But murderers can have all the children they want: Surrogacy and public policy

No new ethical issue is created by reproductive technologies. The state should not intervene to suppress individual rights to take advantage of these technologies, including third party donations. Some individuals will view these technologies as the best available option for having and rearing children. The major values to be protected in public policy ought to be compassion, privacy and procreative rights.     

A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility Judgments*

Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken—theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are influenced by a number of surprising factors, sometimes prompting apparently contradictory judgments. In this paper, we show how an independently motivated hypothesis about responsibility judgments provides a unified explanation of the more important results from these studies. According to this ‘Explanation Hypothesis’, to take an agent to be morally responsible for an event is to take a relevant motivational structure of the agent to be part of a significant explanation of the event. We argue that because of how explanatory interests and perspectives affect what we take as significant explanations, this analysis accounts for the puzzling variety of empirical results. If this is correct, the Explanation Hypothesis also provides a new way of understanding debates about moral responsibility.     

Manipulated stress and dispositional reinvestment in a wall-volley task: an investigation into controlled processing

This field-based study examined the action of reinvesting in controlled processing on 14 university soccer players to assess skill breakdown under pressure. Based on scores on the Reinvestment Scale of Masters, Polman, and Hammond, two experimental groups of participants were inferred to be dispositionally High or Low in Reinvestment. They performed a wall-volley soccer task, which involved kicking a ball repeatedly against a wall target zone for 90 sec. as defined by McMorris, Gibbs, Palmer, Payne, and Torpey in a High and Low Stress environment. Prior to each condition performers were required to complete the Anxiety Rating Scale. A series of two-way (reinvestment x stress) analyses of variance with repeated measures on stress were conducted on the Anxiety and soccer scores. Players scoring High on the Reinvestment Scale reported significantly greater Intensity for Somatic Anxiety and lower Self-confidence than players who scored Low in the High Stress condition. Anxiety Direction scores indicated players scoring High on the Reinvestment Scale reported their increase in Somatic Anxiety and reduction in Self-confidence in the High Stress condition to be significantly more debilitating of performance than players who scored Low on the Reinvestment Scale. Soccer scores indicated players scoring High on the Reinvestment Scale were more prone to reinvesting in controlled processing and essentially experiencing greater decreases in performance under pressure than those Low in Reinvestment. Therefore, these findings support the predictive power of the Reinvestment Scale.     

Introduction

This article reports a comprehensive meta-analysis of the criterion-oriented validity of the Big Five personality dimensions assessed with forced-choice (FC) inventories. Six criteria (i.e., performance ratings, training proficiency, productivity, grade-point average, global occupational performance, and global academic performance) and three types of FC scores (i.e., normative, quasi-ipsative, and ipsative) served for grouping the validity coefficients. Globally, the results showed that the Big Five assessed with FC measures have similar or slightly higher validity than the Big Five assessed with single-stimulus (SS) personality inventories. Quasi-ipsative measures of conscientiousness (K = 44, N = 8794, ρ = .40) are found to be better predictors of job performance than normative and ipsative measures. FC inventories also showed similar reliability coefficients to SS inventories. Implications of the findings for theory and practice in academic and personnel decisions are discussed, and future research is suggested.     

Is there an optimal factor structure of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale in patients with first‐episode psychosis?

The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) is the most widely used scale to assess a variety of symptoms in patients with schizophrenia and other psychoses. The factor structure of the PANSS has been examined with confirmatory factor analyses in several studies, but not in a well‐defined first‐episode psychosis sample. The aim of this paper is to examine the statistical fit of five different PANSS models in a first‐episode, non‐affective psychosis sample. Confirmatory factor analyses were performed on PANSS data (n = 588). A main criterion for best fit was defined as the Expected Cross Validation Index (ECVI). No tested model revealed an optimally satisfactory model fit index. The Wallwork/Fortgang five‐factor model demonstrated the most optimal psychometric properties. The corresponding subscales of all evaluated five‐factor models were strongly intercorrelated. The Wallwork/Fortgang five‐factor model was found to be statistically and clinically ideal among patients with first‐episode psychosis. Therefore, we recommend this model in forthcoming studies among patients with first‐episode psychosis. However, to prevent the loss of clinically valuable information on an item level, we do not recommend removing any items from the original form. Our study also implies that the specific choice of model will not have a substantial effect on outcome results in studies on the course and outcome in first‐episode psychosis.     

Gender differences on the Five to Fifteen questionnaire in a non‐referred sample with inattention and hyperactivity‐impulsivity and a clinic‐referred sample with hyperkinetic disorder

Lambek, R., Trillingsgaard, A., Kadesjö, B., Damm, D. & Thomsen, P. H. (2010). Gender differences on the Five to Fifteen questionnaire in a non‐referred sample with inattention and hyperactivity‐impulsivity and a clinic‐referred sample with hyperkinetic disorder. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 51, 540–447. The aim of the present study was to examine gender differences in children with inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity on the Five to Fifteen (FTF) parent questionnaire. First, non‐referred girls (n = 43) and boys (n = 51) with problems of attention and hyperactivity‐impulsivity and then clinic‐referred girls (n = 35) and boys (n = 66) with hyperkinetic disorder (HKD) were compared on the FTF. Results suggested that non‐referred boys were more hyperactive‐impulsive than non‐referred girls, whereas clinic‐referred boys and girl with HKD were more similar than dissimilar on the FTF questionnaire. Secondly, it was examined whether the application of gender mixed norms versus gender specific norms would result in varying proportions of clinic‐referred children with HKD being identified as impaired on the subdomains of the FTF questionnaire. Based on results it was concluded that the use of a gender mixed normative sample may lead to overestimation of impairment in boys with HKD, but the type of sample applied to define impairment on the FTF should depend on the purpose for applying the questionnaire.     

Effect of low dose ionizing radiation exposure in utero on cognitive function in adolescence

Heiervang, K. S., Mednick, S., Sundet, K. & Rund, B. R. (2010). Effect of low dose ionizing radiation exposure in utero on cognitive function in adolescence. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 210–215. Radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant meltdown greatly affected several Norwegian counties. The cognitive consequences of in utero exposure to radiation from the Chernobyl accident have been intensely debated. This study examines the cognitive outcomes for those Norwegians who were exposed as fetuses to the fallout from Chernobyl. The participants, 84 adolescents who were exposed in utero to radiation from the most contaminated areas in Norway and 94 adolescents from areas not contaminated by the radiation, were tested on verbal and nonverbal IQ. Two data analyses were conducted. First, using a control‐group design, the IQ scores of exposed and unexposed adolescents were compared. Second, in a timing‐of‐exposure design, those exposed during the most sensitive period were contrasted with those exposed later in gestation. Adolescents exposed to low‐dose ionizing radiation in utero scored significantly lower in full‐scale IQ than unexposed adolescents. The difference was restricted to verbal IQ and was not evident for nonverbal IQ. The effect was not observed in exposed adolescents who had passed the most sensitive gestational period prior to the accident and thus were exposed to the radiation from Chernobyl exclusively after gestational week 16. These participants performed as well as the controls. Although the results should be interpreted cautiously due to the study’s nonrandomized design, the data add new and important support to the hypothesis that the Chernobyl accident may have had a subtle effect on the cognitive functioning of those exposed to low‐dose ionizing radiation in utero during the most sensitive gestational period.     

The neural basis of updating: Distinguishing substitution processes from other concurrent processes

Sörqvist, P. & Sætrevik, B. (2010). The neural basis of updating: Distinguishing substitution processes from other concurrent processes. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 357–362. Most previous studies of updating processes have not been able to contrast processes of substituting items in memory with other concurrent processes. In the present investigation, we used a new task called “number updating” and an fMRI protocol to contrast the activation of trials that require item substitution (adding a new item to the working memory representation and suppressing an old item) with trials that involve no substitution (discarding the new item). Trials that require item substitution activated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the posterior medial frontal cortex and the parietal lobes, areas typically seen activated for working memory tasks in general. Trials that do not require substitution activated the anterior medial frontal cortex. Studies examining executive functions have associated this area with cognitive conflict, and may represent suppression of the substitution processes.     

Word fluency performance and strategies in children with cochlear implants: age‐dependent effects?

Löfkvist, U., Almkvist, O., Lyxell, B. & Tallberg, I.‐M. (2012). Word fluency performance and strategies in children with cochlear implants: age‐dependent effects? Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 467–474. Word fluency was examined in 73 Swedish children aged 6–9 years divided into two age groups, 6–7 and 8–9 years; 34 deaf children with cochlear implants (CI) (15 girls/19 boys) and 39 age‐matched children with normal hearing (NH) (20 girls/19 boys). One purpose was to compare the ability to retrieve words in two different word fluency tasks; one phonemically based (FAS letter fluency) and one semantically based (animal fluency). A second purpose was to examine retrieval strategies in the two tasks by conducting an analysis of clustering and switching of word sequences. In general we found that age was an important factor for word fluency ability, in both the CI and the NH groups. It was also demonstrated that children with CI aged 8–9 years retrieved significantly fewer words and used less efficient strategies in the retrieval process, especially on the phonemically based task compared to children with NH of the same ages, whereas children 6–7 years performed similarly in both groups regarding number of retrieved words and use of strategies. The results are discussed with respect to factors such as age differences in performance for children with CI, especially for the phonemically based task.