Watch a three-year-old play. As she enacts Ariel and Barbie’s judo match over which will marry Prince, or trudges through the living room scolding a pink polka-dotted bunny in a stroller, or explains to you that four-foot-tall Dora is in time out because she’s been hitting the other kids with a hammer—well, you may be laughing, but chances are she’s not. When you’re three, play is a serious, cathartic process aimed at sorting out and bringing under tenuous control the often (...) overwhelming emotional cues thrown at you each day. Children tease out what scares them—say, jealousy, or blame, or violent anger—and nail it down in particular scenarios that allow them to follow a feeling to its natural conclusions .. (shrink)

Working at The Hastings Center has been a tremendous professional stepping stone for me. I have long wanted to work in publishing, and I'm leaving the Center to work for America's oldest publisher, John Wiley and Sons. But I feel that my time here has been more than that‐that it has truly continued my education in ways I could not have anticipated. Thank you for letting me be part of your intellectual lives.

In Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective, Joyce Slochower brings a contemporary relational framework to bear on Winnicott's notion of the analytic holding environment. She presents a fresh, thought-provoking, and clinically useful integration of Winnicott's seminal insights with contemporary relational and feminist/psychoanalytic contributions. Seeking to broaden the concept of holding beyond work with severely regressed patients, she addresses holding in a variety of clinical contexts and focuses especially on holding processes in relation to issues of dependence, self-involvement, and hate. (...) She also considers clinical work with patients "on the edge" - patients who seem deperately to need a holding experience that remains paradoxically elusive. Slochower begins her study by questioning the therapeutic limitations of an interactive style. There are times, she proposes, when certain patients simply cannot tolerate evidence of the analyst's separate subjective presence and instead need a holding experience. Though this holding function is essential to work with difficult patients, it enters into the treatment of all patients, whether as figure or ground. Slochower's relational understanding of holding leads her to consider the impact of holding on patient and analyst alike. Throughout, she emphasizes the analyst's and the patient's co-construction, during moments of holding, of an essential illusion of analytic attunement; this illusion serves to protect the patient from potentially disruptive aspects of the analyst's subjective presence. Slochower's case vignettes helpfully illuminate the intersubjective aspects of the holding process, including the clinical picture when a holding frame fails. She elaborates her thesis by considering the therapeutic function of holding in mourning. And she concludes her study with a cogent examination of the theoretical and clinical limitations of working with a holding process. A welcome reprise on an essential Winnicottian theme, Holding and Psychoanalysis broadens and deepens our understanding of the therapeutic role of the analyst's holding function. (shrink)

Researchers and practitioners have devoted considerable attention to firms'' policies regarding discretionary disclosures. Prior studies argue that firms increase demand for their debt and equity issues and, thus, lower their cost of capital, by providing more informative disclosures. However, empirical research has generally not been able to document significant benefits from increased disclosure.This paper proposes an alternative explanation – firms disclose because it is the socially responsible thing to do. We argue that companies have incentives to engage in stakeholder management (...) by undertaking socially responsible activities and that providing extensive and informative disclosures is one such practice.We examine the relationship between firms'' disclosures and measures of social responsibility. We use ratings provided by the Council on Economic Priorities as proxies for the degree of social responsibility adopted by the sample firms. Disclosure rankings provided by the annual Association for Investment Management and Research Corporate Information Committee Reports (AIMR Reports) are used to measure disclosure level.Our results indicate that there is a positive relationship between disclosure level and corporate social responsibility. That is, firms that engage in socially responsive activities provide more informative and/or extensive disclosures than do companies that are less focused on advancing social goals. In addition, we find that socially responsible firms are more likely to provide this increased disclosure through better investor relations practices. These results support our contention that increased disclosure is a form of socially responsible behavior. (shrink)

Theoretical methods for empirical state determination of entangled two-level systems are analyzed in relation to information theory. We show that hidden variable theories would lead to a Shannon index of correlation between the entangled subsystems which is larger than that predicted by quantum mechanics. Canonical representations which have maximal correlations are treated by the use of Schmidt and Hilbert-Schmidt decomposition of the entangled states, including especially the Bohm singlet state and the GHZ entangled states. We show that quantum mechanics does (...) not violate locality, but does violate realism. (shrink)

Describes 100 real-life ethical dilemmas faced by school administrators.

The adoption of web-based telecare services has raised multifarious ethical concerns, but a traditional principle-based approach provides limited insight into how these concerns might be addressed and what, if anything, makes them problematic. We take an alternative approach, diagnosing some of the main concerns as arising from a core phenomenon of shifting trust relations that come about when the physician plays a less central role in the delivery of care, and new actors and entities are introduced. Correspondingly, we propose an (...) applied ethics of trust based on the idea that patients should be provided with good reasons to trust telecare services, which we call sound trust. On the basis of this approach, we propose several concrete strategies for safeguarding sound trust in telecare. (shrink)

Disruptions in theory of mind faculties and the ability to relate to an intersubjective reality are widely thought to be crucial to schizophrenic symptomology. This paper applies a cognitive linguistic framework to analyze spontaneous perspective-taking in two corpora of stories told by people with a schizophrenia diagnosis. We elicited natural narrative language use through life story interviews and a guided storytelling task and analyzed the linguistic construal of viewpoint in these stories. For this analysis, we developed a reliable and widely (...) applicable viewpoint model that allows for the categorization and quantification of speakers’ linguistic presentation and navigation of spatiotemporal domains. We found that our participants skillfully presented, navigated and embedded different narrative viewpoints through a variety of linguistic viewpoint devices. They presented complex viewpoints of other people in both the here-and-now of the interaction and the there-and-then of a narrative, and made use of transition markers to demarcate spatiotemporal discourse domains. We found no differences in viewpoint variables when comparing their guided stories to a control group. If problems with intersubjectivity are indeed an essential part of schizophrenia, an explanation of how this group can take on and navigate complex linguistic viewpoints in natural narrative interaction is called for. (shrink)

Although ever-increasing numbers of women in the United States have been choosing small-business ownership in an apparent attempt to escape their well-documented inequality in the labor market, in this country, small businesses owned by women tend to be less successful than those owned by men. This article brings together the scattered pieces of data available in order to shed light on women's inability to gain greater parity with men in the small-business arena in the United States. Analysis suggests that U.S. (...) women's influx into small capitalism results from their movement into expanding, but highly competitive, industrial niches that are relatively unattractive to men. The authors find that these woman-owned businesses are concentrated within traditionally female-typed fields with lower average business receipts than male-typed fields. Moreover, even within the same industrial subcategories, women owners achieve less economic success than men owners. Although some of the immediate barriers faced by U.S. women in the small-business arena-such as lack of access to capital and government contracts-differ from those that confront women employees, the underlying causes are similar. The authors' discussion suggests that women in the United States carry their labor market disadvantage with them to the small-business sphere, where it is compounded by new manifestations of the same institutional barriers. (shrink)

For the 17 centuries since Hippocrates called for “the most desperate remedies in desperate cases,” physicians have adhered steadfastly to two cooperative goals: to prolong life and to relieve suffering. ut during the past 50 years, mechanical interventions at the edge of life have thrown those aims into dramatic conflict. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation, mechanical ventilation, feeding tubes, and the intensive care unit have postponed physiologic death for many patients who are anencephalic, comatose, or in a persistent vegetative state or prefer death (...) to a life of suffering and pain. Demands from patients' families and cries for social justice have compelled physicians, hospital personnel, and the Supreme Court to analyze concepts long reserved for university philosophers. Although decisions are made daily to withhold and withdraw life support, society is gradually agreeing upon an ethical framework that balances hopeful science with dignified death. This article outlines that ethical framework, reviews recent legal precedents, and suggests practical guidelines for their application. (shrink)

The canon, this full Christian-Torah story, is the paradigm God has given us so that we too can conjugate the verbs of his activity today and know his participation in our lives now.

In The Myth of Morality, Richard Joyce argues that moral discourse is hopelessly flawed. At the heart of ordinary moral judgements is a notion of moral inescapability, or practical authority, which, upon investigation, cannot be reasonably defended. Joyce argues that natural selection is to blame, in that it has provided us with a tendency to invest the world with values that it does not contain, and demands that it does not make. Should we therefore do away with morality, (...) as we did away with other faulty notions such as witches? Possibly not. We may be able to carry on with morality as a 'useful fiction' - allowing it to have a regulative influence on our lives and decisions, perhaps even playing a central role - while not committing ourselves to believing or asserting falsehoods, and thus not being subject to accusations of 'error'. (shrink)

God is one, his gifts many. The Bible has within it a breadth which only the hermeneutics of prophetic critique can reveal.

Lindquist et al. convincingly argue that the brain implements psychological operations that are constitutive of emotion rather than modules subserving discrete emotions. However, thenatureof such psychological operations is open to debate. I argue that considering appraisal theories may provide alternative interpretations of the neuroimaging data with respect to the psychological operations involved.

Marion Lee Sanders,1 Anthony James Langone2 1Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, 2Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA: Transplantation is the preferred treatment option for individuals with end-stage renal disease. Individuals who undergo transplantation must chronically be maintained on an immunosuppression regimen for rejection prophylaxis to help ensure graft survival. Current rejection prophylaxis consists of using a combination of calcineurin inhibitors, mTOR inhibitors, (...) antimetabolite agents, and/or corticosteroids. These agents have collectively improved the short-term outcomes of renal transplantation, but improvements in late/chronic graft loss and recipient survival have lagged significantly behind challenging the field of transplantation to develop novel prophylactic agents. There have been several clinical trials conducted within the last 5 years in an attempt to bring such novel agents to the commercial market. These trials have resulted in the US Food and Drug Administration approval of extended-release tacrolimus, as well as belatacept, which has the potential to replace calcineurin inhibitors for rejection prophylaxis. Other trials have focused on the development of novel calcineurin inhibitors, costimulation blockade, kinase inhibitors, and inhibitors of leukocyte migration. While these later agents have not been FDA-approved for use in transplantation, they remain noteworthy, as these agents explore pathways not previously targeted for allograft-rejection prophylaxis. The purpose of this review was to consolidate available clinical trial data with regard to the recent developments in rejection prophylaxis in kidney transplantation. Keywords: rejection, prophylaxis, immunosuppression, transplantation. (shrink)