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Infant, weanling, adult, and elderly rats were allowed to habituate to a simple exploratory situation and were then tested for retention after 1 min., 1 hr., or 24 hr. Infants habituated more slowly than older animals as indicated by time to habituate and response frequency measures. No age differences were found after a 1-min. retention interval, which suggested that the final levels of original habituation did not differ. However, after longer intervals (1 hr. and 24 hr.), infants rats showed poorer retention of habituation than the older animals.

In Experiment 1 23-day-old rats learned active or passive avoidance. Control animals received equivalent handling and shock in a different apparatus. Both groups were then exposed to an enriched or standard laboratory environment for 60 days prior to a retention test. Environmental enrichment resulted in greater forgetting of active avoidance. The lack of initial latency differences between control groups together with other indices of activity suggested that the differential forgetting was due to memorial effects rather than environmentally induced activity differences. Experiment 2 indicated that environmental enrichment resulted in greater forgetting for both weanlings and adults, implicating extraexperimental interference as a general source of incomplete retention by the rat.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze the ethics of a specific communication strategy to support the contention that ethics needs to be an integrated operational consideration in the corporate communication planning process rather than an afterthought.Design/methodology/approachUsing the marketing communication strategy referred to as disease branding as a case‐in‐point, the “Five Pillars of Ethics for Public Communication” provide a framework for analysis of the need for making ethics an operational consideration in planning.FindingsCommunication strategies attempted by organizations today are subject to public criticism. Disease branding, a prime example, is paradoxically a “non‐branded” approach to marketing pharmaceuticals directly to consumers. Pejoratively referred to as disease‐mongering, this promotion of diseases rather than drugs neatly side‐steps the increasing criticism and even legal obstacles that face or threaten to face direct‐to‐consumer advertising of branded, prescription drugs. It is an innovative, non‐traditional tactic that has been enormously successful in widening markets for specific drug preparations. Application of the “Five Pillars” for ethical analysis finds that this strategy fails to meet the acceptable ethical standard in four out of five.Research limitations/implicationsThis study is limited to the application of one approach to ethical evaluation, although it is one that encompasses a number of widely accepted standards for practice.Practical implicationsAn ethical analysis using the “Five Pillars” can be implemented by any corporate communication professional as a litmus test for determining the ethics of strategies under development during the operational planning process.Originality/valueThis paper fills a gap in the information available to corporate communication professionals about how to operationalize ethics.

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