Principles of forensic mental health assessment: implications for neuropsychological assessment in forensic contexts

Forensic mental health assessment (FMHA) is a form of evaluation performed by a mental health professional to provide relevant clinical and scientific data to a legal decision maker or the litigants involved in civil or criminal proceedings. Such FMHA evaluations can be further specialized when the clinical and scientific data are primarily neuropsychological. This paper provides an adaptation of 29 recently derived principles of FMHA (Heilbrun, 2001) that have been described in two forms: general guidelines for application in FMHA, and guidelines for application to neuropsychological assessment in forensic contexts. Each principle is described, and the general guideline is compared with the highly specialized neuropsychological guideline. In this way, the applicability of such FMHA principles to forensic neuropsychological assessment is described.     

Factorial structure of the kidcope in Hong Kong adolescents

The Kidcope (A. Spirito, L. J. Stark, & C. Williams, 1988), a brief screening measure of coping strategies for children and adolescents, was subjected to exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses in a sample of adolescents in Hong Kong. A 2-factor model was found to fit the data when only the 2 emotional regulation items were treated separately and were allowed to load on the 2 different factors. Further analyses showed that factor loadings, factor variances, and factor covariance were invariant across age and gender. On the basis of the factor analyses, the authors created 2 composite scores, representing control-oriented and escape-oriented coping strategies. Implications for the use of the Kidcope in research and preventive intervention are discussed.     

The Longest Faculty Strike in the History of U.S. Institutions of Higher Education: Perceptions of the Union President

The president of the AAUP faculty union at University of Bridgeport, from 1987 to 1991, offers a first-hand account of the circumstances leading to the fatal strike there. He refutes accusations that the union and its leadership destroyed the university and provides a dramatic, personal account of a faculty union under attack by union busters. The faculty, he argues, was resisting a concerted onslaught on traditional faculty rights. It fought desperately to stifle a retrograde revolution in higher education seeking the substitution of absolute Management Rights to traditional collegiality. He refers to faculty as the soul and mind of a university, and to administration as a necessary evil whose duty is primarily to assist the faculty in the accomplishment of the university's mission.     

Control and maintenance effects of long-term relaxation training in a case of hypertension

The effects of long-term, varied relaxation in a case of essential hypertension are described. The client's unusual achievement of voluntary control over his blood pressure was discussed in terms of new directions in the search of a relaxation specific factor.     

Defensive style and performance on objective personality measures

Two studies on the relations between various styles of defense and the power or validity of self-reports on objective personality questionnaires. The power of individual items on the Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control scale to discriminate between subjects defined as internals or externals by a median-cut procedure using the total score was not affected by the presence Or absence of a projective defensive style. However, the presence of repressive tendencies did appear to restrict item power. Prediction from two achievement scales taken from Gough's California Psychological Inventory was not influenced by level of repression, was affected somewhat adversely by a projective style, and was most clearly contaminated by a rationalizing defense. It was proposed that the differential effects of defensive styles upon the validity of personality tests depended upon the convergence or divergence of the cognitive operations involved in the type of defense and in the type of personality measure.     

Goal attainment scaling: An idiosyncratic method to assess treatment effectiveness in agoraphobia

Goal attainment scaling (GAS) is an individually tailored way to measure treatment gains, using a highly standardized procedure. An advantage of the method is that it takes into account individual characteristics of the patients, and at the same time the data are suitable for quantitative analysis and comparable across patients. Despite the wide acceptance and use of the method in the evaluation of psychotherapy, data on its psychometric properties are rather scarce. In the current study, GAS was used as one of several outcome measures in a research project on the effectiveness of various treatments for panic disorder with agoraphobia. Guidelines for GAS are presented as well as data on the reliability and validity of the procedure. Results indicate that the procedure is reliable, valid, and sensitive to the improvement of patients during treatment. Comparison of GAS with standardized measures revealed considerable concordance, although the clinical end status of patients diverged somewhat dependent on the measure considered.     

Exogenous testosterone and social experience each enhance the development of aggressive behavior in Cyprinodon variegatus

The combined effects of testosterone and social experience from the time of hatching on development of aggressive behaviors in Cyprinodon variegatus were investigated. Social experience was defined as a rearing condition allowing visual, tactile, chemosensory, and auditory contact with zero, three, or 15 additional conspecifics. Behaviors were videotaped once weekly from 3 weeks to 4 months post-hatching, using the focal animal method, and an ethogram was constructed. At 3 months post-hatching, half the fish were injected once with testosterone propionate (2 μg/g b. w., i. p., vehicle-Ringer's solution) and the other half were injected with Ringer's isotonic saline solution. Testosteronetreated subjects showed significantly greater frequencies and durations of behaviors that may be related to aggression than did saline controls. Two weeks after the treatments, a round-robin tournament was conducted between testosterone- and saline-treated fish from each rearing condition. Testosterone-treated fish won significantly more encounters than did saline-treated subjects over all rearing conditions. Furthermore, significantly more aggressive acts were displayed by fish raised in the groups of 16 and the groups of four than did the Isolates. Although the number of aggressive acts exhibited by the group of 16 was greater than the group of four, the difference was not statistically significant.     

Deciding to Act

Philosophical Studies -     

Phenomenology and Theology—Reflections on the Study of Religion

The academic study of religious belief and practice is frequently taken to debunk the content of religion. This attitude impedes the science-theology dialogue and causes believers to react defensively toward studies of religion. I argue that a large, although not unrestricted, domain exists in which phenomenology of religion is neutral with respect to content, that is, compatible with either belief or unbelief. Theology can constructively interact with secular studies of religion, in some cases even explicitly hostile ones. Three themes emerge that elaborate on this interaction: (1) the claim that a scientific study of religion is capable of refuting belief is a logical mistake; (2) religious practice, and to some extent belief, can benefit from secular scrutiny; (3) the entirety of religious expressions is richer than the content that can be captured by analytical study of the phenomenon.