Prescriptions: Autonomy,Humanism and the Purpose of Health Technology

My purpose is to examine two of the foundations of medical ethics: the principle of autonomy and the concept of the human. I also investigate the extent to which health technology makes autonomy and humanness possible. I begin by underlining Illich's point that the same health technology designed to promote health and autonomy also is pathogenic. I proceed to analyse the Kantian concept of autonomy, a concept which is closely associated with health and which continues to determine current ethical thinking. In so doing, I uncover an unexpected ontological function of health technology, a function described in Heidegger's work on technology. Based on this discovery, I suggest that calls for Kantian autonomy may often be self-defeating or even sometimes harmful. I conclude by calling for continued ethical vigilance, but also for a questioning of the hitherto virtually unquestionable concepts of ethics and humanness which may themselves play a role in our era's greatest problems.     

The development of the items-easy (Ie) and items-difficult (Id) subscales for the MMPI-A

This research involves the development, validation, and cross-validation of the Items-Easy (Ie) and Items-Difficult (Id) subscales for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-Adolescent (MMPI-A; Butcher et al., 1992). These subscales were designed to assess the degree to which reading comprehension deficits may be responsible for significant elevations of validity Scale F and the standard clinical scales on adolescents' MMPI-A profiles. A difference score, bared on the two 13-item subscales, was created in order to compare subjects' responses to subsets of the more comprehensible (Ie) and less comprehensible (Id) items within the test. Hit rate, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive power, and negative predictive power were calculated on the basis of simple (Id - Ie) and weighted (3Id - 1Ie) difference scores for the validation (N = 495) and cross-validation (N = 264) samples, and for specific high-F profile subsamples. Although some of the indices reflected classification accuracy as high as 95%, none of the indices yielded consistently high results across the various samples and subsamples. It has been concluded that the Ie and Id subscales should be used only for research purposes at this time.     

Gender barriers in the legal profession: Implications for career development of female law students

To draw attention to the changes occurring in the legal profession, in general, and in law school, in particular, this analytical discussion aims at examining some of the key issues pertinent to the life career development of female students in law schools. The authors explore gender‐related psychosocial aspects, such as the differences between the career patterns of men and women. The applicability to women of key tenets from several career development theories is considered, and several specific career counseling implications and strategies, aimed at addressing the unique needs of women studying in a law school environment, are provided.     

Increasing intolerance of uncertainty over time: the potential influence of increasing connectivity

Anxiety levels have increased for several decades, despite objective indicators of historically unprecedented safety. A perceived inability to tolerate uncertainty or distress motivates individuals experiencing anxiety to engage in safety behaviors. Mobile phones provide unrestricted access to safety cues intended to reduce uncertainty and therein anxiety; however, recurrent engagement in reassurance seeking behaviors paradoxically increases anxiety. The current research was designed to assess whether self-reported intolerance of uncertainty (IU) levels may have been increasing and, if so, whether the increases correlate positively with mobile phone penetration and Internet usage. A cross-temporal meta-analysis was conducted using data from 52 North American studies exploring IU as well as social indicator data from several public sources. A statistically significant increase in IU levels occurred from 1999 to 2014, correlated with increases in mobile phone penetration and Internet usage. As hypothesized, IU levels appeared to be increasing over time and the increases correlate positively with mobile phone penetration and Internet usage. The results support the possibility that mobile phones increase reassurance seeking, acting as safety cues, and reducing spontaneous, everyday exposures to uncertainty, which may ultimately potentiate psychopathology by increasing IU and anxiety. Subsequent experimental research to assess for causality appears warranted. Limitations and directions for future research are presented.     

What are impossible worlds?

In this paper, I argue for a particular conception of impossible worlds. Possible worlds, as traditionally understood, can be used in the analysis of propositions, the content of belief, the truth of counterfactuals, and so on. Yet possible worlds are not capable of differentiating propositions that are necessarily equivalent, making sense of the beliefs of agents who are not ideally rational, or giving truth values to counterfactuals with necessarily false antecedents. The addition of impossible worlds addresses these issues. The kinds of impossible worlds capable of performing this task are not mysterious sui generis entities, but sets of structured propositions that are themselves constructed out of possible worlds and relations. I also respond to a worry that these impossible worlds are unable to represent claims about the shape of modal space itself.     

The time-line genogram: highlighting temporal aspects of family relationships

The genogram, or family diagram, is an assessment tool widely used by clinicians to study family members and their relationships over several generations. The standard genogram format is limited, however, because it does not show temporal patterns directly. An alternative, the Time-Line Genogram (TLG), which plots time on the vertical axis to display life events and changes in relationships when they actually occurred, highlights temporal aspects of family history that the standard format sometimes obscures.     

The intelligent reflex

ABSTRACT

The seeming distinction between motor and cognitive skills has hinged on the fact that the former are automatic and non-propositional (knowing-how), whereas the latter are slow and deliberative (knowing-that). Here, the physiological and behavioral phenomenon of long-latency stretch reflexes is used to show that “knowing-that” can be incorporated into “knowing-how,” either immediately or through learning. The experimental demonstration that slow computations can, with practice, be cached for fast retrieval, without the need for re-computation, dissolves the intellectualist/anti-intellectualist distinction: All complex human tasks, at any level of expertise, are a combination of intelligent reflexes and deliberative decisions.