In team-based tasks, successful communication and mutual understanding are essential to facilitate team coordination and performance. It is well-established that an important component of human conversation is the maintenance of common ground. Maintaining common ground has a number of associated processes in which conversational participants engage. Many of these processes are lacking in current synthetic teammates, and it is unknown to what extent this lack of capabilities affects their ability to contribute during team-based tasks. We focused our research on how (...) teams package information within a conversation, by which we mean specifically whether information is explicitly mentioned or implied, and how multiple pieces of information are ordered both within single communications and across multiple communications. We re-analyzed data collected from a simulated remotely-piloted aerial system task in which team members had to specify speed, altitude, and radius restrictions. The data came from three experiments: the “speech” experiment, the “text” experiment, and the “evaluation” experiment. We asked first whether teams settled on a specific routine for communicating the speed, altitude, and radius restrictions, and whether this process was different if the teams communicated in speech compared to text. We then asked how receiving special communication instructions in the evaluation experiment impacted the way the human teammates package information. We found that teams communicating in either speech or text tended to use a particular order for mentioning the speed, altitude, and radius. Different teams also chose different orders from one another. The teams in the evaluation experiment, however, showed unnaturally little variability in their information ordering and were also more likely to explicitly mention all restrictions even when they did not apply. Teams in the speech and text experiments were more likely to leave unnecessary restrictions unmentioned, and were also more likely to convey the restrictions across multiple communications. The option to converge on different packaging routines may have contributed to improved performance in the text experiment compared some of the conditions in the evaluation experiment. (shrink)

This paper contributes to our understanding of participation in the Eucharist by examining the swallow. The paper begins with a thick description of the swallow as act, as phenomenon, and as symbol. This description reveals the swallow’s interstitial nature, which is then examined for its implications on the meaning of participation in the sacrament. The paper then recommends approaches to the Eucharist for Catholics for whom swallowing is difficult or impossible. The paper finally incorporates these findings with the ex opere (...) operato doctrine, demonstrating participation as efficacious interaction. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.2 (Summer 2013): 253–262. (shrink)

This article reviews recent developments in health care law, focusing on controversy at the intersection of health care law and culture. The article addresses: emerging issues in federal regulatory oversight of the rapidly developing market in direct-to-consumer genetic testing, including questions about the role of government oversight and professional mediation of consumer choice; continuing controversies surrounding stem cell research and therapies and the implications of these controversies for healthcare institutions; a controversy in India arising at the intersection of abortion law (...) and the rights of the disabled but implicating a broader set of cross-cultural issues; and the education of U.S. health care providers and lawyers in the theory and practice of cultural competency. (shrink)

Colorado has consistently had one of the highest rates of suicide in the United States, and El Paso County has the highest number of suicide and firearm-related suicide deaths within the state. Community-based solutions like those of the Suicide Prevention Collaborative of El Paso County may be more effective in preventing suicide as they are specific to local issues, sensitive to local culture, and informed by local data, community members, and stakeholders.

Answering important public health questions often requires collection of sensitive information about individuals. For example, our understanding of how HIV is transmitted and how to prevent it only came about with people's willingness to share information about their sexual and drug-using behaviors. Given the scientific need for sensitive, personal information, researchers have a corresponding ethical and legal obligation to maintain the confidentiality of data they collect and typically promise in consent forms to restrict access to it and not to publish (...) identifying data.The interests of others, however, can threaten researchers' promises of confidentiality when legal demands are made to access research data. In some cases, the subject of the litigation is tightly connected to the research questions, and litigants' interest in the data is not surprising. Researchers conducting studies on tobacco or occupational or other chemical exposures, for example, are relatively frequent targets of subpoenas. (shrink)

This article reviews recent developments in health care law, focusing on the engagement of law as a partner in health care innovation. The article addresses: the history and contents of recent United States federal law restricting the use of genetic information by insurers and employers; the recent federal policy recommending routine HIV testing; the recent revision of federal policy regarding the funding of human embryonic stem cell research; the history, current status, and need for future attention to advance directives; the (...) recent emergence of medical–legal partnerships and their benefits for patients; the obesity epidemic and its implications for the child’s right to health under international conventions. (shrink)

The question 'Why should I obey the law?' introduces a contemporary puzzle that is as old as philosophy itself. The puzzle is especially troublesome if we think of cases in which breaking the law is not otherwise wrongful, and in which the chances of getting caught are negligible. Philosophers from Socrates to H.L.A. Hart have struggled to give reasoned support to the idea that we do have a general moral duty to obey the law but, more recently, the greater number (...) of learned voices has expressed doubt that there is any such duty, at least as traditionally conceived. (shrink)

We use a new model of metarepresentational development to predict a cognitive deficit which could explain a crucial component of the social impairment in childhood autism. One of the manifestations of a basic metarepresentational capacity is a ‘ theory of mind ’. We have reason to believe that autistic children lack such a ‘ theory ’. If this were so, then they would be unable to impute beliefs to others and to predict their behaviour. This hypothesis was tested using Wimmer (...) and Perner’s puppet play paradigm. Normal children and those with Down’s syndrome were used as controls for a group of autistic children. Even though the mental age of the autistic children was higher than that of the controls, they alone failed to impute beliefs to others. Thus the dysfunction we have postulated and demonstrated is independent of mental retardation and specific to autism. (shrink)

Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviors of category members. We investigated whether reasoning about transplants of bodily elements showed evidence of essentialist thinking. Both Americans and Indians endorsed the possibility of transplants conferring donors' personality, behavior, and luck on recipients, consistent with essentialism. Respondents also endorsed essentialist effects even when denying that transplants would change a recipient's category membership (e.g., predicting that a recipient of a pig's heart (...) would act more pig-like but denying that the recipient would become a pig). This finding runs counter to predictions from the strongest version of the “minimalist” position (Strevens,2000), an alternative to essentialism. Finally, studies asking about a broader range of donor-to-recipient transfers indicated that Indians essentialized more types of transfers than Americans, but neither sample essentialized monetary transfer. This suggests that results from bodily transplant conditions reflect genuine essentialism rather than broader magical thinking. (shrink)

The reproducibility movement in psychology has resulted in numerous highly publicized instances of replication failures. The goal of the present work was to investigate people’s reactions to a psychology replication failure vs. success, and to test whether a failure elicits harsher reactions when the researcher is a woman vs. a man. We examined these questions in a pre-registered experiment with a working adult sample, a conceptual replication of that experiment with a student sample, and an analysis of data compiled and (...) posted by a psychology researcher on their public weblog with the stated goal to improve research replicability by rank-ordering psychology researchers by their “estimated false discovery risk.” Participants in the experiments were randomly assigned to read a news article describing a successful vs. failed replication attempt of original work from a male vs. female psychological scientist, and then completed measures of researcher competence, likability, integrity, perceptions of the research, and behavioral intentions for future interactions with the researcher. In both working adult and student samples, analyses consistently yielded large main effects of replication outcome, but no interaction with researcher gender. Likewise, the coding of weblog data posted in July 2021 indicated that 66.3% of the researchers scrutinized were men and 33.8% were women, and their rank-ordering was not correlated with researcher gender. The lack of support for our pre-registered gender-replication hypothesis is, at first glance, encouraging for women researchers’ careers; however, the substantial effect sizes we observed for replication outcome underscore the tremendous negative impact the reproducibility movement can have on psychologists’ careers. We discuss the implications of such negative perceptions and the possible downstream consequences for women in the field that are essential for future study. (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers have recently been exploring whether the mechanisms which underlie the acquisition of ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) are best charac- terized as cognitive modules or as developing theories. In this paper, we attempt to clarify what a modular account of ToM entails, and why it is an attractive type of explanation. Intuitions and arguments in this debate often turn on the role of develop- ment: traditional research on ToM focuses on various developmental sequences, whereas cognitive modules are thought (...) to be static and ‘anti-developmental’. We suggest that this mistaken view relies on an overly limited notion of modularity, and we explore how ToM might be grounded in a cognitive module and yet still afford development. Modules must ‘come on-line’, and even fully developed modules may still develop internally, based on their constrained input. We make these points con- crete by focusing on a recent proposal to capture the development of ToM in a module via parameterization. (shrink)

Number concepts must support arithmetic inference. Using this principle, it can be argued that the integer concept of exactly ONE is a necessary part of the psychological foundations of number, as is the notion of the exact equality - that is, perfect substitutability. The inability to support reasoning involving exact equality is a shortcoming in current theories about the development of numerical reasoning. A simple innate basis for the natural number concepts can be proposed that embodies the arithmetic principle, supports (...) exact equality and also enables computational compatibility with real- or rational-valued mental magnitudes. (shrink)

Human social intelligence comprises a wide range of complex cognitive and affective processes that appear to be selectively impaired in autistic spectrum disorders. The study of these neuro- developmental disorders and the study of canonical social intelligence have advanced rapidly over the last twenty years by investigating the two together. Specifically, studies of autism have provided important insights into the nature of ‘theory of mind’ abilities, their normal development and underlying neural systems. At the same time, the idea of impaired (...) development of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying ‘theory of mind’ has shed new light on the nature of autistic disorders. This general approach is not restricted to the study of impairments but extends to mapping areas of social intelligence that are spared in autism. Here we investigate basic moral judgment and find that it appears to be substantially intact in children with autism who are severely impaired in ‘theory of mind’. At the same time, we extend studies of moral reasoning in normal development by way of a new control task, the ‘cry baby’ task. Cry baby scenarios, in which the distress of the victim is ‘unreasonable’ or ‘unjustified,’ do not elicit moral condemnation from normally developing preschoolers or from children with autism. Judgments of moral transgressions in which the victim displays distress are therefore not likely the result of a simple automatic reaction to the distress and more likely involve moral reasoning. Mapping the cognitive co-morbidity patterns of disordered development should encompass both impairments and sparings because both will be needed to make sense of the neural and genetic levels. (shrink)

Chaotic itinerancy is useful for illustrating transitions in attractor dynamics seen in the olfactory system. Cantor coding is a good model for information processing, but so far it lacks perceptual proof. The theories presented provide a large step toward bridging the use of chaos as an interpretive tool and hard examination of chaotic neural activity during perception.

Purpose Although surrogate decision-making is prevalent in intensive care units and concerns with decision quality are well documented, little is known about how clinicians help family members understand the surrogate role. We investigated whether and how clinicians provide normative guidance to families regarding how to function as a surrogate. Subjects and methods We audiorecorded and transcribed 73 ICU family conferences in which clinicians anticipated discussing goals of care for incapacitated patients at high risk of death. We developed and applied a (...) coding framework to identify normative statements by clinicians regarding what considerations should guide surrogates’ decisions, including whether clinicians explained one or more of Buchanan and Brock’s three standard principles of SDM to family members. Results Clinicians made at least one statement about how to perform the surrogate role in 24 conferences ). We observed three general types of normative guidance provided to surrogates, with some conferences containing more than one type of guidance: counselling about one or more standard principles of SDM ; counselling surrogates to make decisions centred on the patient as a person, without specifying how to accomplish that ; and counselling surrogates to make decisions based on the family’s values. Conclusions Clinicians did not provide normative guidance about the surrogate role in two-thirds of family conferences for incapacitated patients at high risk for death. When they did, clinicians’ guidance was often incomplete and sometimes conflicted with standard principles of SDM. Future work is needed to understand whether providing explicit guidance on how to perform the surrogate role improves decision-making or mitigates surrogates’ psychological distress. (shrink)

Purpose Although surrogate decision-making is prevalent in intensive care units and concerns with decision quality are well documented, little is known about how clinicians help family members understand the surrogate role. We investigated whether and how clinicians provide normative guidance to families regarding how to function as a surrogate. Subjects and methods We audiorecorded and transcribed 73 ICU family conferences in which clinicians anticipated discussing goals of care for incapacitated patients at high risk of death. We developed and applied a (...) coding framework to identify normative statements by clinicians regarding what considerations should guide surrogates’ decisions, including whether clinicians explained one or more of Buchanan and Brock’s three standard principles of SDM to family members. Results Clinicians made at least one statement about how to perform the surrogate role in 24 conferences ). We observed three general types of normative guidance provided to surrogates, with some conferences containing more than one type of guidance: counselling about one or more standard principles of SDM ; counselling surrogates to make decisions centred on the patient as a person, without specifying how to accomplish that ; and counselling surrogates to make decisions based on the family’s values. Conclusions Clinicians did not provide normative guidance about the surrogate role in two-thirds of family conferences for incapacitated patients at high risk for death. When they did, clinicians’ guidance was often incomplete and sometimes conflicted with standard principles of SDM. Future work is needed to understand whether providing explicit guidance on how to perform the surrogate role improves decision-making or mitigates surrogates’ psychological distress. (shrink)

Whole-genome analysis and whole-exome analysis generate many more clinically actionable findings than traditional targeted genetic analysis. These findings may be relevant to research participants themselves as well as for members of their families. Though researchers performing genomic analyses are likely to find medically significant genetic variations for nearly every research participant, what they will find for any given participant is unpredictable. The ubiquity and diversity of these findings complicate questions about disclosing individual genetic test results. We outline an approach for (...) disclosing a select range of genetic results to the relatives of research participants who have died, developed in response to relatives? requests during a pilot study of large-scale medical genetic sequencing. We also argue that studies that disclose individual research results to participants should, at a minimum, passively disclose individual results to deceased participants? relatives. (shrink)

This article reviews recent developments in health care law, focusing on the engagement of law as a partner in health care innovation. The article addresses: the history and contents of recent United States federal law restricting the use of genetic information by insurers and employers; the recent federal policy recommending routine HIV testing; the recent revision of federal policy regarding the funding of human embryonic stem cell research; the history, current status, and need for future attention to advance directives; the (...) recent emergence of medical–legal partnerships and their benefits for patients; the obesity epidemic and its implications for the child’s right to health under international conventions. (shrink)

Relationships, jobs, and health behaviors-these are what New Year's resolutions are made of. Every year millions resolve to adopt a better diet, exercise more, become fit, or lose weight but few put into practice the health behaviors they aspire to. For those who successfully begin, the likelihood that they will maintain these habits is low. Healthcare professionals recognize the importance of these, and other, health behaviors but struggle to provide their patients with the tools necessary for successful maintenance of their (...) medical regimens. The thousands of research papers that exist on patient adherence and health behavior change can leave professionals overwhelmed. This book synthesizes the results from more than 50 years of empirical research, resulting in simple, powerful, and practical guidance for health professionals who want to know the most effective strategies for helping their clients to put long-term health-relevant behavior changes into practice. It advocates a straightforward 3-ingredient model: Before a person can change, they must know what change is necessary ; desire the change ; and then have the tools to achieve and maintain the change. This book is designed to be informative and compelling, but its numerous anecdotes and examples render it engaging and entertaining, as well. Written for a practitioners and students of medicine, chiropractic, osteopathy, nursing, health education, physician assistant programs, dentistry, clinical and health psychology, marriage and family counseling, social work, school psychology, and care administrators -- and for lay persons who wish to take an active role in their health, this book brings together major empirically-based findings within the field and provides succinct, evidence-based recommendations and strategies for using these findings to make real changes. (shrink)

Mounting evidence documents the extraordinary toll on human health resulting from the consumption of unhealthy food products and physical inactivity. In response to America's growing obesity problem, local policymakers have been looking for legal strategies that can be adopted in their communities to encourage healthful behaviors. In order to provide practical tools to policymakers, this article examines four possible venues for local policy change to improve the health of a community: the school environment the built environment () community facilities and (...) the point of sale environment. Finally, the article examines the use of taxes or fees as a means of paying for nutrition policy work as well as potentially reducing the consumption of unhealthy products. This article illustrates that local laws and policies can be a valuable tool in changing a community's environment in order to improve nutritional options and increase opportunities for physical activity. (shrink)

This paper advances the Hunt–Vitell General Theory of Marketing Ethics as a framework for enriching current understanding of both long-term marketing relationships in general, and principal-agent associations specifically. Under economic models of agency theory, manufacturer-distributor relationships are conceptualized as principal-agent associations where both parties are assumed be motivated exclusively by short-term financial self-interest within the logical constraints of zero-sum game conditions. As a general model of ethical decision making and behavior in marketing, the Hunt–Vitell theory illustrates how ethical decisions are (...) predicated not only upon estimations of potential benefits or outcomes (using teleological criteria), but also deontological evaluations which invoke norms and values. Furthermore, the recent ideas advanced in "relationship marketing" perspectives suggest that distribution channel associations premised upon non-zero-sum or symbiotic assumptions may be more effective and more jointly profitable. Based upon the Hunt–Vitell model, propositions are formulated that complement the understanding of agency theory within the context of marketing channel relationships, and thus, may represent a basis for more effective agency selection and interaction in marketing practice. (shrink)

“He's [the Red King's] dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he's dreaming about?”Alice said, “Nobody can guess that.”“Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you'd be?”“Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.“Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You'd be nowhere. Why, you're only a sort of thing in his dream!”“If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you'd go out—bang!—just like a candle.”“I (...) shouldn't!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I'm only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?”“Ditto,” said Tweedledum.“Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee.He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn't help saying “Hush! You'll be waking him, I'm afraid, if you make so much noise.”“Well, it's no use your talking about waking him,” said Tweedledum, “when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real.”“I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.“You won't make yourself a bit realler by crying,” Tweedledee remarked: “there's nothing to cry about.”“If I wasn't real,” Alice said—half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous —“I shouldn't be able to cry.”“I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.—Through the Looking Glass. (shrink)

The ability to engage in and recognize pretend play begins around 18 months. A major challenge for theories of pretense is explaining how children are able to engage in pretense, and how they are able to recognize pretense in others. According to one major account, the metarepresentational theory, young children possess both production and recognition abilities because they possess the mental state concept, PRETEND. According to a more recent rival account, the Behavioral theory, young children are behaviorists about pretense, and (...) only produce and recognize pretense as a sort of behavior--namely, behaving 'as-if'. We review both the metarepresentational and Behavioral accounts and argue that the Behavioral theory fails to characterize very young children's abilities to produce and to recognize pretense. Among other problems, the Behavioral theory implies that children should frequently mis-recognize regular behavior as pretense, while certain regular forms of pretend play should neither be produced nor recognized. Like other mental states, pretense eludes purely behavioral description. The metarepresentational theory does not suffer these problems and provides a better account of children's pretense. 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Fernand Hallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. These new representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of "genius" or "intuition."Instead, Hallyn (...) investigates the problem of how new scientific hypotheses are actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected to support a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both neoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Department of French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Fernand Hallyn treats the work of these two figures not simply in terms of the history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices. These new representations of the universe, he insists, cannot be explained by recourse to explanations of "genius" or "intuition."Instead, Hallyn (...) investigates the problem of how new scientific hypotheses are actually formed and the complex way in which certain facts and not others are selected to support a particular theory. He contends that the scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination and that the work of Copernicus and Kepler must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Hallyn shows the sun-centered universe to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both neoplatonism and mannerism in the sixteenth centuryFernand Hallyn is a Professor in the Department of French Literature at the University of Ghent. Distributed for Zone Books. (shrink)

Young children’s failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the most likely content for the belief to be attributed from amongst several competing contents [Leslie, A. M., & Polizzi, P. (1998). Developmental Science, 1, 247–254]. We (...) tested this model with an ‘avoidance false belief task’ in which subjects predict the behavior of a character, who wants to avoid an object but who is mistaken about which of three locations it is in. The task has two equally correct answers—in seeking to avoid the location where she mistakenly believes the object to be, the character might equally go to the location where the object actually is, or to the remaining empty location. However, the model predicts that subjects will prefer one of these answers, selecting the object’s actual location over the empty location. This bias was confirmed in a series of five experiments with children aged between 4 and 8 years of age. A sixth experiment ruled out two rival explanations for children’s biased responding. Two further experiments found the opposite bias in adults. These findings support one selection model as an account of belief-desire reasoning in children, and suggest that a different model is needed for adults. The process of selecting contents for mental state attributions shows a developmental shift between 8 years of age and adulthood. (shrink)