Ethical dilemmas in pharmacy practice

The purpose of this study was to document the responses of pharmacy students and pharmacists to various ethical dilemmas. The responses of the first professional year students, third professional year students and pharmacists were evaluated and compared. In most instances, responses indicated a high priority for patient/client welfare. Pharmacists and students reportedly act with regard to the dignity of life, individual freedom, and an inner sense of right.     

Implicit and explicit memory without awareness

Summary Three experiments are reported which investigate the conscious status of subjects during an implicit-memory test. In all experiments the subjects either named each visually presented target item or generated each item from an anagram in a first phase of incidental learning. In a second phase, they were either given a visual word-stem completion task as an implicit-memory test or given a recognition task (Experiment 1), or a cued-recall task (Experiments 2 and 3) as explicit-memory tests. Finally, in a third phase the subjects were required to make decisions about the input status (i. e., they had to decide whether the item was present in the first phase) as well as about the output status of information (i. e., they had to decide whether the item had been completed, recognized or recalled in the second phase). A generation effect (i. e., generated items were remembered better than named items) was evident in the recognition and recall data, but only for items whose recognition or recall was accompanied by conscious recollection of their previous occurrence in the study list. Judgments about the input status were more precise, given that items had been consciously recognized or recalled rather than completed. The same pattern of findings was observed for judgments about the output status. The results are interpreted as evidence that subjects in implicit-memory tests are less aware of the fact that some of their productions are relevant to prior experiences. In addition, they are less aware of the fact that they are retrieving information from their memories. However, the same state of nonawareness may be present in explicit-memory tests, as was revealed by the performance of subjects on those items whose recognition or recall was not accompanied by conscious recollection.     

Employee recognition: A procedure to reinforce work attendance

An employee recognition program to improve work attendance was conducted for one year in 1986 as part of a 3-year study using the awarding and posting of attendance certificates as the primary method of employee recognition. Compared to sick leave usage during 1985, those employees in the recognition group decreased their use of sick leave by 28%. In 1987, the year following the end of the recognition program, the average sick leave returned to a level higher than the 1986 level. In addition, the sick leave of a nonintervention control group of employees showed a sequential increase each year from 1985 to 1987, with their use in 1986 being 16% greater than those employees in the employee recognition group.     

Donor and recipient: Social development,social interaction,and evolutionary processes

This review examines recent books on altruism and prosocial behaviour. Psychological approaches, biological approaches, and economic approaches are covered. The list of variables known to influence prosocial behaviour includes situational determinants, motivational orientations, and personality variables. Psychological theories emphasizing norms, cost-benefit calculations, and developmental factors have been used successfully to explain prosocial behaviour. Attention is given to models of helping and social and therapeutic treatment programmes. Genetic variables in prosocial behaviour are also reviewed.     

A taxonomy of item response models

A number of models for categorical item response data have been proposed in recent years. The models appear to be quite different. However, they may usefully be organized as members of only three distinct classes, within which the models are distinguished only by assumptions and constraints on their parameters. “Difference models” are appropriate for ordered responses, “divide-by-total” models may be used for either ordered or nominal responses, and “left-side added” models are used for multiple-choice responses with guessing. The details of the taxonomy and the models are described in this paper. The present study was supported in part by two postdoctoral fellowships awarded to Lynne Steinberg: an Educational Testing Service Postdoctoral Fellowship at ETS, Princeton, NJ and an NIMH Individual National Research Service Award at Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Helpful comments by the editor and three anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged.     

“And Yet It Moves”: Dream and Reality of the Ecumenical Movement

This article offers an overview of the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, which met in Karlsruhe, Germany, in August–September 2022. It sets out the context in which the assembly took place, the main issues discussed, and perspectives for the future. The article argues that the assembly in Karlsruhe demonstrated that the ecumenical movement still is alive and can offer enormous potential in a world at the brink of a new East–West divide, facing a significant weakening of multilateral structures of cooperation, and even the threat of nuclear war. Moreover, the Karlsruhe assembly demonstrated that on subjects such as the Middle East, peace ethics, and nationalism, and in the deep commitment and spiritual life of its participants, the ecumenical movement is vital and vibrant and represents a countercultural force against rigid nationalisms.     

Self-control: An integrative framework

Research on self-control has flourished within the last two decades, with many researchers trying to answer one of the most fundamental questions regarding human behaviour—how do we successfully regulate desires in the pursuit of long-term goals? While recent research has focused on different strategies to enhance self-control success, we still know very little about how strategies are implemented or where the need for self-control comes from in the first place. Drawing from parallel fields (e.g., emotion regulation, health) and other theories of self-regulation, we propose an integrative framework that describes self-control as a dynamic, multi-stage process that unfolds over time. In this review, we first provide an overview of this framework, which poses three stages of regulation: the identification of the need for self-control, the selection of strategies to regulate temptations, and the implementation of chosen strategies. These regulatory stages are then flexibly monitored over time. We then expand this framework by outlining a series of growth points to guide future research. By bridging across theories and disciplines, the present framework improves our understanding of how self-control unfolds in everyday life.     

On the detectability of straight lines in visual noise: An extension of French’s paradigm into the millisecond domain

We report the results of a study that investigated the effects of four experimental parameters on the tachistoscopic detectability of dotted lines in a noisy background consisting of dynamic patterns of identical dots. Characteristics of the lines that were explored included dot spacing, dot numerosity, and line orientation. Dot spacing was shown to be the most powerful parameter in determining the masking effect: the closer the dots, the more easily the line was detected. Increasing the number of the dots was also effective in increasing the detectability of a line, but only up to a limit of five dots. The orientation of the line, on the other hand, did not alter its detectability. Increasing the density of the visual masking noise monotonically reduced the detectability of the line. These studies are an extension of French’s (1953, 1954) work, differing mainly in the fact that the stimulus material was presented tachistoscopically rather than in a mode that allowed prolonged (up to 5 sec) examination of the figures. Thus, they put the results in a domain in which physiological interpretations may be more critically evaluated. A comparison of the results suggests that essentially the same sorts of cognitive mechanisms are operating in the millisecond domain as in the longer exposures. This suggests that simple neurological models utilizing the concept of feature filters or detectors may be being prematurely applied to relatively complex perceptual processes.