Individual Research Participants Research Articles

The Environmental Genome Project: Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is supporting a multiyear research initiative examining genetic influences on environmental response. Proponents of this new initiative, known as the Environmental Genome Project, hope that the information learned will improve our understanding of environmentally associated diseases and allow clinicians and public health officials to target disease-prevention strategies to those who are at increased risk. Despite these potential benefits, the project presents several ethical and social challenges. Of immediate concern is the protection of individual research participants. Other ethical issues relate to the application of research results and how study findings could affect social priorities. Clarifying these emerging areas of concern, many of which have not received adequate attention in the existing bioethics literature, is an important step toward minimizing potential research-related risks and defining research needs.

The environmental genome project: ethical, legal, and social implications.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences is supporting a multiyear research initiative examining genetic influences on environmental response. Proponents of this new initiative, known as the Environmental Genome Project, hope that the information learned will improve our understanding of environmentally associated diseases and allow clinicians and public health officials to target disease-prevention strategies to those who are at increased risk. Despite these potential benefits, the project presents several ethical and social challenges. Of immediate concern is the protection of individual research participants. Other ethical issues relate to the application of research results and how study findings could affect social priorities. Clarifying these emerging areas of concern, many of which have not received adequate attention in the existing bioethics literature, is an important step toward minimizing potential research-related risks and defining research needs.

Risks of alcohol consumption in laboratory studies involving human research participants.

Research protocols that include alcohol consumption raise a number of critical issues with regard to potential risks to research participants, researchers, and institutions. This article seeks to highlight some of these issues by presenting some of the potential risks and discussing relevant dimensions and parameters of these risks. Risks to individual research participants are the primary focus of concern, but consideration of risks associated with aspects of the experimental, contextual, and institutional setting are also considered. The authors conclude with recommendations for individuals conducting studies involving alcohol consumption by human research participants.

Protection of persons with mental disorders from research risk: a response to the report of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission.

For the last several years, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) has considered several complex issues relating to biomedical research. Prominent among these considerations has been the protection of the rights and welfare of human research subjects, and the NBAC recently submitted to the president a report entitled Research Involving Persons With Mental Disorders That May Affect Decisionmaking Capacity. The importance of careful protection of vulnerable populations from undue or inappropriate risk in human subject research cannot be overemphasized, and the NBAC report includes recommendations that would strengthen such protection. However, the creation of workable mechanisms that allow appropriate risk-benefit judgments and that preserve respect for the autonomy of participating research subjects is challenging indeed. We believe that the NBAC has developed recommendations that strengthen protections for individual research participants. However, several key elements of the report are stigmatizing to persons with psychiatric disorders, and they could, if adopted as new federal regulations, inappropriately impede critical categories of psychiatric research.

Why new perspectives are needed for understanding depression in women.

AbstractThe often-cited finding that is a problem particularly afflicting women is one that mainstream theoretical approaches have been unable to explain satisfactorily. Such theories have been critiqued as inherently dualist and reductionist and as employing concepts that are implicitly androcentric. Mainstream theories promote a view of depression as a form of individual disorder or psychopathology, capable of being understood without regard to the broader sociocultural context. Neglected within mainstream theory and research on depression are social-structural and discursive conditions that regulate women's lives and shape their experiences. Research informed by feminist standpoint and social constructionist epistemological perspectives provides one avenue for offsetting the limitations of mainstream approaches. At this juncture, forms of inquiry drawing on qualitative methodologies offer more useful, and potentially more emancipatory, strategies for understanding depression in women than mainstream approaches, because they can more fully acknowledge the lived experiences of women.In this article, I analyze limitations of the currently dominant, or mainstream, approaches to understanding and explaining in women. (f.1) Based on this analysis, I argue for the need to develop alternative theoretical and methodological perspectives. The limitations of mainstream approaches become apparent when the assumptions implicit in these approaches are considered from feminist standpoint and social constructionist perspectives. Within clinical psychology and adjacent fields, much research, and the practice it informs, is grounded in mainstream frameworks. When depression is conceptualized within mainstream frameworks, the accounts produced serve to medicalize and pathologize both women's bodies and women's experiences. From a feminist perspective, such approaches are viewed as lacking in emancipatory potential, because they do not share a feminist concern with women's empowerment and are more likely to collude with, than pose challenges to, oppressive conditions in women's lives. Not only are mainstream approaches likely to disempower depressed women, they also disempower women in general, because they promote androcentric, homogenized, decontextualized, reductionistic, and dualistic ways of understanding women's lived experiences and embodied lives.WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT DEPRESSION IN WOMEN?A short answer to this question is: not very much. In mainstream research on depression, gender is either ignored entirely or addressed only in terms of a female/male dichotomy, defined by individual of assignment. In the first case, research is conducted as though participants are interchangeable without regard to gender, on the assumption that theories of depression apply equally well to both females and males. In the second case, individual research participants are categorized as either female or male, and gender is addressed in this limited way by testing for sex in depression. Attention then focuses on whether differences are present between males and females in the rate or severity of depression (usually defined, respectively, as presence of diagnosable depressive disorder or level of self-reported depressive symptoms). And a consistent finding has been that rates or levels of depression are higher among women than men (cf. Bebbington, 1996; McGrath, Keita, Strickland, & Russo, 1990; Nolen-Hoeksema, 1990; Weissman et al., 1993).(f.2)Among mainstream depression researchers, there is also a consensus that reported evidence of differences in rates or levels of depression cannot be explained (or explained away) as merely the product of measurement or other methodological artifacts. Such evidence of differences in rates or levels of depression between women and men is now generally interpreted as reflecting a true difference and attention has shifted to the problem of accounting for the preponderance of women among the depressed. …

Indirect Attempt to Change Death Attitudes: Negative Findings and Associated Relationships

Indirect treatment (concentrated relaxation and stress management) of student nurses did not produce a significant change in death anxiety or death depression or ability to communicate with the dying. Change in state anxiety and trait anxiety and general depression correlated with each other. Change in the three death attitude measures, however, neither correlated with each other nor with changes in the general anxiety and general depression measures. A viscosity model in which death anxiety and death depression are more resistant to change than general anxiety and general depression was proposed. It was contended that interventions based on Templer's (1976) two-factor theory tend to be simplistic and not implemented for the individual patient or research participant. More holistic approaches were recommended.

Estimating inspection time: response probabilities, the BRAT IT algorithm, and IQ correlations

Bates and Eysenck (1993), used a 3rd-order cubic polynomial curve fitting procedure on correct-response probabilities computed from the trial record of individual research participants ( N = 70) in an inspection time (IT) task. They demonstrated that this methodology produced estimates of IT that, when correlated with full-scale IQ scores (assessed by Jackson's Multidimensional Aptitude Battery), provided a measure of agreement that exceeded that given by the Barrett BRAT IT algorithm. The correlation between IT computed via the BRAT algorithm and full-scale IQ in this sample was −0.35, that between IQ and the cubic polynomial estimate was −0.35. When removing one outlier observation from the polynomial estimate data, this correlation increased to −0.47. Further, Bates and Eysenck also removed a further 5 cases from the dataset on the basis of “bad fit” of the data by the polynomial function, this had the effect of increasing the correlation to −0.62. However, it is demonstrated in this paper that when systematic, explicit, and quantified, criteria are applied to the outlier analysis, and replication of the results is sought across a further four IT datasets, the correlations between the BRAT algorithm parameters and those produced from 3 curve equation functions are actually equivalent. The average systematic outlier-corrected correlation between IT and IQ for both the BRAT and cubic polynomial estimates is −0.34. Further, the unadjusted correlations between BRAT IT estimates and cubic polynomial estimates all exceed 0.95, across all 5 datasets. It is concluded that given the relative difficulty of producing exact polynomial estimates at 0.76 response probability, the inappropriate use of a cubic polynomial for a function bounded by (0,1), and the perhaps inappropriate data produced by the BRAT algorithm for this type of approach to IT estimation, the use of the curve-fit procedure is sub-optimal with regard to this particular form of IT estimation algorithm.