Forensic Interviewing Aids: Do Props Help Children Answer Questions About Touching?

The belief that props help children report abuse has fostered the widespread use of anatomical dolls and body diagrams in forensic interviews. Yet studies involving alleged abuse victims, children who have experienced medical examinations, and children who have participated in staged events have failed to find consistent evidence that props improve young children's ability to report key information related to bodily contact. Because props elevate the risk of erroneous touch reports, interviewers need to reconsider the belief that props are developmentally appropriate in forensic interviews, and researchers need to explore new approaches for eliciting disclosures of inappropriate touching.     

Reflexive fighting in the albino rat: Aggressive or defensive behavior?

Specific agonistic responses of albino rats were compared for dominant colony rats and intruders, and for rats in a “reflexive fighting” task. The “reflexive fighters” showed high levels of defensive responses such as boxing and freezing, and very low levels of aggressive behaviors such as piloerection, biting, and the lateral display. This pattern clearly suggests that the behaviors measured in the reflexive fighting task reflect conspecific defensive reactions, rather than “shockelicited aggression.” Moreover, striking responses seen in the reflexive fighting task also occur at a high rate when footshock is given to a solitary rat held in a boxing posture. Thus it appears that “reflexive fighting” primarily involves defensive rather than aggressive responses.     

Theodicy: The Solution to the Problem of Evil,or Part of the Problem?

Theodicy, the enterprise of searching for greater goods that might plausibly justify God’s permission of evil, is often criticized on the grounds that the project has systematically failed to unearth any such goods. But theodicists also face a deeper challenge, one that places under question the very attempt to look for any morally sufficient reasons God might have for creating a world littered with evil. This ‘anti-theodical’ view argues that theists (and non-theists) ought to reject, primarily for moral reasons, the project of ‘justifying the ways of God to men’. Unfortunately, this view has not received the serious attention it deserves, particularly in analytic philosophy of religion. Taking my cues from such anti-theodicists as Kenneth Surin, D.Z. Phillips and Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, I defend several reasons for holding that the way of thinking about God and evil enshrined in theodical discourse can only add to the world’s evils, not remove or illuminate them.

Childhood Adverse Experience: Yes or No? Mothers' Decision-Making Process When Responding to Survey Questions

The aim of this pilot study was to assess how difficult it is for mothers to answer questions regarding adversities their children might have experienced, and to investigate their considerations in the decision-making process. A nonrepresentative community sample of 628 mothers of 6- to 8-year-old children responded to an online survey. The mothers answered questions regarding adversities, rated the acceptability of these questions, and reported on any difficulties they had in responding. Based on the mothers' reports, qualitative analyses were conducted to identify metacategories of arguments. The study highlights the need for increased awareness of the complexity involved in soliciting information about adverse experiences in research and clinical settings, and for caution in interpreting epidemiological results in this field.     

What has happened to Pr?gnanz? Coding, stability, or resonance.

Three theoretical measures of Pr?gnanz were compared with four data sets. The theoretical measures were a stimulus-coding one (structural information load, SIL), a measure related to within memory processes (stability), and one based on the interaction of perception and memory (resonance). The four data sets were obtained in two experiments and involved goodness rating, grouping, and immediate and delayed recall. A complete set of seven-element binary serial patterns was used in each experiment. Both SIL and resonance were shown to correlate reliably with the data sets across tasks. The resonance measure, however, performed best. Pr?gnanz thus appears to be explained better by resonance than by stimulus coding or memory storage. Resonance explained all systematic variance in the recall tasks, but not in the other tasks. Regarding these, partial-correlation analyses showed that the effect of stability could be fully reduced to resonance. SIL could not be similarly reduced. Therefore, additional perceptual constraints, other than resonance, would be needed for a complete account of goodness in the judging or grouping tasks.     

Geographic heuristics or shortcuts to failure?: response to Snook et al.

Snook, Taylor, and Bennell, in ‘Geographic profiling: The fast, frugal, and accurate way’ (Applied Cognitive Psychology, January 2004, volume 18, pp. 105–121), suggest that by invoking two simple rules untrained individuals can perform geographic profiling tasks as accurately as sophisticated computer software. While the results are interesting in terms of geographic heuristics, the authors' reach conclusions unsupported by their data and methods. Though they claim to address ‘the ongoing debate about whether individuals can perform as well as actuarial techniques when confronted with real world, consequential decisions,’ their laboratory experiment bears little resemblance to the reality of criminal investigation. Major flaws exist with both data selection (the cases used may not have met the assumptions underlying geographic profiling, and they only involved a series of three locations, too low for pattern detection), and methods of analysis (nonlinear error was measured linearly, and computerized geographic profiling search strategies were distorted). Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Detection of changes in spatial position: III. Dot number or dot density?

Better detection of changes in spatial position is achieved within random dot patterns consisting of a small number of dots rather than a large number of dots. Why? The result might be related directly to the number of display elements which must be monitored and thereby linked to the sharing of attention across display elements. The result, previously obtained for displays of constant area, might be related to the density of display elements and thereby linked to proximity relations within spatial patterns. Or the result may be due to the local separation of neighboring dots when inquiring about the state of a specific dot. The present study attempts to unconfound these factors. It is shown that performance is related to the number of dots that must be motored, irrespective of dot density; that dot density 18 effective primarily 10 the inquiry of the state of specific elements; and then principally as It relates to the separation of the queried element from its neighbors.     

Ethnic Minority Women’s Experiences with Intimate Partner Violence: Using Community-Based Participatory Research to Ask the Right Questions

Current definitions, instruments, and processes for measuring intimate partner violence, including sexual assault, are insufficient to detect the nature and scope of violence against all women. To remedy this problem, we recommend the use of community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles to develop culturally informed quantitative instruments that measure ethnic minority women’s experiences of intimate partner violence (IPV). CBPR requires community members and researchers to work equitably together throughout the research process, sharing decision-making and ownership. This paper identifies problems with current measurement approaches and describes the strengths and challenges of the CBPR approach. We argue that this research orientation offers the potential for “flexible standardization” that can provide better estimates of the extent of IPV and sexual assault, and provide communities with the knowledge they need to address these problems in a culturally sensitive manner.     

Sensitivity to aversive events in depression: Antecedent,concomitant, or consequent?

This study tested whether sensitivity to aversive events is a concomitant versus antecedent/consequent of depression. Twenty currently depressed subjects, twenty subjects with remitted depression, and twenty control subjects completed psychophysiological and learning tasks involving aversive components. Both currently depressed and remitted subjects, when compared to control subjects, exhibited greater decreases in skin resistance response reactions to negative social scenes and a greater sensitivity to extinction in the learning condition involving an aversive component. The fact that the responses of remitted subjects were very similar to those of currently depressed subjects on both tasks is consistent with the view that sensitivity to aversive events is an antecedent or consequent of depression, as opposed to being only a concomitant. The results also provide some support for the passive avoidance model of depression.This study was based on portions of a doctoral dissertation by the first author, with the second author as chairperson, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.This research was aided by a Grant-in-Aid of Research to the first author from Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, an award from the Jill Shelby Memorial Fund to the first author, and support from National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH17071, awarded to C. R. Snyder.Portions of this paper were presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, August 1989, and at the meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy, Washington, DC, November, 1989.     

Failure to Mentalize: Defect or Defense?

ABSTRACT

The author reviews current thinking on the phenomena of failure to mentalize and provides an alternative to the structural defect point of view. Also included are some clinical implications of this alternative viewpoint.     

Attending to objects: costs or benefits?

The single-object advantage is said to occur when performance is faster and/or more accurate when the two targets to be compared appear on one object than when they appear on two different objects. The single-object advantage has been interpreted to suggest that attention can select objects rather than unparsed regions of visual space. In five experiments we explored whether directing attention to one object rather than two objects produces a benefit or a minor cost. Participants were required to compare two target features that belonged to one object, to two objects, or did not belong to any object. In addition, we varied the relevance to the task of object-related global information, such as symmetry of the object and perceptual cluttering of the background. Results showed that attending to one object in comparison to attending to no object produced a benefit only when object-related global information was relevant to the task. In contrast, when object-related global information was irrelevant to the task, attending to one object produced a cost. Thus, it can be concluded that attending to an object does not produce an absolute benefit, but rather produces a smaller cost than attending to two objects.     

Acceptable Contradictions: Pragmatics or Semantics? A Reply to Cobreros et al.

Naive speakers find some logical contradictions acceptable, specifically borderline contradictions involving vague predicates such as Joe is and isn’t tall. In a recent paper, Cobreros et al. (J Philos Logic, 2012) suggest a pragmatic account of the acceptability of borderline contradictions. We show, however, that the pragmatic account predicts the wrong truth conditions for some examples with disjunction. As a remedy, we propose a semantic analysis instead. The analysis is close to a variant of fuzzy logic, but conjunction and disjunction are interpreted as intensional operators.     

Remarks on the identifiability of thurstonian ranking models: Case V, case III, or neither?

It is well-known that the representations of the Thurstonian Case III and Case V models for paired comparison data are not unique. Similarly, when analyzing ranking data, other equivalent covariance structures can substitute for those given by Thurstone in these cases. That is, we may more broadly define the family of covariance structures satisfying Case III and Case V conditions. This paper introduces the notion of equivalence classes which defines a more meaningful partition of the covariance structures of the Thurstonian ranking models. In addition, the equivalence classes of Case V and Case III are completely characterized.