EFFECTS OF MEMORY AIDS ON THE DYADIC CONVERSATIONS OF INDIVIDUALS WITH DEMENTIA

The effects of a prosthetic memory aid on the conversational content and social skills of dyads with dementia were evaluated. Six individuals with moderate to severe dementia served as either subject or partner in dyads during 5-min conversational probes conducted three times per week in daycare and nursing-home settings. During phases when a memory aid, consisting of personally relevant picture and sentence stimuli, was available, most subjects used their own aid to improve the quality of conversations by increasing the frequency of on-topic statements, diminishing nonproductive utterances, lengthening their conversational turn, and/or increasing the frequency of turns taken. Most partners demonstrated awareness of social discourse conventions by appropriately relinquishing conversational dominance, decreasing both content and nonproductive utterances, and increasing acknowledging or affirmative comments when subjects used memory aids. Naive judges' ratings of aided and unaided conversational samples on seven conversational dimensions reflected differences in perceptions of significant improvement as a function of the conversational discourse style of each dyad.     

How Americans Perceive Foreign Policy Threats: A Magnitude Scaling Analysis

This paper evaluates three hypotheses about the structure of threat perceptions in the post-Cold War era: the replacement of a military conception of threat by an economic one; fluidity in threat perceptions because of an absence of a polestar nation; and Huntington's clash of civilizations theory. Using psychophysical magnitude measures of threat perception, these findings provide no support for the notion that threats are perceived economically. There is limited support for the theory that threat perceptions are unstable; most countries are clustered around a core of weakly hostile or friendly perceptions, which is suggestive of instability. At the same time, however, there does appear to be stability in perceptions of strong friends and enemies. The hypothesis best supported by these data is Huntington's theory that culture determines threat perceptions. In this study, not a single Western country is perceived as hostile, and all nations that do receive hostile scores are non-Western.     

A Theoretical Framework for Analysing the Notion of Relative Importance of Criteria

Multiple-criteria decision aid almost always requires the use of weights, importance coefficients or even a hierarchy of criteria, veto thresholds, etc. These are importance parameters that are used to differentiate the role devoted to each criterion in the construction of comprehensive preferences. Many researchers have studied the problem of how to assign values to such parameters, but few of them have tried to analyse in detail what underlies the notion of importance of criteria and to give a clear formal definition of it. In this paper our purpose is to define a theoretical framework so as to analyse the notion of the importance of criteria under very general conditions. Within this framework it clearly appears that the importance of criteria is taken into account in very different ways in various aggregation procedures. This framework also allows us to shed new light on fundamental questions such as: Under what conditions is it possible to state that one criterion is more important than another? Are importance parameters of the various aggregation procedures dependent on or independent of the encoding of criteria? What are the links between the two concepts of the importance of criteria and the compensatoriness of preferences? This theoretical framework seems to us sufficiently general to ground further research in order to define theoretically valid elicitation methods for importance parameters.     

Welfare and Wealth, Poverty and Justice in Today’s World

This article argues that there is no sound basis for thinking that we have a general and strong duty to rectify disparities of wealth around the world, apart from the special case where some become wealthy by theft or fraud. The nearest thing we have to a rational morality for all has to be built on the interests of all, and they include substantial freedoms, but not substantial entitlements to others assistance. It is also pointed out that the situation of the worlds poor is not that of victims of disasters, but simply of less-developed technology, which can be repaired by full and free trade relations with others. The true savior of the worlds poor is the businessman, not the missionary. What we do need to do is strike down barriers to commerce, rather than requisition aid.     

Culture Is More than a Static Residual: Introduction to the Special Section on Culture and Foreign Policy

The literature on international relations frequently refers to culture in broad, macro-level ways to explain what cannot be explained by economic or military power. The assumptions that culture is simple, uniform and the opposite of power are, in the view of the authors, erroneous. Also, the authors note that there is a lack of scholarly interaction among psychologists interested in cross-cultural phenomena and international relations specialists interested in questions of identity and foreign policy. As an introduction to a special section on culture and foreign policy, this article calls for more communication among these scholarly communities; provides a set of observations about foreign policy and culture understood as a complex, dynamic concept; and calls for specific kinds of studies to better understand foreign policy in the context of cultural complexity and richness.     

The eternal yearning

Parker Palmer defines spirituality as ‘the eternal yearning to be connected with something larger than our own egos’ (2003, 121). This yearning is an innate human need that transcends age, culture, ethnicity and belief. Despite deficit assumptions about young people, they are drawn to this need to surmount the ego and contribute to something larger than their own wants and needs. Two counter stories of young people involved in social activism outline how this is achieved. These are stories of contribution, compassion, empathy and understanding. Implications for schools are outlined including the range of learning that social activism inspires.     

Unlocking the beauty of the imperfect duty to aid: Sen's idea of the duty of assistance

This paper examines the links between acting upon a duty to assist, responsibility for these actions, and how such actions link with incremental moral duties that can amass as a consequence of such action. More specifically, this paper is concerned with practices of international aid and assistance, whereby public and privately funded donations enable the actions of parties outside of the territorial and jurisdictional boundaries of a community and state to directly influence the functioning of that community, and the incremental moral duties to which such action can give rise. Using a Senian account of the basis of moral duty, it explains how agents are responsible for the outcomes of their acts of assistance, even when mediated through international institutional actors, and how such acts can give rise to accumulative duties and obligations that are not bound or constrained by territorial boundaries or pre-existing special obligations.     

The Mistreatment of My People: Victimization by Proxy and Behavioral Intentions to Commit Violence Among Muslims in Denmark

Islamist extremism is often explained by the suffering endured by Muslims in Islamic countries as a result of Western‐led wars. However, many terrorist attacks have been carried out by European Muslims with no personal experiences of war. Across two studies among Danish Muslims, we tested if what we call “victimization‐by‐proxy processes” motivate behavioral intentions to commit acts of violence. We used Muslim identification, perceived injustice of Western foreign policies, and group‐based anger to predict violent and nonviolent behavioral intentions. More importantly, we compared path models of Danish Muslims from conflict zones with those without direct personal experience of Western‐led occupation. We found similar effects among the participants in each category, that is, vicarious psychological responses mimicked those of personally experienced adversity. In fact, participants born in Western Europe were, on average, more strongly identified with Muslims, more likely to perceive Western foreign policy as more unjust, reported greater group‐based anger, and were more inclined to help Muslims both by nonviolent and violent means.