Research ethics is a core component of undergraduate psychology curricula, typically first encountered in introductory textbooks. Previous analyses of introductory textbooks focused on human research ethics. Given growing concerns about animal research—particularly among college students—we analyzed discussions of animal research ethics in 18 introductory psychology textbooks. Our results revealed that while most textbooks address this topic, defenses of animal use and mentions of oversight account for a majority of content, while discussions of ethics were lacking. We discuss implications of these (...) results and suggest improvements for engaging students to think critically about animal research ethics. (shrink)

Greenleaf’s foundational work on servant leadership has evolved considerably over the past 50 years. Servant leadership has been found to have positive outcomes on group and organisational effectiveness. While servant leadership characteristics and outcomes have been measured, is a need to be better understand how servant leaders navigate when they disagree. Using a social and cultural analysis, the conflict between Paul and Barnabas is explored. Social and cultural analysis allows interpreters to understand what the characters in the narrative ‘see and (...) hear.’ The analysis of Acts 15:36–41 yielded three emerging themes related to how these servant leaders navigated conflict: (1) the tension created by conflict, (2) leader maturity and conflict and (3) the effectiveness of servant leadership amid differences. It was found that servant leaders are not immune from conflict, and when two servant leaders disagree it creates tension between the various servant leader behaviours. Furthermore, a leader’s experience and maturity influence their responses to conflict. Lastly, it was found that servant leaders do not allow conflict to derail their mission.Contribution: This article contributes to the body of knowledge on servant leadership by exploring how servant leaders navigate conflict from a biblical perspective. By exploring servant leadership behaviours from a biblical perspective, this article contributes to the interdisciplinary focus of HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, engaging social scientific constructs through a New Testament paradigm. (shrink)

The study of servant leadership has been extensively defined with a list of applicable attributes; however, has limited guidance on implementation of a servant leadership culture within an existing leadership culture. The research gap was addressed through socio-rhetorical analysis using social and cultural texture of the Matthew 20:20-28 pericope. The exegetical analysis revealed five emerging themes applicable to Jesus’ methods of servant leadership implementation. These transitioning themes included: organizational order of change, everyone matters, new identity and values, implementation without compromise, (...) and speak more about the new than the old. (shrink)

C/D box snoRNAs (SNORDs) are an abundantly expressed class of short, non‐coding RNAs that have been long known to perform 2′‐O‐methylation of rRNAs. However, approximately half of human SNORDs have no predictable rRNA targets, and numerous SNORDs have been associated with diseases that show no defects in rRNAs, among them Prader‐Willi syndrome, Duplication 15q syndrome and cancer. This apparent discrepancy has been addressed by recent studies showing that SNORDs can act to regulate pre‐mRNA alternative splicing, mRNA abundance, activate enzymes, and (...) be processed into shorter ncRNAs resembling miRNAs and piRNAs. Furthermore, recent biochemical studies have shown that a given SNORD can form both methylating and non‐methylating ribonucleoprotein complexes, providing an indication of the likely physical basis for such diverse new functions. Thus, SNORDs are more structurally and functionally diverse than previously thought, and their role in gene expression is under‐appreciated. The action of SNORDs in non‐methylating complexes can be substituted with oligonucleotides, allowing devising therapies for diseases like Prader‐Willi syndrome. (shrink)

The sense of touch informs us of the physical properties of our surroundings and is a critical aspect of communication. Before touches are perceived, mechanical signals are transmitted quickly and reliably from the skin's surface to mechano‐electrical transduction channels embedded within specialized sensory neurons. We are just beginning to understand how soft tissues participate in force transmission and how they are deformed. Here, we review empirical and theoretical studies of single molecules and molecular ensembles thought to be involved in mechanotransmission (...) and apply the concepts emerging from this work to the sense of touch. We focus on the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a well‐studied model for touch sensation in which mechanics can be studied on the molecular, cellular, and systems level. Finally, we conclude that force transmission is an emergent property of macromolecular cellular structures that mutually stabilize one another. (shrink)

Memories and Monsters explores the nature of the monstrous or uncanny, and the way psychological trauma relates to memory and narration. This interdisciplinary book works on the borderland between psychology and philosophy, drawing from scholars in both fields who have helped mould the bourgeoning field of relational psychoanalysis and phenomenological and existential psychology. The editors have sought out contributions to this field that speak to the pressing question: how are we to attend to and contend with our monsters? The authors (...) in this volume examine the ways in which we might best relate to our monsters, and how the legacies of ancient traumas and anxieties continue to affect our current stories, memories and everyday practices. Covering such manifestations of the monstrous as racism, crimes against humanity, trauma as portrayed in music and art, and the Holocaust, this book explores the impact the uncanny has on our individual and collective psyches. By focusing on a very specific theme, and one that excites the imagination, Memories and Monsters stokes the flames of an important current movement in relational psychoanalysis. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as professionals in psychology and graduate school students and tutors in the fields of both psychology and philosophy. (shrink)

Calls are increasing for American health care to be organized as a learning health care system, defined by the Institute of Medicine as a health care system “in which knowledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural outgrowth and product of the healthcare delivery process and leads to continual improvement in care.” We applaud this conception, and in this paper, we put forward a new ethics framework for it. No such (...) framework has previously been articulated. The goals of our framework are twofold: to support the transformation to a learning health care system and to help ensure that learning activities carried out within such a system are conducted in an ethically acceptable fashion. (shrink)

Background This paper describes the design, implementation, and process outcomes from three public deliberations held in three tribal communities. Although increasingly used around the globe to address collective challenges, our study is among the first to adapt public deliberation for use with exclusively Indigenous populations. In question was how to design deliberations for tribal communities and whether this adapted model would achieve key deliberative goals and be well received.Methods We adapted democratic deliberation, an approach to stakeholder engagement, for use with (...) three tribal communities to respect tribal values and customs. Public deliberation convenes people from diverse backgrounds in reasoned reflection and dialogue in search of collective solutions. The deliberation planning process and design were informed by frameworks of enclave deliberation and community-based participatory research, which share key egalitarian values. The deliberations were collaboratively designed with tribal leadership and extensive partner input and involvement in the deliberations. Each deliberation posed different, locally relevant questions about genomic research, but used the same deliberation structure and measures to gauge the quality and experience of deliberation.Results A total of 52 individuals participated in the deliberations across all three sites. Deliberants were balanced in gender, spanned decades in age, and were diverse in educational attainment and exposure to health research. Overall, the deliberations were positively evaluated. Participant perceptions and external observer datasets depict three deliberations that offered intensive conversation experiences in which participants learned from one another, reported feeling respected and connected to one another, and endorsed this intensive form of engagement.Conclusion The adapted deliberations achieved key deliberative goals and were generally well received. Limitations of the study are described. (shrink)

Participants in clinical research sometimes view participation as therapy or exaggerate potential benefits, especially in phase I or phase II trials. We conducted this study to discover what methods might improve cancer patients’ understanding of early-phase clinical trials. We randomly assigned 130 cancer patients from three U.S. medical centers who were considering enrollment in a phase I or phase II cancer trial to receive either a multimedia intervention or a National Cancer Institute pamphlet explaining the trial and its purpose. Intervention (...) participants were 32 times more likely to believe that the trial’s purpose was to examine safety and 60 % less likely to believe they would experience long-term benefit or cure. There was no difference in enrollment decision. However, while patients’ understanding of the trial’s purpose improved and expectations of long-term benefit diminished, half the respondents still believed they would experience long-term benefit or cure from participation. Therefore, we conclude that multimedia interventions such as this one may help oncologists to explain the risks and benefits of early-phase cancer trials in a way that patients can more easily understand, helping them to make more informed decisions about participation. But further research into other factors that influence patients’ beliefs about the outcome of enrollment is needed, both to modify the interventions and to determine how malleable patient beliefs are. (shrink)

Dynamic intra-individual variability (IIV) in cardiac vagal control across multiple situations is believed to contribute to adaptive cognition under stress; however, a dearth of research has empirically tested this notion. To this end, we examined 25 U.S. Army Soldiers (all male, Mean Age= 30.73, SD = 7.71) whose high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) was measured during a resting baseline and during three conditions of a shooting task (training, low stress, high stress). Response inhibition was measured as the correct rejection of (...) friendly targets during the low and high stress conditions. We tested the association between the standard deviation of HF-HRV across all four task conditions (IIV in vagal control) and changes in response inhibition between low and high stress. Greater differences in vagal control between conditions (larger IIV) were associated with higher tonic vagal control during rest, and stronger stress-related decreases in response inhibition. These results suggest that flexibility in vagal control is supported by tonic vagal control, but this flexibility also uniquely relates to adaptive cognition under stress. Findings are consistent with neurobehavioral and dynamical systems theories of vagal function. (shrink)

There has been increased interest in the potential of maternal immunisation to protect maternal, fetal, and infant health. Maternal tetanus vaccination is part of routine antenatal care and immunisation campaigns in many countries, and it has played an important part in the reduction of maternal and neonatal tetanus. Additional vaccines that have been recommended for routine maternal immunisation include those for influenza and pertussis, and other vaccines are being developed. Maternal immunisation is controversial since regulators, professionals, and the public are (...) often reluctant to accept pharmaceutical interventions during pregnancy. So far, little attention has been given to the ethics of vaccination during pregnancy. In this Personal View we argue that maternal immunisation should be offered in response to concrete, severe risks of disease for mother and child, and we explain how this requirement of serious risk can be used to guide ethical decision-making about maternal immunisation. (shrink)

Common symptoms of multiple sclerosis include motor impairments of the lower extremities, particularly gait disturbances. Loss of balance and muscle weakness, representing some peripheral effects, have been shown to influence these symptoms, however, the individual role of cortical and subcortical structures in the central nervous system is still to be understood. Assessing [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose uptake in the CNS can assess brain activity and is directly associated with regional neuronal activity. One potential modality to increase cortical excitability and improve motor function in (...) patients with MS is transcranial direct current stimulation. However, tDCS group outcomes may not mirror individual subject responses, which impedes our knowledge of the pathophysiology and management of diseases like MS. Three PwMS randomly received both 3 mA tDCS and SHAM targeting the motor cortex that controls the more-affected leg for 20 min on separate days before walking on a treadmill. The radiotracer, FDG, was injected at minute two of the 20 min walk and the subjects underwent a Positron emission tomography scan immediately after the task. Differences in relative regional metabolism of areas under the tDCS anode and the basal ganglia were calculated and investigated. The results indicated diverse and individualized responses in regions under the anode and consistent increases in some basal ganglia areas. Thus, anodal tDCS targeting the M1 that controls the more-affected leg of PwMS might be capable of affecting remote subcortical regions and modulating the activity of the circuitry connected to these regions. (shrink)

Recent legislation, such as the Patient Self-Determination Act, establishes advance directives as an acceptable procedural means of incorporating patients’ preferences for life-sustaining treatments into their medical care. Advance directives can enhance medical decision making since they provide patients with an opportunity to communicate their preferences before suffering from an acute illness that may preclude their ability to do so.Although patients expect discussions about life-sustaining therapies to be initiated by their physicians, very little is known about what prompts physicians to discuss (...) advance directives with their patients. As in other areas of clinical decision making, there is evidence that patients’ sociodemographic factors influence whether discussions about advance directives occur between patients and their physicians. In one study of persons with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, those who had not had discussions about advance directives with their physicians tended to be non-white, have no prior hospitalization, and were more likely to have been cared for in a health maintenance organization than in a teaching hospital. (shrink)

Recent legislation, such as the Patient Self-Determination Act, establishes advance directives as an acceptable procedural means of incorporating patients’ preferences for life-sustaining treatments into their medical care. Advance directives can enhance medical decision making since they provide patients with an opportunity to communicate their preferences before suffering from an acute illness that may preclude their ability to do so.Although patients expect discussions about life-sustaining therapies to be initiated by their physicians, very little is known about what prompts physicians to discuss (...) advance directives with their patients. As in other areas of clinical decision making, there is evidence that patients’ sociodemographic factors influence whether discussions about advance directives occur between patients and their physicians. In one study of persons with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, those who had not had discussions about advance directives with their physicians tended to be non-white, have no prior hospitalization, and were more likely to have been cared for in a health maintenance organization than in a teaching hospital. (shrink)

Coupledom and notions of intimacy and family formation with one committed partner are hallmarks of family and relationship science. Recent national surveys in the United States and Canada have found that consensually non-monogamous relationships are common, though prevalence of specific types of consensual non-monogamy are unknown. The present research draws on a United States Census based quota sample of single adults to estimate the prevalence of desire for, familiarity with, and engagement in polyamory—a distinct type of consensually non-monogamous relationship where (...) people typically engage in romantic love and sexual intimacy with multiple partners. Results show that 1 out of 6 people desire to engage in polyamory, and 1 out of 9 people have engaged in polyamory at some point during their life. Approximately 1 out of 15 people reported that they knew someone who has been or is currently engaged in polyamory. Among participants who were not personally interested in polyamory, 1 out of 7 indicated that they respect people who engage in polyamory. Few sociodemographic correlates emerged; no differences in prevalence were found based on political affiliation, income, religion, geographic region, or race/ethnicity. Sexual minorities, men, and younger adults reported greater desire to engage in polyamory. Men and people with lower education backgrounds were more likely to have previously engaged in polyamory. Given that emotional and sexual intimacy is an important part of most people’s lives, understanding the varied ways in which people navigate their intimate lives is critical for the fields of relationship, sexuality, and family science. (shrink)

Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational models of language understanding. In this paper, we propose two information-theoretic measures—ambiguity and distinctiveness—derived from a simple model of sentence processing. We test these measures on a set of puns and regular sentences and show that they correlate significantly with human (...) judgments of funniness. Moreover, within a set of puns, the distinctiveness measure distinguishes exceptionally funny puns from mediocre ones. Our work is the first, to our knowledge, to integrate a computational model of general language understanding and humor theory to quantitatively predict humor at a fine-grained level. We present it as an example of a framework for applying models of language processing to understand higher level linguistic and cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

Are the places that superhuman beings purportedly act and dwell randomly or arbitrarily distributed? Inspired by theoretical work in cognitive science of religion, descriptions of superhuman beings were solicited from informants in 20 countries on five continents, resulting in 108 usable descriptions, including information about these beings’ properties, their dwelling location, and whether they were the target of rituals. Whether superhuman beings are the subject of religious and ritual practices appeared to co-vary in relation to both features of physical geography (...) and cognitive factors. Good gods were more likely the focus of religious practices than evil gods, and where the gods are thought to dwell mattered. If either the being was thought to dwell in a dangerous place or a resource rich place, it was more likely to have practices directed at it. (shrink)

Spitale et al. (2024) address a public health ethics question of great importance: How should governments communicate with the public during public health emergencies? The article highlights severa...

If “Big Gods” evolved in part because of their ability to morally regulate groups of people who cannot count on kin or reciprocal altruism to get along, then powerful gods would tend to be good gods. If the mechanism for this cooperation is some kind of fear of supernatural punishment, then we may expect that mighty gods tend to be punishing gods. The present study is a statistical analysis of superhuman being concepts from 20 countries on five continents to explore (...) whether the goodness of a god is related to its mightiness. Gods that looked more like the God of classical theism and gods that were low in anthropomorphism were more likely to be regarded as morally good and to be the target of religious practices. Mighty gods were not, however, especially likely to punish or to be a “high god.”. (shrink)

Calls are increasing for American health care to be organized as a learning health care system, defined by the Institute of Medicine as a health care system “in which knowledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural outgrowth and product of the healthcare delivery process and leads to continual improvement in care.” We applaud this conception, and in this paper, we put forward a new ethics framework for it. No such (...) framework has previously been articulated. The goals of our framework are twofold: to support the transformation to a learning health care system and to help ensure that learning activities carried out within such a system are conducted in an ethically acceptable fashion. (shrink)

Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex is the first book to examine how nonhuman animals are used in war and the military. Animals and War contributes significantly to the fields of social justice, animal rights, and anti-war/peace activist communities. This book also will be read by peace, conflict, social justice, and critical animal studies scholars, students, and practitioners.

ObjectiveTo compare techniques for computing clustering and switching scores in terms of agreement, correlation, and empirical value as predictors of incident cognitive impairment.MethodsWe transcribed animal and letter F fluency recordings on 640 cases of ICI and matched controls from a national epidemiological study, amending each transcription with word timings. We then calculated clustering and switching scores, as well as scores indexing speed of responses, using techniques described in the literature. We evaluated agreement among the techniques with Cohen’s κ and calculated (...) correlations among the scores. After fitting a base model with raw scores, repetitions, and intrusions, we fit a series of Bayesian logistic regression models adding either clustering and switching scores or speed scores, comparing the models in terms of several metrics. We partitioned the ICI cases into acute and progressive cases and repeated the regression analysis for each group.ResultsFor animal fluency, we found that models with speed scores derived using the slope difference algorithm achieved the best values of the Watanabe–Akaike Information Criterion, but with good net reclassification improvement only for the progressive group. For letter fluency, different models excelled for prediction of acute and progressive cases. For acute cases, NRI was best for speed scores derived from a network model, while for progressive cases, the best model used clustering and switching scores derived from the same network model. Combining variables from the best animal and letter F models led to marginal improvements in model fit and NRI only for the all-cases and acute-cases analyses.ConclusionSpeed scores improve a base model for predicting progressive cognitive impairment from animal fluency. Letter fluency scores may provide complementary information. (shrink)

Over two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson suggested the need for a broader legal curriculum. As the twenty-first century begins, the practice of law will increasingly demand interdisciplinary knowledge and collaboration — between those trained in law and a broad range of scientific and technical fields, including engineering, biology, genetics, ethics, and the social sciences. The practice of public health law provides a model for both the substantive integration of law with science, and for the way its practitioners work. In (...) addition, public health law also provides a model for interdisciphuy and integrative teaching. (shrink)

Over two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson suggested the need for a broader legal curriculum. As the twenty-first century begins, the practice of law will increasingly demand interdisciplinary knowledge and collaboration — between those trained in law and a broad range of scientific and technical fields, including engineering, biology, genetics, ethics, and the social sciences. The practice of public health law provides a model for both the substantive integration of law with science, and for the way its practitioners work. In (...) addition, public health law also provides a model for interdisciphuy and integrative teaching. (shrink)

Cultural group selection theorists propose that humans evolved prosocial preferences. These claims revolve largely around the centrality of punishment in cultural groups, which helped to eliminate free riders. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether distinguishing between free-riding as an action, and free riders as entities, undermines or supports this view. I develop three individual-based models of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The first model shows that strong reciprocity removes overt freeriders from a population, and maintains a high rate of (...) cooperation. In the second, I introduce individuals that mimic cooperative preferences, but who defect when they trick opponents into cooperating. I show that strong reciprocity is robust against this strategy, but not because individuals are replaced by strong reciprocators. Finally, I introduce a third strategy, covert mimicry, where some mimics may defect without detection. I draw attention to the problem highlighted in these models, which is that cooperation may be maintained in populations only because freeriders are not presented with the opportunity to defect. I discuss this problem in the context of cultural group selection and the human capacity for innovation, and suggest that hypotheses relying on prosocial preferences for maintaining cooperation require some revision. (shrink)

Mammalian neural cells contain at least two forms of brain spectrin: brain spectrin (240/235) which is located primarily in the axons and presynaptic terminals of neurons, and brain spectrin (240/235E) which is found in the cell bodies, dendrites and postsynaptic terminals of neurones. Brain spectrin (240/235E) is also found in certain glial cell types. Antibodies against red blood cell spectrin detect only brain spectrin (240/235E), while antibodies against brain spectrin isolated from axonal and synaptic membranes detect brain spectrin (240/235). Previous (...) apparent discrepancies in the literature concerning brain spectrin localization at the light microscope level were undoubtedly due to different laboratories detecting distinct brain spectrin subtypes, based on the particular antibody being utilized for immunohistochemistry. In this review we (1) discuss the data supporting the presence of at least two distinct subtypes of mammalian brain spectrin, (2) explain how these results reconcile previous discrepancies concerning the localization of spectrin within neural cells, and (3) suggest the future implications of these findings. (shrink)

In Schmidt's experiments, only properties of actually produced movements systems are measured; in Fitts' experiments, external task parameters are measured too (target size and distance). Thus, the laws contain variables of different natures and cannot be reduced to each other even formally. These difference especially reveals itself in modeling: a model of variability can be simpler if it deals with the performance variables only. On the other hand, modeling Fitts' law, one should take into account not only the human effector (...) system but features of the experimental apparatus as well. These differences have not been sufficiently reflected in Plamondon & Alimi's target article. (shrink)

Classification of the boys in 48 families of three or more brothers according to their Moray House Test (VIQ) scores awarded at age 11±1[fraction one-half] years in 1947–75 confirms the postulated existence of a total of nine male phenotypes for this X-linked trait in the score range <70 to 140 points. The phenotypic means lie close to the sequence 69(8)133. Recombination is shown to occur. An additive effect of three alleles at each of two X-chromosome loci is the most likely (...) simple scheme. An iterative approach matching the observed mixtures of proposed genotypes in the families with probabilities for variable levels of homozygosity, non-crossover/crossover heterozygosity, and maternal meiotic recombination yields a best goodness of fit where this last is 20%. (shrink)

Kinematic properties of reaching movements reflect constraints imposed on the joint angles. Contemporary models present solutions to the redundancy problem by a pseudoinverse procedure (Whitney 1969) or without any inversion (Berkenblit et al. 1986). Feldman & Levin suggest a procedure based on a regular inversion. These procedures are considered as an outcome of a more general approach.