often and more consistently with these preferences.     

THE METAPHYSICS OF DOWNWARD CAUSATION: REDISCOVERING THE FORMAL CAUSE

The methodological nonreductionism of contemporary biology opens an interesting discussion on the level of ontology and the philosophy of nature. The theory of emergence (EM), and downward causation (DC) in particular, bring a new set of arguments challenging not only methodological, but also ontological and causal reductionism. This argumentation provides a crucial philosophical foundation for the science/theology dialogue. However, a closer examination shows that proponents of EM do not present a unified and consistent definition of DC. Moreover, they find it difficult to prove that higher‐order properties can be causally significant without violating the causal laws that operate at lower physical levels. They also face the problem of circularity and incoherence in their explanation. In our article we show that these problems can be overcome only if DC is understood in terms of formal rather than physical (efficient) causality. This breakdown of causal monism in science opens a way to the retrieval of the fourfold Aristotelian notion of causality.     

平等的正义性及其形式原则考论

正义在逻辑上是比平等更底层、更基础的概念,可以为平等理论提供逻辑基础,平等的论证是一种正义性论证。支撑平等的正义的形式原则相同的人相同对待,不同的人不同对待,恰恰是从平等的描述性概念即人们的相同性到平等的规范性概念即平等要求的逻辑过渡。     

Some thoughts between body and mind in the light of Wilma Bucci's multiple code theory

The author proposes the usefulness of Wilma Bucci's Multiple Code Theory in clarifying some controversial issues in psychoanalytically inspired psychosomatics. Definition of a dialectic among different entities may appear difficult in an unitarian view of the organism, where body and mind are seen as having no kind of intrinsic existence, which may be differentiated from the organism as a whole, but as two categories having to do with the perspective of the observer. This aporia may find a solution in a redefinition of the body-mind relationship as that between symbolic systems and the subsymbolic system, both of which may be viewed as mind or as body depending on the point of observation. Similarly, somatic pathology, if we accept an unitary paradigm, need no longer be viewed as due to an influence of 'mind' on 'body': a definition of pathology as linked to a disconnection between different systems, as found in Bucci's theory, is proposed as a possible solution. Emergence of somatic symptoms, however, besides being witness to disconnection, may be seen as the subsymbolic first expression of an item of content, an attempt at reconnection, as already proposed, in a way, by Winnicott in 1949. This attempt has much better opportunities to succeed when it finds an adequate container, as in analysis. A clinical situation of this kind is presented.