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Background: In patients with clinically isolated syndromes (CIS) suggestive of multiple sclerosis (MS), the extent of brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) lesion load influences the probability and time to development [...]

This paper explores the notion that people who believe in psychic ability possess various psychological attributes that increase the likelihood of them misattributing paranormal causation to experiences that have a normal explanation. The paper discusses the structure and measurement of belief in psychic ability, then reviews the considerable body of work exploring the relationship between belief in psychic ability, and academic performance, intelligence, critical thinking, probability misjudgement and reasoning, measures of fantasy proneness and the propensity to find correspondences in distantly related material. Finally, the paper proposes several possible directions for future research, including: the need to build a multi-causal model of belief; to address the issue of correlation versus causation; to resolve the inconsistent pattern of findings present in many areas; and to develop a more valid, reliable and fine-grained measure of belief in psychic ability., Surveys suggest that approximately 50% of Americans believe in the existence of extrasensory perception (e.g. Newport & Strausberg, 2001), and that similar levels of belief exist throughout much of Western [...]

The first author, a proponent of evidence for psychic ability, and the second, a sceptic, have been conducting a systematic programme of collaborative sceptic-proponent research in parapsychology. This has involved carrying out joint experiments in which each investigator individually attempted to mentally influence the electrodermal activity of participants at a distant location. The first two collaborations obtained evidence of 'experimenter effects', that is, experiments conducted by the proponent obtained significant results but those conducted by the sceptic did not. This paper describes a new collaborative study that attempted to replicate our previous findings and explore potential explanations for past results. The new study failed to replicate our previous findings. The paper investigates whether the results obtained in our initial studies may have been caused by a genuine psychic effect, and this third experiment failed to replicate this finding because some aspect of the study disrupted the production of that effect, or whether the results from our first two studies represented chance findings or undetected subtle artifacts, and the results obtained in the present study accurately reflect the absence of a remote detection of staring effect. The implications of this work are discussed, along with the benefits of conducting collaborative work for resolving disagreements in other controversial areas of psychology., For well over a hundred years scientists have explored the possible existence of psychic ability (Edge, Morris, Palmer, & Rush, 1986). This work has generated considerable controversy, with proponents arguing [...]

This paper attempts to explore the human factors and systems dynamics of human+machine interaction by reference to the Kegworth aircraft accident. The paper seeks to move beyond the more traditional human factors literature to include research findings from both systems research and crisis management in an attempt to examine the relationships between active and latent failures. The role of human error within complex technical systems is explored and particular emphasis is placed upon the dynamics of latent errors within the management of such systems. The main thesis developed here is that, while there are important cognitive processes at work within accident causation, attention needs to be moved away from the level of the operator to the wider managerial and social frameworks within which individuals work. Copyright [C] 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords Kegworth air crash; organizational resilience; sense making; crisis management, INTRODUCTION The study of human reliability is to a large extent motivated by the need to prevent unwanted consequences from erroneous actions -- in other words to prevent accidents from [...]

This article is an attempt to explain the reasons why autonomy has acquired today such a remarkable position in philosophic and political discourse as well as in political and social practice. As a proponent of the system paradigm, I am far away from an idealistic humanism, which would attribute the range of a social ideal such as autonomy to the human, independent spirit. On the contrary, regarding autonomy as an evaluative criterion for the decisions of many social systems (for example, of politics and economy, but also of education and health), I would argue that it should be examined in the context of the operations of these systems, in case the causes of its power should be clarified. For that reason, I use the analytical tool of functional differentiation/integration of society based mainly on Luhmann's theory about social systems, yet without adopting the Luhmannian model regarding the binary codes of system self-reference. By replacing the mechanism of binary coding of Luhmann with a group of values spread in the social functional systems by the 'orders of discourse' (as Foucault understands them), I would suggest reconsidering the Luhmannian theory of functional differentiation if we want to approach effectively the social phenomena of our era. The view of this paper for autonomy as an intersystem evaluative criterion for the system's choices could be corroborated by applying the revised model. Keywords social system; differentiation; integration; orders of discourse; autonomy; authenticity, INTRODUCTION Without doubt the notion of autonomy has a powerful effect on Western thought because it summarizes the description of the valued orientations of the Western individual. Besides, it is [...]

Adults find it harder to remember the names of familiar people than other biographical information such as occupation or nationality. It has been suggested that the opposite effect occurs in children (Scanlan & Johnston, 1997). We failed to replicate the effects found by Scanlan and Johnston and instead found that children were slower to match a name than an occupation to a famous face (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2 and 3, however, we show a temporal advantage for names in both adults and children when highly familiar faces are used. This is the case for famous and personally known faces. These results show that the speed of name retrieval is influenced by familiarity in the same way in both children and adults and indicate that children do not represent knowledge for familiar people differently from adults. The implications of these results for current models of name retrieval difficulties are discussed., Evidence from several sources shows that adults find it harder to remember names than other types of biographical knowledge about familiar people. This has been demonstrated in natural settings, where [...]

ABSTRACT Structural neuroimaging is a routine component of the diagnostic evaluation of dementia that is used to rule out potential causes of mental impairment, whereas functional imaging can differentiate different [...]

Recent studies have suggested the existence of three personality types: resilients, overcontrollers, and undercontrollers. In this article, we searched for subtypes within each of the three main personality types. Using [...]

We report a cross-cultural study of the relationship between language and colour cognition that tests the linguistic relativity hypothesis. We compared speakers of English, Russian and Setswana - languages with different numbers of' basic' colour terms - on a colour grouping task in order to see whether choice of colour groups reflected the differences among the colour lexicons of the three languages. Participants sorted a representative set of 65 colours into 'N' groups (where N ranged from 2 through to 12) based on their perceptual similarity. We assessed the similarities and differences among the choices of the three language samples, and focused in particular on two more specific questions. First, we tested the conjecture that levels of consensus over which tiles to group together should peak when N equalled the number of basic colour terms in the language. Second, we focused on possible linguistic influences on colour grouping in the GREEN - BLUE region of colour space. Setswana uses a single term for this region (botala), whereas English uses two terms (green and blue) and Russian uses three terms (zelenyj 'green', sinij 'dark blue' and goluboj 'light blue'). The most striking feature of the results was the marked similarity of the groups chosen across the three language samples. In addition there were small but reliable differences in grouping associated with linguistic differences. Specifically, maximum levels of consensus occurred at lower values of N for Setswana speakers than for the other two languages, and they were more likely to group GREEN with BLUE than speakers of the other languages. However, Russian speakers were no more likely than speakers of the other languages to form separate LIGHT BLUE and DARK BLUE groups. The results are consistent with universal perceptual processes modulated at the margin by linguistic or cultural influences., The linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH) (Sapir, 1921; Whorf, 1956) is currently out of favour. For instance, modern textbooks mention it as an interesting episode in the history of psychology, but [...]

Introduction In 1991 the United Kingdom population was 57.8 million of whom 9.1 million (15.7%) were aged 65 years or older [1]. Forecasts indicate that the population aged over 65 [...]

Byline: Arline Kaplan Early findings from a national study are shedding light on differences in the type and prevalence of mental disorders in US-born and immigrant Latinos, as well as [...]

PHANTOM ASSAILANTS & THE MADNESS OF CROWDS HISTORY IS REPLETE WITH EPISODES of collective delusion, during which substantial numbers of the members of a community are convinced that they have [...]

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major cause of deaths following accidents and a major cause of disablement and morbidity among the survivors. The clinical problem of treating this vast [...]