An extensive, and controversial, literature concluding that prolactin (PRL), growth hormone (GH), insulin-like growth factor-I (IGF-I), and thyroid hormones are critical immunoregulatory factors has accumulated. However, recent studies of mice deficient in the production of these hormones or expression of their receptors indicate that there are only a few instances in which these hormones are required for lymphocyte development or antigen responsiveness. Instead, a case is made that their primary role is to counteract the effects of negative immunoregulatory factors, such (...) as glucocorticoids, which are produced when the organism is subjected to major stressors. The immunoprotective actions of PRL, GH, IGF-I, and/or thyroid hormones in these instances may ensure immune system homeostasis and reduce the susceptibility to stress-induced disease. These immuno-enhancing effects could be exploited clinically in instances where the immune system is depressed due to illness or various treatment regimens. BioEssays 23:288–294, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Currently, an emphasis is being placed on the integration of ethical issues into the business curriculum. This paper investigates the viability of using student group interaction to induce an upward movement in the stages of moral development as advanced by Kohlberg. The results of a classroom experiment using graduate business law students suggest that formulating groups that mix stages of moral development can provide a robust environment for upward movement. In addition, the results suggest strategies for formulating effective groups, based (...) upon entry levels as measured by the Defining Issues Test. (shrink)

The vegetation eaten by animals on large areas of several continents is deficient in phosphate and deleterious effects on physiology, particularly reproduction, ensue. Records on bone chewing behaviour by both pastoral andwild game animals extend over two centuries. In laboratory investigation of this apt behaviour it has been shown that the appetite for bones is innate and specific and cued predominantly by olfactory stimuli. It is suppressed by rapidly increasing the plasma phosphate concentration to normal but not influenced by increasing (...) the phosphate concentration in cerebrospinal fluid. The central organization of this genetically programmed behaviour appears to differ from systems subserving thirst and sodium appetite. (shrink)

People often choose intuitive rather than equally valid nonintuitive alternatives. The authors suggest that these intuitive biases arise because intuitions often spring to mind with subjective ease, and the subjective ease leads people to hold their intuitions with high confidence. An investigation of predictions against point spreads found that people predicted intuitive options more often than equally valid nonintuitive alternatives. Critically, though, this effect was largely determined by people's confidence in their intuitions. Across naturalistic, expert, and laboratory samples, against personally (...) determined point spreads, and even when intuitive confidence was manipulated by altering irrelevant aspects of the decision context, the authors found that decreasing intuitive confidence reduced or eliminated intuitive biases. These findings indicate that intuitive biases are not inevitable but rather predictably determined by contextual variables that affect intuitive confidence. (shrink)

Speculations about the role of consciousness in physical systems are frequently observed in the literature concerned with the interpretation of quantum mechanics. While only three experimental investigations can be found on this topic in physics journals, more than 800 relevant experiments have been reported in the literature of parapsychology. A well-defined body of empirical evidence from this domain was reviewed using meta-analytic techniques to assess methodological quality and overall effect size. Results showed effects conforming to chance expectation in control conditions (...) and unequivocal non-chance effects in experimental conditions. This quantitative literature review agrees with the findings of two earlier reviews, suggesting the existence of some form of consciousness-related anomaly in random physical systems. (shrink)

Searching for information is critical in many situations. In medicine, for instance, careful choice of a diagnostic test can help narrow down the range of plausible diseases that the patient might have. In a probabilistic framework, test selection is often modeled by assuming that people's goal is to reduce uncertainty about possible states of the world. In cognitive science, psychology, and medical decision making, Shannon entropy is the most prominent and most widely used model to formalize probabilistic uncertainty and the (...) reduction thereof. However, a variety of alternative entropy metrics (Hartley, Quadratic, Tsallis, Rényi, and more) are popular in the social and the natural sciences, computer science, and philosophy of science. Particular entropy measures have been predominant in particular research areas, and it is often an open issue whether these divergences emerge from different theoretical and practical goals or are merely due to historical accident. Cutting across disciplinary boundaries, we show that several entropy and entropy reduction measures arise as special cases in a unified formalism, the Sharma–Mittal framework. Using mathematical results, computer simulations, and analyses of published behavioral data, we discuss four key questions: How do various entropy models relate to each other? What insights can be obtained by considering diverse entropy models within a unified framework? What is the psychological plausibility of different entropy models? What new questions and insights for research on human information acquisition follow? Our work provides several new pathways for theoretical and empirical research, reconciling apparently conflicting approaches and empirical findings within a comprehensive and unified information-theoretic formalism. (shrink)

Psychiatry has witnessed a new wave of approaches to clinical phenotyping and the study of psychopathology, including the National Institute of Mental Health’s Research Domain Criteria, clinical staging, network approaches, the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology, and the general psychopathology factor, as well as a revival of interest in phenomenological psychopathology. The question naturally emerges as to what the relationship between these new approaches is – are they mutually exclusive, competing approaches, or can they be integrated in some way and used (...) to enrich each other? In this opinion piece, we propose a possible integration between clinical staging and phenomenological psychopathology. Domains identified in phenomenological psychopathology, such as selfhood, embodiment, affectivity, etc., can be overlaid on clinical stages in order to enrich and deepen the phenotypes captured in clinical staging (‘high resolution’ clinical phenotypes). This approach may be useful both ideographically and nomothetically, in that it could complement diagnosis, enrich clinical formulation, and inform treatment of individual patients, as well as help guide aetiological, prediction, and treatment research. The overlaying of phenomenological domains on clinical stages may require that these domains are reformulated in dimensional rather than categorial terms. This integrative project requires assessment tools, some of which are already available, that are sensitive and thorough enough to pick up on the range of relevant psychopathology. The proposed approach offers opportunities for mutual enrichment: clinical staging may be enriched by introducing greater depth to phenotypes; phenomenological psychopathology may be enriched by introducing stages of severity and disorder progression to phenomenological analysis. (shrink)

Integrins are ubiquitous trans‐membrane adhesion molecules that mediate the interaction of cells with the extracellular matrix (ECM). Integrins link cells to the ECM by interacting with the cell cytoskeleton. In cases such as leukocyte binding, integrins mediate cell‐cell interactions and cell‐ECM interactions. Recent research indicates that integrins also function as signal transduction receptors, triggering a number of intracellular signaling pathways that regulate cell behavior and development. A number of integrins are known to stimulate changes in intracellular calcium levels, resulting in (...) integrin activation. Although changes in intracellular calcium regulate a vast number of cellular functions, this review will discuss the stimulation of calcium signaling by integrins and the role of intracellular calcium in the regulation of integrin‐mediated adhesion. (shrink)

We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by both molecular states and ecological states as well as the more obvious nucleic acid coding; this information processing has one overall function—to perpetuate itself; and the processing method is filtration of, and synthesis of, information at lower levels to appear at higher levels in complex (...) systems . We show how information patterns, are united by the creation of mutual context, generating persistent consequences, to result in ‘functional information’. This constructive process forms arbitrarily large complexes of information, the combined effects of which include the functions of life. Molecules and simple organisms have already been measured in terms of functional information content; we show how quantification may be extended to each level of organisation up to the ecological. In terms of a computer analogy, life is both the data and the program and its biochemical structure is the way the information is embodied. This idea supports the seamless integration of life at all scales with the physical universe. The innovation reported here is essentially to integrate these ideas, basing information on the ‘general definition’ of information, rather than simply the statistics of information, thereby explaining how functional information operates throughout life. (shrink)

How research studies should use social media to recruit research participants is a timely question. Importantly, the question is how, not if, studies should use...

Discussion of the ethics of forgoing medically provided nutrition and hydration tends to focus on adults rather than infants and children. Many appellate court decisions address the legal propriety of forgoing medically provided nutritional support of adults, but only a few have ruled on pediatric cases that pose the same issue.The cessation of nutritional support is implemented most commonly for patients in a permanent vegetative state ). An estimated 4,000 to 10,000 American children are in the permanent vegetative state, compared (...) to 10,000 to 25,000 adults. Yet the dearth of literature, case reports, and court decisions suggests that physicians and families of pediatric patients stop medically provided nutrition or seek court orders much less frequently. (shrink)

We argue that concentration of power in religious hospitals threatens disestablishment values. When hospitals deny care for religious reasons, they dominate patients’ bodies and convictions. Health law should — and to some extent already does — constrain such religious domination.

Is human cognition best described by optimal models, or by adaptive but suboptimal heuristic strategies? It is frequently hard to identify which theoretical model is normatively best justified. In the context of information search, naoptimal” models.

These essays exhibit explanation and argument regarding some of the possible answers to these fundamental questions in moral philosophy.

The probabilistic analysis of functional questions is maturing into a rigorous and coherent research paradigm that may unify the cognitive sciences, from the study of single neurons in the brain to the study of high level cognitive processes and distributed cognition. Endless debates about undecidable structural issues (modularity vs. interactivity, serial vs. parallel processing, iconic vs. propositional representations, symbolic vs. connectionist models) may be put aside in favor of a rigorous understanding of the problems solved by organisms in their natural (...) environments. [Shepard; Tenenbaum & Griffiths]. (shrink)

There are many important methodological decisions that need to be made when examining emotional reactivity in psychopathology. In the present study, we examined the effects of two such decisions in an investigation of emotional reactivity in depression: (1) which (if any) comparison condition to employ; and (2) how to define change. Depressed (N = 69) and control (N = 37) participants viewed emotion-inducing film clips while subjective and facial responses were measured. Emotional reactivity was defined using no comparison condition (i.e., (...) raw scores), baseline comparison condition (i.e., no stimulus presented), and neutral comparison condition (i.e., neutral stimulus presented). Change in emotional reactivity was assessed using four analytic approaches: difference scores, percentage change, residualised change, and ANCOVA. Results differed among the three comparison conditions and among several of the analytic approaches. Overall, our investigation suggests that choosing a comparison condition and the definition of change can significantly influence the presence of group differences in emotional reactivity. Recommendations for studies of emotional reactivity in psychopathology are discussed. (shrink)

As both priest and victim, Christ offered himself through sacrificial actions involving death, entry into the heavenly sanctuary, and cleansing by blood. Hebrews highlights the soteriological, psychological, and social benefits of this sacrifice.