Despite evidence in college students indicating a hunger for spiritual insight and spirituality’s application in health care, there continues to be guardedness within the academy towards inclusion of curricula that address spirituality. The purpose of this article is to examine the ethical considerations of teaching spirituality in the academy by describing current trends, issues relevant to nursing education and practice, legitimate concerns of the academy, and the importance of an ethical instructional response when teaching about spirituality. Data supporting the interest (...) and desire by students to explore meaning and purpose in the context of spirituality will be presented. Challenges and barriers inherent in teaching this topic will be described, including the affective response, the lack of a universally accepted definition of spirituality, and spirituality’s relationship to religion. Pedagogical strategies consistent with an ethical instructional response will be discussed as the key to eliciting trust within the academy. A model of teaching spirituality and health will be offered to illustrate these possibilities. (shrink)

Researchers studying depression often encounter research participants in serious preexisting distress. Examining investigators' ethical responsibilities to these subjects, Stanton and New found that depression researchers reported actions that ranged from doing nothing to contacting both the distressed subject and a significant other. By experimentally manipulating consent form information regarding potential treatment referral, we examined whether subjects adjusted their responses on depression measures as a function of the level of follow-up they expected to receive. Results reveal that subjects who potentially could (...) receive the most intrusive intervention were less likely to report depressive symptoms than were subjects who anticipated less intrusive follow-up. Willingness to report depressive symptoms in particular conditions varied in part as a function of subject sex. Thus, ethical safeguards used in studies with subjects in preexisting distress may have consequences for the validity of self-report depression measures. (shrink)

Research examining the possible effects of deceptive research participation on participants' perceptions of psychology has yielded equivocal results. The present study's goal was to clarify the possible effects of participation in mildly deceptive research on participants' impressions of scientific and applied psychology. Participants (N = 112) were randomly assigned to one of six experimental conditions: active groups receiving negative, positive, or no feedback, or passive groups receiving negative, positive, or no feedback. Following participation, participants completed measures of impressions of psychotherapy (...) and psychotherapists, researchers, and instructors. The manipulation did not affect attitudes toward psychology on any of the dependent measures, although gender effects resulted on one measure. Participants in general reported very positive attitudes toward the science and practice of psychology. Recommendations are offered for future research on the effects of more extensive deceptions. (shrink)

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

James is a seventy‐two‐year‐old man with end‐stage dementia who was transferred from another hospital. At the time of transfer James had sepsis from two multidrug‐resistant organisms, respiratory failure requiring ventilatory support, renal insufficiency, pancytopenia, and hypotension requiring vasopressors. He has severe contractures and foot drop, has a feeding tube, and has been nonverbal for several months. His son, Paul, is requesting full code and treatment focused on recovery despite James's extremely poor prognosis.Paul is James's only child, and James's wife is (...) deceased. Paul says he has the “gift of prophecy” and knows for certain when God is speaking to him. “God,” he says, “doesn't lie.” He says that he and his father spent years preaching together and have witnessed many healings. He believes that they are being “rebuked” because at a time when his father was too tired to travel much, they held fewer revivals and did not save enough souls.James's condition has worsened slowly. He has almost no urine output and does not breathe over the ventilator. He is extremely volume overloaded; his toenails have bloodied and popped off. By hospital‐day twenty‐one, he had only corneal reflexes. The medical team is troubled; if James is to stay on the ventilator, he will need a tracheostomy, but this would only further prolong what has already been an agonizingly prolonged dying process.Paul continues to pray for his father to get up. (shrink)

An informed consent and voluntary assent in biomedical research with adolescents is contingent on a variety of factors, including adolescent and parent perceptions of research risk, benefit, and decision-making autonomy. Thirty-seven adolescents with asthma and their parents evaluated a high or low aversion form of a pediatric asthma research vignette and provided an enrollment decision; their perceptions of family influence over the participation decision; and evaluations of risk, aversion, benefit, and burden of study procedures. Adolescents and their parents agreed on (...) research participation decisions 74% of the time, yet both claimed ultimate responsibility for the participation decision. Both rated most study procedures as significantly more aversive than risky. Parents were more likely to rate aspects of the hypothetical study as beneficial and to provide higher risk ratings for procedures. Disagreements concerning research participation decisions and decision-making autonomy have implications for the exercise of voluntary assent in biomedical research. (shrink)

Unlike nonhuman primates, thousands of bird species have articulatory capabilities that equal or surpass those of humans, and they develop their vocalizations through vocal imitation in a way that is very similar to how human infants learn to speak. An understanding of how speech mechanisms have evolved is therefore unlikely to yield key insights into how the human brain is special.

Evolutionary theory makes further predictions about conflict. It predicts sex differences in the proclivity to attack and defend. It further suggests complementary biases in what we expect of the sexes. Finally, it suggests that the forms of human facial expressions of anger and happiness may have coevolved with the regularity of conflict as a means of signaling, bluffing, and defusing attack.

The increasing use of pharmacotherapy raises specific ethical concerns for psychologists working with vulnerable populations. Due to a shortage of trained specialists, professionals without training in mental health, such as primary care providers, are increasingly prescribing and monitoring psychotropic medications. Vulnerable populations face additional barriers to mental health treatment and are at heightened risk when these factors intersect. Hence, these patients experience unique barriers to receiving optimal psychopharmacological care and are differentially vulnerable to deleterious outcomes associated with misdiagnosis and overmedication. (...) Taken together, these factors fuel inequities in the access, quality, and utilization of mental health care. Psychologists working with these patients are ethically mandated to protect patients from harm and ensure equitable care across patient populations. Specifically, psychologists must respond to the dilemma of how to effectively treat patients within these vulnerable populations who have been misdiagnosed or poorly medicated while remaining within the bounds of their competence. This article recommends pathways to address these dilemmas through education, training, research, and advocacy. (shrink)

The nature–nurture controversy has been with us since it was first outlined by Plato and Aristotle. Nobody likes it anymore. All reasonable scholars today agree that genes and environment interact to determine complex cognitive outcomes. So why does the controversy persist? First, it persists because it has practical implications that cannot be postponed (i.e., what can we do to avoid bad outcomes and insure better ones?), a state of emergency that sometimes tempts scholars to stake out claims they cannot defend. (...) Second, the controversy persists because we lack a precise, testable theory of the process by which genes and the environment interact. In the absence of a better theory, innateness is often confused with (1) domain specificity (outcome X is so peculiar that it must be innate), (2) species specificity (we are the only species who do X, so X must lie in the human genome), (3) localization (outcome X is mediated by a particular part of the brain, so X must be innate), and (4) learnability (we cannot figure out how X could be learned, so X must be innate). We believe that an explicit, plausible theory of interaction is now around the corner, and that many of the classic maneuvers to defend or attack innateness will soon disappear. In the interim, some serious errors can be avoided if we keep these confounded issues apart. That is the major goal of this chapter: not to attack innateness but to clarify what claims about innateness are (and are not) about. (shrink)

Here a distinguished American historian challenges the belief that the eighteenth century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks (...) at the book’s continuing relevance within the context of current discussion about the Enlightenment. “Will remain a classic—a beautifully finished literary product.”—Charles A. Beard, _American Historical Review_ “_The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers _remains_ _one of the most distinctive American contributions to the historical literature on the Enlightenment.... [It] is likely to beguile and provoke readers for a long time to come.”—Johnson Kent Wright, from the foreword. (shrink)

The radical nub of Byrne & Russon's argument is that passive priming effects can produce much of the evidence of higher-order cognition in nonhuman primates. In support of their position we review evidence of similar behavioral priming effects n humans. However, that evidence further suggests that even program-level imitative behavior can be produced through priming.