Informed Consent and Dual Purpose Research

The ethical treatment of human participants in psychological research is regulated by both federal guidelines and the ethical standards of the American Psychological Association (APA). Under certain circumstances, however, both APA standards and federal regulations allow for exceptions for informed consent. In spite of the possibility of exception, a number of factors have made it difficult to conduct and publish research that does not incorporate informed consent. The authors consider these factors and propose 2 approaches that may reduce reluctance to consider exceptions to informed consent under appropriate circumstances. First, journals should not rely on informed consent as the only method of screening research for the ethical treatment of human participants. Second, efforts must be made to work with institutional review boards and other units that review psychological research to ensure that their members are aware of the conditions under which informed consent is considered reasonable. Failure to consider ethical research without informed consent may have serious ethical consequences for research

The Arkansas Code and Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org

The United States Supreme Court decided Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc. (“PRO”) in late April, 2020, a case with major implications for those who rely on the Arkansas statutes. The case addressed whether extra materials Georgia includes in its official statutes, the annotations, can be copyrighted, or if they are in the public domain and can be freely distributed without permission. The case pitted two important competing interests against each other: the ability of citizens to freely access the official versions of laws of their state, versus the interests of a third-party publisher in being compensated for its work. Arkansas produces its code in a process which is nearly identical to Georgia’s. Also, like the fact situation in PRO, the organization Public.Resource.Org (“PRO”) maintains a free copy of the Arkansas code on the internet without the State’s permission. This article will examine PRO and look at how the ruling might apply to Arkansas’s own official code

Manner of Death and Willingness to Nullify in a Euthanasia Case

Jurors are subject to many biases that hinder their ability to make objective decisions and nullification may occur when the jury believes the law is unfair or immoral. In a case involving euthanasia, a defendant may not be viewed as having committed a crime if it was done out of mercy and a jury may be more likely to choose to nullify as a result. However, nullification can encourage jurors to make decisions based on their attitudes and subjective interpretations of events. One unexplored potential influence on euthanasia attitudes and the decision to nullify may be the manner of death. It is also unknown how the public views euthanasia when it is performed by a physician compared to a family member or friend. Two studies were performed to fill these gaps. First, opinions of and reactions to 17 different manners of death in euthanasia cases were examined in a sample of the general public. This study found varying ratings of the 17 euthanasia methods, and the methods of “lethal injection”, “bag smother”, and “head smash” were selected for further examination in Study 2. In the second study, participants from the general public acted as mock jurors in a euthanasia case that varies by manner of death, perpetrator, and presence of nullification instructions. The results of Study 2 revealed significant effects of method and perpetrator on sentence, with a case involving a wife and lethal injection receiving the lowest sentences. It was found that jurors were most likely to nullify in a case that provided nullification instructions and involved a wife using lethal injection for euthanasia. This finding suggests that different circumstances of a euthanasia case will affect jurors’ propensity to focus on personal sympathies and interpretations. Limitations and future directions are discussed. Keywords: jury decision-making, jury nullification, euthanasia, manner of death

Analyzing the Language of Food on Social Media

We investigate the predictive power behind the language of food on social media. We collect a corpus of over three million food-related posts from Twitter and demonstrate that many latent population characteristics can be directly predicted from this data: overweight rate, diabetes rate, political leaning, and home geographical location of authors. For all tasks, our language-based models significantly outperform the majority-class baselines. Performance is further improved with more complex natural language processing, such as topic modeling. We analyze which textual features have most predictive power for these datasets, providing insight into the connections between the language of food, geographic locale, and community characteristics. Lastly, we design and implement an online system for real-time query and visualization of the dataset. Visualization tools, such as geo-referenced heatmaps, semantics-preserving wordclouds and temporal histograms, allow us to discover more complex, global patterns mirrored in the language of food.Comment: An extended abstract of this paper will appear in IEEE Big Data 201

Welsh v. United States, The Sixth Circuit Gives a Physics Lesson - For Every Action There is an Equal and Opposite Reaction

This casenote will review the facts of Welsh v. United States and present the current judicial approaches to spoliation of evidence in civil litigation. Second, the note will analyze the Welsh court\u27s proposed solution to the spoliation problem. Finally, the note will discuss the use of the Welsh approach in litigation and management implications for health care facilities

Choice Dynamics in Concurrent Ratio Schedules of Reinforcement

Roughly 50 years of research has demonstrated that choice changes as a function of the amount of reinforcement available from two concurrently available schedules of reinforcement, and this function has been labeled the generalized matching law. The matching law, however, historically only accounts for choice between two variable-interval schedules of reinforcement. If the matching law is to be a general perspective for how organisms allocate behavior amongst several alternatives, then it ought to account for behavior when reinforcers depend on work requirements in addition to time requirements. To study these contexts, the present experiments employed concurrent ratio schedules that were programmed nonindependently. As such, responses to one ratio schedule simultaneously incremented the response counter for both schedules. The probability of reinforcement increased on both schedules as responses were allocated to either schedule. In Experiment 1, response allocation of pigeons was assessed when three lengths of changeover delays (0 s, 2.5 s, and 10 s) were in effect. Experiment 2 compared choice in concurrent variable-ratio and fixed-ratio schedules. Experiment 3 controlled the number of reinforcers delivered to two concurrently-available variable-ratio schedules. When concurrent variable-ratio schedules were in effect, the matching law described choice well in all three experiments. Choice on concurrent fixed-ratio schedules was inconsistent across pigeons. The main variable controlling response allocation in all experiments was the distribution of reinforcement. By controlling the number of reinforcers delivered to each schedule, choice can be brought under precise control even when ratio schedules are in effect. These results support extensions of the generalized matching law to contexts in which reinforcers are contingent on response requirements rather than time requirements

Signaling Changes in Reinforcer Ratios Facilitates Adaptive Forgetting in Pigeons

Forgetting is often characterized as maladaptive, but if a cue no longer signals the consequences of a response, then forgetting the previously learned stimulus-response discrimination is adaptive. Pigeons pecked for food in concurrent schedules of reinforcement. The relative frequency of food delivery on each key changed pseudorandomly across sessions with an overnight break in the middle of each session. New sessions began immediately after the last food delivery in the previous session. When the change from one session to the next was not signaled, responses remained under the control of the previous session\u27s ratio of reinforcement. When the session change was signaled by a change in the color of the keylights, control by the ratio from the previous session was diminished. Without interference from past ratios, sensitivity to the ratio of reinforcement was greater in the signaled than the unsignaled condition. This decrease in sensitivity to past ratios marks an example of adaptive forgetting