The development of effective means to enhance research integrity by universities requires baseline measures of individual, programmatic, and institutional factors known to contribute to ethical decision making and behavior. In the present study, master’s thesis and Ph.D. students in the fields of biological, health and social sciences at a research extensive university completed a field appropriate measure of research ethical decision making and rated the seriousness of the research issue and importance for implementing the selection response. In addition they were (...) asked to rate their perceptions of the institutional and departmental research climate and to complete a measure of utilitarian and formalistic predisposition. Female students were found to be more ethical in their decision making compared to male students. The research ethical decision measure was found to be related to participants’ ethical predisposition and overall perception of organizational and departmental research climate; however, formalism was the only individual predictor to reach statistical significance and none of the individual subscales of the research climate measure were significantly correlated to ethicality. Participants’ ratings of the seriousness of the issue were correlated with their ratings of the importance of carrying out their selected response but neither was significantly predictive of the ethicality of their responses. The implications of these findings for the development of more effective training programs and environments for graduate students in research ethics and integrity are discussed. (shrink)

Training programs, departmental/disciplinary norms, and individual factors have been hypothesized to influence ethical behavior. This exploratory study surveyed graduate students from a single university in the American Southeast. Relationships were examined among 496 participants’ individual characteristics, training, self-rated knowledge and decision-making skills in research conduct, and judgments of ethically questionable vignettes. Key findings include the increased likelihood of unethical action by students in online programs, a negative relationship between age and unethical actions, and a negative relationship between agreeableness and reports (...) that a peer would take an unethical action. Graduate training was unrelated to judgments of ethicality. (shrink)

As practicing clinicians, physicians are expected to uphold the ethical norms of their profession, including fidelity to patients and respect for patients’ self-determination. At the same time, as individuals, physicians are moral agents in their own right and, like their patients, are informed by and committed to diverse cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions and beliefs. In some circumstances, the expectation that physicians will put patients’ needs and preferences first may be in tension with the need to sustain the sense of (...) moral integrity and continuity that grounds a physician’s personal and professional life. This article examines the implications for patients, physicians, and the medical profession when tensions arise between a physician’s professional commitments and his or her deeply held personal moral beliefs. It offers guidance on when a physician’s professional commitments should outweigh personal beliefs as well as when physicians should have freedom to act according to the dictates of conscience while still protecting patients’ interests. (shrink)

Contemporary society needs the recognition of a moral middle ground, where human behavior can be evaluated as permissible, understandable, or even valuable. As a counterforce to polarization and divisive politics, an identity model is proposed in which individual and group identities are transcended by a human and ecological identity.

Comic storyboards that participants co-create can function as generative data collection tools when integrated into interviews or focus groups in a qualitative-rhetorical study. As a preliminary stage of a study, user testing comic storyboards can help ensure that they are generative and participant-informed, the latter being especially important when researching issues related to participant vulnerability, such as stigma. This article discusses the exigency, user testing, adaptation, and affordances of comic storyboards as data collection or story elicitation tools in a study (...) of provider-enacted HIV stigma. Our user testing of comics storyboards enabled us to implement more responsive, participant-centered, and participatory forms of data collection. Given that the goal of this study is to develop anti-stigma provider training materials in the form of comics, participants’ contributions through user testing not only helped us improve our data collection in the main study, but also generated input that informed our conceptualization and drafting of provider training comics. (shrink)

Life as a complicated process is composed of causal phenomena. But even if we know the reasons of all that happens in a living organism, we do not know what life really is. The problem of intercausal relation, of “causal structure” remains. The reason why a process takes place, must be found by analysis, causal structures are found by synthesis of the results of this analysis. Causal structures are characterized by two kinds of equilibrium: energetic and specific equilibrium. A state (...) of physical equilibrium is characterized by a minimum of free energy; a biological energetic equilibrium is an organized one, where the vital factors activate the production of energy by each other and force each other to limit that production to the necessary measure. A specific equilibrium is characterized by the properties of its factors, properties by which those factors act as a cause after having received a specific stimulation. Every factor possesses two specific properties, in accordance with the properties of two neighbouring factors, as a link between two other links in a chain . Both forms of equilibrium authorise us to speak of living systems as a “whole”. In the second part of this paper we treat the dynamic aspect of the functions of living systems as a “whole”. This dynamic aspect manifests itself in growth and probably in cortical functions. Blastomeres represent, when isolated, the “whole” of growing potentialities of a germe. In normal contact with each other they restrict themselves to produce a part of that “whole”, in harmony with that which other blastomeres produce. This harmonious restriction can be explained by interaction between all the blastomeres by which every blastomere suppresses in other blastomeres all that it will produce itself. Blastomeres must therefore act on other blastomees not according to their isolate “being”, but according to the influences which they undergo by all other blastomeres, that means according to their “rôle”. There must be a causal net of interaction between all the blastomeres and that net “as a whole” determines every step of growth. Such a net of relation determines also human history and sociology. Materialism only took account of isolated causes, vitalism only of the effect of the net of causal relations without understanding that such a net might be analysed. In reality there is neither materialism nor vitalism.La vie est un phénomène complexe, se composant de différents phénomènes causals, qui un jour peut-être seront réduits à la causalité physique et chimique. Cependant connaitre toutes les causes des phénomènes vitaux ne signifie pas connaître la vie. Le problème de la vie ne se borne pas aux rapports causals, mais implique surtout les rapports intercausals, c'est à dire l'harmonie ou l'équilibre de ses parties constituantes. La vie comme phénomène est provoquée par une „structure causale”. Tandis que les causes sont trouvées par l'analyse, les rapports intercausals doivent être recherchés par la synthèse, c'est-à-dire par la réconstruction de la réalité de l'organisme vivant en se servant des données analytiques. Le système vivant est en équilibre énergétique et spécifique. Les facteurs énergétiques sont interlacés de telle façon, qu'ils s'activent entre eux et qu'ils se forcent entre eux à se resteindre au développement de l'énergie nécessaire. Un équilibre physique c'est l'état d'énergie libre minimum, tandis que l'équilibre biologique c'est un état d'énergie organisée. Dans un équilibre spécifique on ne peut se borner aux effects causals se manifestant par un phénomène. Il faut décrire les rapports des propriétés spécifiques de tous les facteurs; ce sont ces propriétés qui leur permettent d'agir comme cause, lorsqu'-ils sont atteint d'une excitation spécifique. Les facteurs possèdent au moins deux propriétés spécifiques, adaptées à deux facteurs voisins, comme chaque anneau d'une chaine s'adaptant à deux anneaux voisins . Le fait que l'on trouve dans chaque individu ces deux formes d'équilibre nous donne le droit de créer le concept du „tout” par rapport auquel on peut constater l'harmonie de tous les tacteurs.C'est là le „tout statique”, reste encore le „tout dynamique” qui se manifeste par la croissance et probablement par les phénomènes se produisant dans l'écorce cérébrale, base des actes psychiques. Les parties représentent beaucoup de possibilités qui ne se réalisent pas; p.e. les blastomères peuvent représenter le „tout” de l'organisme, tandis qu'ils se borneront dans la croissance normale à la production d'une part de l'individu. Il y a une interaction entre tous les blastomères, de façon que, par la suppression ou par l'activation mutuelle, chaque partie réalise ce que lui laissent les autres et ce qui est en harmonie avec ce que produiront les autres. De cette façon il y aura de l'harmonie dans tout ce qui sera produit. Les parties agissent par cette interaction, non selon leur „être”, en tant que cellule isolée, mais selon leur „rôle” dans le „tout” du germe, rôle qui est déterminé par cette interaction mutuelle universelle. C'est cette interaction qui détermine le „patron causal”, responsable de chaque étappe de la coissance. Ainsi ce ne sont pas les facteus isolés, mais le réseau des rapports établis entre tous les facteurs, qui gouvernent les phénomènes de la croissance. Ce réseau, par activation ou par suppression, détermine à chaque instant les propriétés causales des parties, d'entre toutes les multiples possibilités. Les possibilités étant données dans les cellules, c'est le „tout” du réseau des rapports qui détermine la croissance. Le matérialisme n'a vu que les causes isolées, telles qu'ellés se manifestent dans les expériences des physiciens, grâce à la technique; le vitalisme n'a vu que le „tout”, sans tâcher de l'analyser afin de trouver à sa base le système causal compliqué, que nous avons tâché de décrire. Dans la réalité la théorie du causalisme ni celle du vitalisme le tiennent plus de bout. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Life and Publications Naturalism, Creative Imagination, and Pragmatism America Conclusion.

Society in the Self: A Theory of Identity in Democracy shows how society is working in the deeper regions of self and identity. This book is an exploration of the democratic potentials of self and identity in a globalizing and localizing society.

Includes chapters that address the selection of disciplines and thinkers that are grouped into: religious thought; individual thinkers in the narrative tradition, and two noteworthy themes in the area of business thought (specifically, management and organizational behaviour).

This essay argues that medical and health humanists interested in the rhetorical work of publics can extend their research by attending to embodiment and infrastructure. In addition to discussing how such strategies are illustrated in the essays appearing in this special issue, I relate them to the rhetorical study of personal health records (PHRs) as described in consumer-directed arguments. I conclude by posing two questions to health and medical humanists: “How do discursive constructions of publics and more specific instantiations of (...) embodied experiences mutually shape each other?” and “What do the infrastructures of health and medical users look like and involve in their enactment?”. (shrink)

Recent empirical work indicates that reduced autobiographical memory specificity can act as an avoidant processing style. By truncating the memory search before specific elements of traumatic memories are accessed, one can ward off the affective impact of negative reminiscences. This avoidant processing style can be viewed as an instance of what Erdelyi describes as the “subtractive” class of repressive processes.

Caplan & Waters's neuropsychological evidence for two types of verbal working memory rests entirely on a very restricted definition of “syntactic complexity,” one in terms of word order. This opens the possibility that the dissociation they observe relates to the differential use of word-order strategies rather than to the structure of verbal working memory.

Herman J. Saatkamp’s _A Life of Scholarship with Santayana: Essays and Reflections_ gathers together his work of a lifetime. There are twenty-three pieces, in three sections: “Santayana and Philosophy,” “Editorship,” and “Genetic Concerns and the Future of Philosophy.”.

The press environment created by abrupt transitions from government dominance to independence has created difficult ethical dilemmas for editors and publishers. Pursuit of earnings - without which a free marketplace of ideas is impossible - has forced leaders of media enterprises to make painful choices about employment, privacy, career training, distribution, pornography, and subsidy. Winnowing out the weak and inefficient is seen as both healthy and creative. Consensus on ethical guidelines will not come quickly. Political and economic changes occur more (...) rapidly than cultural ones. In all free countries, press management involves a delicate balancing of cultural and economic imperatives. In newly free countries achieving that balance is particularly difficult. (shrink)

Grodzinsky's theory of agrammatic sentence processing fails to account for crucial empirical facts. In contrast to his predictions, the data show that there are (1) degrees of severity and (2) problems with sentences that do not require movement, and that (3) under the right task circumstances, full-fledged syntactic trees are constructed.