ORGAN DONATION IN THE CONTEXT OF HUMAN TENDENCY TO BE CONSISTENT. CONSIDERATIONS WITH REFERENCE TO LAW AND PSYCHOLOGY

The text verifies the hypotheses that exploiting the human tendency to be consistent and introducing appropriate legal solutions can increase organ donation. The considerations found that there are arguments for the status quo bias (the tendency to be consistent) exists and affects humans. Concurrently, there are multiple rational psychological justifications for this kind of occurrences. Thus, the status quo bias can be exploited for increasing the organ donation, imposing on a person the decision regarding being willing to become an organ donor after their death or not, and count on this person not changing their decision in the future due to the tendency to be consistent. In Poland, such a solution could be introduced by adding the 7th item to the Article 11 section 1 of the Act on Vehicle Operators with the following wording: “declared that they agree or not to the removal of cells, tissues or organs from their corpses for transplantation, or the removal of cells and tissues for transplanting them into another person. The declaration may be changed at any time.”

Self, free will and the place of brain in the legal domain

The movements to understand the free will and choice, which is empirically apparent to the observer, is contested by brain science. Further explorations about intentions, reasons along with deception have brought the meaning of self and agency under re-examination. However, a triangulated picture with other scientific evidence may make the picture clear. The aim will be to ponder upon the free will, law and brain determinism. Since brain studies are emerging as an important interdisciplinary domain such as law and psychology, it may be interesting for readers to have a knowledge about the common-sense understanding of brain functioning and how it connects to the philosophical problems of solipsism and knowledge of other minds, freedom of actions, purpose and the will. Not apart from this, the conceptual errors and further debates speculated by the legal theorists and social scientists in the integration of law and neuroscience which has empirical, practical and ethical implications will be highlighted

Rīgas Stradiņu universitātes Socioloģijas katedras devums Latvijas izglītībai, zinātne un sabiedrībai

The article offers an overview of the activities of the Department of Sociology of Riga Stradins University during its existence in 1998–2020. The article states the aims of the Department, lists the implemented study programmes in sociology, law and psychology, as well as describes the development of the Department during its existence. It should be noted that the Department has played an important role not only in research and teaching the new generations of sociologists and psychologists, but also in scientific expertise.

"There are no Band-Aids for emotions": The development of thinking about emotional harm

An understanding of harm is central to social and cognitive development, but harm largely has been conceptualized as physical damage or injury. Less research focuses on children’s judgments of harm to others’ internal well-being (emotional harms). We asked 5–10-year-old children (N = 456, 50% girls, 50% boys; primarily tested in Central New York, with socioeconomic diversity, but limited racial/ethnic or linguistic diversity) to compare emotional and physical harms. In Experiment 1, children compared simple harms (intended and completed) and then scenarios in which the perpetrator’s intention did not match the outcome (intended emotional harm, but caused physical harm, or vice-versa). Assessments of the severity of emotional (versus physical) harm increased with age and depended on the perpetrator’s intentions. In Experiment 2, children saw emotional and physical harms that were: Simple (intended and completed); Incomplete (intended, but not completed); or Accidental (not intended, but completed). Children evaluated physical and emotional harms in isolation and then compared the two. Judgments of the relative severity of emotional harm increased with age, but only when intentions and outcomes were both present. This reflected an increase with age in children’s perceptions that emotional harm was hurtful, whereas perceptions of physical harm were relatively stable across development. With age, children also increasingly associated emotional harms with longer-term impacts (being remembered and reoccurring). These findings suggest reasoning about the severity, underlying intentions, and duration of emotional harm shifts with age. The results hold implications for moral development, law and psychology, and emotional-harm-related interventions including those addressing bullying.

Exploring the emotional burdens and impact of medical negligence litigation on the plaintiff and medical practitioner: insights from Ireland

Arguments for reform of the dynamic of medical negligence litigation in Ireland frequently centre on temporal and financial concerns. However, as the field of law and psychology has continued to grow, a body of international literature has emerged which recognises that litigation can have a destructive emotional impact on its participants, particularly in the context of medical negligence disputes. This paper contributes to the discourse on law-caused harms through a critical exploration of the emotional burdens of medical negligence litigation from the perspective of both the plaintiff and medical practitioner, with reference to the findings of an empirical study (interviews with barristers, patient support groups, and medical professional bodies) and the literature. Whilst the temporal and financial efficiency of medical negligence litigation is important, if litigation can cause emotional harm, this should be considered a serious, undesirable effect of the traditional adversarial process, and may have broader implications for reform in this area.

Conclusion

Throughout this book, we have sought to identify what we see as the basic building blocks for environmental law and psychology, and for applying a psychological analysis to specific environmental laws. To that end, we have identified key ways we believe that psychological research can help in understanding and predicting why, when, and how people think about and respond to environmental harm. We have also argued that a psychological approach to environmental law and policy, which takes account of this research, can help the law more effectively shape human behavior to desired ends—whatever those ends might be. This conclusion flags a set of questions, projects, and data needs that could help policy makers and attorneys to even better understand and predict the impacts of environmental law as well as develop more effective (and in some cases cheaper) environmental laws and regulations. This includes the possibility of using law to debias; the relationship between politics and the psychology of environmental law; how environmental law might be updated in light of psychological analysis; and the role of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic within environmental law and psychology.

General Law and Psychology in Environmental Law

This chapter addresses what general law and psychology have to say that may be helpful to environmental law, as they are in other areas of law. It addresses what law and psychology can tell us about getting people to change their attitudes and their behaviors—when attempts to change might work, when they might fail, and why. The chapter addresses persuasion, motivation (with an emphasis on motivated cognition), cognition, and social influence. In each category, the chapter first describes the broad strokes of the psychological research, before giving examples of how it might be used to understand the law generally, and environmental law more particularly.

Key Features of Environmental Law and Psychology

This chapter argues that environmental law is psychologically distinctive. This distinctiveness flows in large part from the unique emphasis environmental law has on environmental and ecological injury—injury that tends to be diffuse, complex, and nonhuman in character. These characteristics trigger a set of psychological phenomena, which tend to make environmental and ecological injuries challenging for people to perceive, understand, and care about. A psychology of environmental law should account for these distinctive characteristics, while respecting the normative goals and institutional constraints through which environmental law and policy is created and enforced.

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND LEGAL CHARACTERISTICS OF GUILT AND RESPONSIBILITY

Статья посвящена характеристике элемента вины в праве и в психологии. В работе проводится анализ вины в контексте ее определения, в первую очередь как психологического явления, а затем и правового. В заключении работы формулируется вывод о том, то человек нуждается в определении вопросов вины и ответственности в действии некоего внешнего фактора, регулятора линию поведения, в котором соотносится с таким регулятором. The article is devoted to the characterization of the element of guilt in law and psychology. The paper analyzes guilt in the context of its definition, first of all as a psychological phenomenon, and then as a legal one. In conclusion, the paper concludes that a person needs to determine the issues of guilt and responsibility in the action of an external factor that regulates the behavior line, which is related to such a regulator.