NAGEL VS. NAGEL ON THE NATURE OF PHENOMENAL CONCEPTS

In a footnote to his ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’, Thomas Nagel sketches a promising account of phenomenal concepts that purports to explain why mind‐body identity statements, even if necessary, will always seem contingent. Christopher Hill and Brian McLaughlin have recently developed this sketch into a more robust theory. In Nagel's more recent work, however, he suggests that the only adequate theory of phenomenal concepts is one that makes the relation between phenomenal and physical states intelligible, or ‘transparent’. Developing such a theory, however, appears to be no easy task. In this paper I argue that the Nagel‐Hill‐McLaughlin proposal is preferable – and that a serious problem with it, noticed by Stephen Yablo, can be avoided by revising the proposal according to some further suggestions made by Nagel himself.     

INTEGRATING GENDER AND ETHNICITY INTO PSYCHOLOGY COURSES

In this introduction to the special issue on teaching about gender and ethnicity in psychology, we consider the assumptions underlying an inclusive curriculum that pays attention to gender and ethnicity and address why such a curriculum has merit. We review empirical studies, assessing whether existing curricula are inclusive, and present an overview of the articles and the recurrent themes. These themes include the complexity of the interaction between ethnicity and gender; the difficulty of deciding which of the many possible ethnic groups to include in course material; the dominance of evaluative comparison in discussions of differences among groups; the interdisciplinary nature of research on ethnicity; and the tendency in psychology to ignore the importance of the power differences that confound analyses of the effect of ethnicity and gender.     

Roles and Role Conflict of Women in Infertile Couples

This study explored the experience of role conflict for women in infertile couples. The infertile group consisted of 29 women who, with their husbands, were beginning an infertility program; comparison group subjects were 29 married women with no history of inability to conceive. Each subject completed self-report instruments measuring role conceptions and expectations, the experience of role conflict, and occupational commitment. Each husband also reported his role expectations for his ideal woman. Also, a semi-structured interview was conducted with each infertile subject. Compared to the control group, the infertile group's role conceptions were more traditional; they reported less role conflict of various kinds, and they showed greater occupational commitment. They did not differ significantly on degree of wife-husband role discrepancy, or on mother's occupational commitment. These findings lead to an understanding of infertility as part of an interactional system for dealing with potentially intolerable sources of role conflict.     

Spiritual and emotional determinants of health

Within our present health care system, there is a growing movement that argues that our perceptions of health and illness are in need of change. This change includes redefining what we mean by health in terms of the whole person—the emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions of our being, as well as the physical. An increasing number of health professionals and social scientists believe our concepts of health and illness must consider all these aspects of life. It is believed that the quality of life may be enhanced by such perceptions of health, which include social and spiritual factors. Using data from the 1985 Akron Area Survey—The Subjective Quality of Life in the Akron Area—this study explores the effects of spiritual well-being and emotional well-being on health satisfaction. Results indicate that emotional and spiritual factors do significantly contribute to the subjective evaluation of health, especially for individuals who are physically limited.An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the joint session of the Association for the Sociology of Religion and the American Sociological Association, August 20, 1986. The author would like to thank Margaret Poloma, Ph.D., The University of Akron, and Mark Tausig, Ph.D., The University of Akron, for their helpful comments.     

Two forms of persistence in visual information processing

Iconic memory, which was initially regarded as a unitary phenomenon, has since been subdivided into several components. In the present work we examined the joint effects of two such components (visible persistence and the visual analog representation) on performance in a partial report task. The display consisted of 15 alphabetic characters arranged around the perimeter of an imaginary circle on the face of an oscilloscope. The observer named the character singled out by a bar-probe. Two factors were varied: exposure duration of the array (10, 50, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400 or 500 ms) and duration of blank period (interstimulus interval, ISI) between the termination of the array and the onset of the probe (0, 50, 100, 150, or 200 ms). Performance was progressively impaired as both exposure duration and ISI were increased. The results were explained in terms of a probabilistic combinatorial model in which the timecourses of visible persistence and of the visual analog representation are regarded as time-locked to the onset and to the end of stimulation, respectively. The impairing effect of exposure duration was attributed to the relatively high spatial demands of the task that could be met optimally by information in visible persistence (which declines as a function of exposure duration), but less adequately by information in the visual analog representation. A second experiment, employing a task with lesser spatial demands, confirmed this interpretation.     

Psychological compensation: a theoretical framework.

The 2 main objectives of this article are to review a variety of literatures in which the concept of compensation is used and to integrate the results of this review into a general framework of compensation. The review focuses on 4 domains of psychological inquiry: compensation for sensory handicaps, cognitive deficits, interpersonal losses, and brain injury. In the proposed framework, underlying dimensions and 4 basic steps in the progression of compensatory behavior are distinguished. The latter include origins, mechanisms, forms, and consequences. Finally, we describe ways in which researchers in particular domains can benefit from the global, process-oriented framework we propose. For most of the areas of compensation research reviewed, investigators can profit from a consideration of a broader selection of dimensions, additional steps in the process, alternative outcomes, and both objective and subjective assessment procedures.     

Single and combined effects of methylphenidate and behavior therapy on the classroom performance of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder

Twenty-four boys with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) participating in an intensive summer treatment program each received b.i.d. placebo and two doses of methylphenidate (MPH, 0.3 mg/kg and 0.6 mg/kg) crossed with two classroom settings: a behavior modification classroom including a token economy system, time out and daily home report card, and a regular classroom setting not using these procedures. Dependent variables included classroom observations of on-task and disruptive behavior, academic work completion and accuracy, and daily self-ratings of performance. Both MPH and behavior modification alone significantly improved children's classroom behavior, but only MPH improved children's academic productivity and accuracy. Singly, behavior therapy and 0.3 mg/kg PMH produced roughly equivalent improvements in classroom behavior. Further, the combination of behavior therapy and 0.3 mg/kg MPH resulted in maximal behavioral improvements, which were nearly identical to those obtained with 0.6 mg/kg MPH alone.The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Patricia Donovan, Michelle Berry, Mary Ingram, Patricia Wells, Beth Gnagy, Karen Greenslade, Mary Hamilton, and the entire staff of the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic ADHD Summer Treatment Program.