Brief therapy in adult psychiatry: results from fifteen years of practice

We report the outcomes from our solution-focused brief therapy outpatient clinic in adult mental health. A questionnaire was sent to clients and their family doctors one year after they ceased to attend. Seventy-five clients were referred, of whom fifty-three were seen and forty-one traced at follow-up. Thirty-one (76%) reported a good outcome, with an overall average of 5.02 sessions, 20% attending only one session. Combining these data with our previous studies, 170 referrals were received of whom 136 attended and 118 were traced. Good outcome was reported by eighty-three clients (70%) with a mean of 4.03 sessions per case. There was no significant difference between the groups in solving additional problems or seeking further professional help. New problems were significantly less common in the 'good outcome' group. Long-standing problems did less well. In all three studies there were no significant differences in outcome between socioeconomic groups.     

Visualizing the relationship among indicators for lone actor terrorist attacks: Multidimensional scaling and the TRAP‐18

This validation study analyses data from a sample of North American terrorist attackers (n = 33) and non‐attackers (n = 23) through the lens of the Terrorist Radicalization Assessment Protocol (TRAP‐18; Meloy, 2017) utilizing a multivariate statistical approach – multidimensional scaling – to visualize potential clustering (co‐occurrence) of risk factors. Rarely done in terrorism research, the results plotted in two‐dimensional space show the clustering and co‐occurrence of most of the eight proximal warning behaviors among the attackers, but not among the non‐attackers, and less of a clustering and association of distal characteristics, but their presence in both attackers and non‐attackers. These findings provide further empirical support for the rational‐theoretical model of the TRAP‐18, a structured professional judgment instrument for threat assessment of lone actor terrorists. It advances the quantitative analysis of operationally relevant and behaviorally observable indicators for use by law enforcement and counterterrorism professionals and their consultants. Findings are discussed in relation to other research on pre‐offense behaviors of lone actor terrorists, and recommendations are made for both operational use and further research.     

SUPERVALUATION FIXED-POINT LOGICS OF TRUTH

Michael Kremer defines fixed-point logics of truth based on Saul Kripke’s fixed point semantics for languages expressing their own truth concepts. Kremer axiomatizes the strong Kleene fixed-point logic of truth and the weak Kleene fixed-point logic of truth, but leaves the axiomatizability question open for the supervaluation fixed-point logic of truth and its variants. We show that the principal supervaluation fixed point logic of truth, when thought of as consequence relation, is highly complex: it is not even analytic. We also consider variants, engendered by a stronger notion of ‘fixed point’, and by variant supervaluation schemes. A ‘logic’ is often thought of, not as a consequence relation, but as a set of sentences – the sentences true on each interpretation. We axiomatize the supervaluation fixed-point logics so conceived.     

When is profiling possible? Offense planning and aggression as moderators in predicting offender age from victim age in stranger rape

Debate continues with regard to the possibility of inferring an offender's characteristic features from crime scene details (the process of so-called "offender profiling"). We argue that psychology generally has benefited from appreciating context in predicting behavior. In the same way, profiling would benefit from an appreciation of context in predicting characteristics. This "reverse" process is contingent on various "if...then" relationships. As one example, this paper demonstrates how profiling offender age from victim age is contingent on (i) the level of planning and (ii) the level of aggression displayed during the offense. Eighty-five stranger rape case records formed the data set. Moderated regression analysis revealed that victim age is a significant predictor of offender age only in cases where the offender has (i) shown evidence of planning the attack and/or (ii) acts in a gratuitously aggressive manner. The theoretical bases for these findings may lie in the extent to which offenders disparately plan and target victims and how extreme aggressiveness in stranger rapes may relate to a near-peer proxy for an offender's anger. The implications of the results for the processes and methods involved in offender profiling suggest that certain crime scene factors can have differential moderating effects on predictive outcomes.     

Plattner's Arrow: Science and Multi-Dimensional Time

Might time be multi‐dimensional? In exploring this question, this paper uses a thought‐experiment about dimensionality, H. G. Wells' ‘The Plattner Story’. Plattner has his left and right sides transposed after a trip through a fourth spatial dimension, a change with independent empirical consequences. This example is then generalised to reversals of the directions of time and entropy. Finally, this thought‐experiment is related to relativistic theories of time and the possibility of preserving causality in a temporally multi‐dimensional framework.     

Load effects in attention: Comparing tasks and age groups

Attention is limited in terms of both capacity (i.e., amount of information attended) and selectivity (i.e., the degree to which non-attended information is nonetheless processed). One of the seminal theories in the field, load theory, predicts that these two aspects of attention interact in systematic ways. Specifically, load theory predicts that when the amount of information to attend is less than the available capacity, spare attention will naturally leak out to unattended items. While load theory has found a great deal of empirical support, the robustness of the findings has recently been called into question, in particular with respect to the extent to which the predictions are borne out across different tasks and populations. Here we report tests of perceptual load effects in two different tasks (change detection and enumeration) and in two populations (adults and 7- to 8-year-old children). Adults’ accuracies did not demonstrate the predicted interaction between the capacity and selection dimensions, whereas children’s performance, in addition to being overall worse than adults, did show the interaction. The overall lower accuracy of children was seen to be the result of a larger performance decrement in response to capacity demands, distracting information, and their interaction. Interestingly, while these results were seen at the level of the two tasks, there was no within-participants correlation across tasks. Overall, these results suggest that maturation-related changes attenuate the magnitude of distractor effects in attention, which in turn limits the evidence for interactions between capacity and selection in high-functioning populations.

     

Time travel,hyperspace and Cheshire Cats

H. G. Wells’ Time Traveller inhabits uniform Newtonian time. Where relativistic/quantum travelers into the past follow spacetime curvatures, past-bound Wellsians must reverse their direction of travel relative to absolute time. William Grey and Robin Le Poidevin claim reversing Wellsians must overlap with themselves or fade away piecemeal like the Cheshire Cat. Self-overlap is physically impossible but ‘Cheshire Cat’ fades destroy Wellsians’ causal continuity and breed bizarre fusions of traveler-stages with opposed time-directions. However, Wellsians who rotate in higher-dimensional space can reverse temporal direction without self-overlap, Cheshire Cats or mereological monstrosities. Alas, hyper-rotation in Newtonian space poses dynamic and biological problems, (e.g. gravitational/electrostatic singularities and catastrophic blood-loss). Controllable and survivable Wellsian travel needs topologically-variable spaces. Newtonian space, not Newtonian time, is Wellsians’ real enemy.     

Examination of Spatial Working Memory Performance in Children and Adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Combined Type (ADHD-CT) and Anxiety

Spatial working memory (SWM) is known to be impaired in children with ADHD-CT, whether anxiety is present or not. Yet, it remains unclear whether anxiety disorders add to the SWM impairments evident in ADHD-CT and whether these findings extend into adolescents with ADHD-CT and anxiety. Further, it is not yet known whether children and adolescents with carefully defined anxiety disorders alone, demonstrate SWM deficits. This study explored the association of SWM and its strategy and spatial span components in carefully defined children and adolescents (age 6–16 years) with ADHD-CT alone (N?=?163; 14 % female), ADHD-CT and anxiety (N?=?243; 23 % female), anxiety disorders alone (N?=?69; 25 % female) compared to age- and gender-matched healthy control participants (N?=?116; 19 % female). The relationship between SWM and its strategy and span components and core ADHD-CT symptoms and anxiety symptoms were also examined. There was no evidence of an additive effect of ADHD and anxiety on SWM, strategy and spatial span deficits. But, anxiety disorders alone were associated with impaired SWM and span performance compared to healthy control participants. In contrast, strategy did not differ between children and adolescents with anxiety disorders alone and healthy control participants, suggesting that with anxiety span is the most affected component. Further, these findings were age-independent. This study concurs with and extends current influential models about the cognitive effects of anxiety on performance in the setting of ADHD-CT. Clinical implications and future research directions are discussed.