A study on the resistance of observation systems of observers' expectancies

Different sets of expectations were induced in groups of observers before asking them to observe a film. Four aspects of Hall's notation system for the observation of proxemic behavior (1963) were adopted for the purposes of this study and another observation aspect was added. All Ss observed the same scenes of the film. They only differed in the kind of information on experimenters' beliefs and the hypotheses of the observation study. Results indicate that induced expectancies influenced the recordings of the observers. Implications of these outcomes are discussed.     

“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.     

Reference in single sentences and in texts

This study investigated the comprehension and production of reference terms in both sentences (Experiments 1 and 2) and texts (Experiments 3 and 4) using a sentence completion task. In Experiments 1 and 2, the use of a sentence-level strategy (subject assignment) was investigated. In Experiments 3 and 4, the use of a text-level strategy (topic assignment) was also investigated. There was a clear preference for continuing the sentences by referring to the subjects of the sentences regardless of the availability of gender cues, in both single sentences and in texts. There was also an influence of the topic of each text on both the choice of referent and the type of reference term used. However, the choice of reference term was affected by the number of potential antecedents in the preceding text. Overall, the results suggest that the sentence subject is a salient item in working memory. This salience is increased if the sentence subject is also the textual topic. In addition, it appears that the presence of a pronoun in a text triggers a specific strategy to assign the pronoun to the (salient) sentence subject.This work is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted by R. A. Crawley to the University of Durham and supported by the Medical Research Council of Great Britain.     

The use of heuristic strategies in the interpretation of pronouns

The aim of the two experiments reported here was to distinguish between two heuristic strategies that have been proposed to account for the assignment of pronouns: the subject assignment strategy and the parallel function strategy. According to the subject assignment strategy, a pronoun is assigned to a preceding subject noun phrase, whereas according to the parallel function strategy, a pronoun is assigned to a previous noun phrase in the same grammatical position as the pronoun. These two strategies were tested by examining the interpretation of single object pronouns, first in a reading task and second in an assignment task. In both experiments, there was a strong preference for assigning an object pronoun to the preceding subject noun phrase, thus supporting the subject assignment strategy. However, this was only the case for pronouns that were linguistically ambiguous. When assignment was constrained by gender, there was no effect of either strategy. It is suggested that heuristic strategies are only used in the absence of other strong cues to assignment.     

Fallacies and moral dilemmas

The continuing debate between utilitarians and deontologists often takes the form of disagreement over how particular moral dilemmas are to be resolved, but protagonists on both sides tend to overlook the possibility of resolving a dilemma with remainder, such as regret. The importance of remainder is also overlooked by critics of some absolutist ways of resolving or slipping between the horns of certain moral dilemmas. Moreover, deontologists, if not utilitarians, can be criticised for overlooking the possibility that, according to their theory, some dilemmas may be irresolvable. Virtue ethics, with its concentration on the agent, readily accommodates both mention of remainder and irresolvable dilemmas, and yields a specification of tragic dilemmas which the other two theories might like to take on.     

Causal Responsibility and Rationing in Medicine

The article addresses the issue of rationing health care services, a topic currently being hotly debated in many countries. The author argues that the aspect of causal responsibility ought to play a decisive role in the allocation of limited medical resources. Starting out from Ronald Dworkin's distinction between option luck and brute luck, the appropriate and meaningful uses of the term causal responsibility are clarified first. A discussion of the conditions which might justify giving lower priority to patients whose illnesses are the result of unhealthy behavior, like e.g. alcohol abuse, follows. Causal responsibility is then viewed in the context of private health insurance and the club model of organ donation. It is argued that individuals themselves are basically responsible for their decisions regarding insurance coverage and membership in organ donors' clubs. Causal responsibility is shown to be a more suitable criterion for rationing scarce medical resources than other criteria which might alternatively be considered, such as patients' age.     

Paralinguistic processing in children with callosal agenesis: emergence of neurolinguistic deficits

Recent research revealed impaired processing of both nonliteral meaning and affective prosody in adults with agenesis of the corpus callosum (ACC) and normal intelligence. Since normal children have incomplete myelination of the corpus callosum, it was hypothesized that paralanguage deficits in children with ACC would be less apparent relative to their peers. The Familiar and Novel Language Comprehension Test (FANL-C) and Prosody Test were given to 18 children with ACC and normal intelligence and 17 controls matched for age (7-13 years), education, and IQ (83-122). When controlling for age, children with ACC were significantly poorer in comprehension of the precise meaning of both literal and nonliteral items on the FANL-C. Adults with ACC had previously been shown to have difficulty only on nonliteral items. The effect size for nonliteral comprehension in children with ACC was smaller than that seen in adults. There was only a trend for the child ACC group to perform worse on the recognition of affective prosody. Thus, while deficits in paralinguistic processing were apparent, children with ACC were not as clearly different from age peers as adults, and were equally deficient at comprehending literal and nonliteral expressions. The differences in results between adults and children with ACC are thought to reflect incomplete callosal development in normal children, and the importance of the corpus callosum in the early stages of the development of the ability to process literal language.     

Functional neuroanatomy of altered states of consciousness: the transient hypofrontality hypothesis

It is the central hypothesis of this paper that the mental states commonly referred to as altered states of consciousness are principally due to transient prefrontal cortex deregulation. Supportive evidence from psychological and neuroscientific studies of dreaming, endurance running, meditation, daydreaming, hypnosis, and various drug-induced states is presented and integrated. It is proposed that transient hypofrontality is the unifying feature of all altered states and that the phenomenological uniqueness of each state is the result of the differential viability of various frontal circuits. Using an evolutionary approach, consciousness is conceptualized as hierarchically ordered cognitive function. Higher-order structures perform increasingly integrative functions and thus contribute more sophisticated content. Although this implies a holistic approach to consciousness, such a functional hierarchy localizes the most sophisticated layers of consciousness in the zenithal higher-order structure: the prefrontal cortex. The hallmark of altered states of consciousness is the subtle modification of behavioral and cognitive functions that are typically ascribed to the prefrontal cortex. The theoretical framework presented yields a number of testable hypotheses.