A preliminary study of Hare's “Research Scale for the Assessment of Psychopathy” in mentally-abnormal offenders

The abbreviated (15-item) version of Hare's Research Scale for the Assessment of Psychopathy (RSAP) was investigated in a sample of male admissions to Broadmoor Special Hospital (N = 50), along with five MMPI measures relevant to psychopathy (Impulsivity, Sociability, Psychopathic Deviate, Anxiety and Sociopathy). Patients were assigned to one of four clinical diagnostic groups: Personality Disorder, Mixed (personality disorder with schizophrenia), Schizophrenia and Affective Disorder. Results indicated that while both psychopathic groups (Mixed and Personality Disorder) showed high scores on almost all RSAP items, the Affective Disorder group showed low scores on almost all items. Results of a discriminant function analysis indicated that Hare's RSAP was superior to the MMPI measures at discriminating between psychopaths and non-psychopaths. Use of the discriminant function to re-allocate patients to criterion groups showed a high hit rate (94%) for psychopathic patients but a hit rate of only 61% for non-psychopathic patients. Half of the schizophrenic patients were mis-allocated to the psychopathic group. The results support the idea of an affective deficit common to psychopaths and schizophrenics, but suggest that psychopaths additionally show a deficit which may be characterized by a lack of goal-directed behaviour.     

The number of ways to label a structure

It has been observed that the number of different ways in which a graph withp points can be labelled isp! divided by the number of symmetries, and that this holds regardless of the species of structure at hand. In this note, a simple group-theoretic proof is provided.This work was supported by Grant MH 10834 from the National Institute of Mental Health.     

Anxiety and the spelling and use in sentences of threat/neutral homophones

The disambiguation of threat/neutral homophones was investigated in high- and low-trait anxiety subjects who had been exposed to either a positive or a negative mood manipulation procedure. Subjects were required first to spell each auditorily presented word and second, to generate and speak a sentence using the word. Difference indices were calculated for the spelling and the sentence usage data, i.e. the number of threat minus neutral interpretations. Examination of these indices revealed that subjects exposed to the negative mood manipulation procedure produced relatively more threat than neutral interpretations (for both spelling and sentence usage) than did subjects exposed to the positive mood manipulation procedure. Multiple regression analyses revealed that both the trait anxiety and mood manipulation variables contributed significantly to the prediction of the difference index on the spelling task. In the analysis of the use of homophones in sentences, only the mood manipulation variable contributed significantly to the prediction of the difference index on the sentence usage task.     

Toward a new conceptualization and operationalization of risk perception within the genetic counseling domain

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it provides an historical overview of studies of risk, risk perception, and decision making under risk within the genetic counseling domain. Second, it proposes an alternative conceptualization and operationalization for the study of risk perception. The conceptualization involves probability, adversity, incompleteness, and ambiguity. Prior studies of risk perception focus on the recurrence risk and operationalize risk perception by asking for interpretations of the magnitude of the probability of the outcome. Their focus is on the probability of a particular outcome. We formulate the problem in terms of a gamble and suggest that risk perception be operationalized in terms of the riskiness of the gamble. Our focus is on the riskiness of a decision option which entails two or more outcomes.     

Type of academic training and causal attributions for social problems

To provide evidence of the effects of academic training on causal attributions, university students in social science, commerce and engineering were compared at different points of their training in terms of their explanations of poverty and unemployment. Results of cross-sectional analyses showed no field differences in causal attributions at the beginning of the first academic year but significant differences at the end of the year, with social science students blaming the system more than commerce or engineering students. Longitudinal analysis showed that, within a six-month interval, the causal attributions of the students changed significantly as a function of their field of study. Differential employment prospects, while not accounting for the effects of academic training, were found to be related to attributional change. These results confirm the hypothesis that causal attributions are affected by socialization in a particular culture and that exposure to the culture of the social sciences reinforces a system-blame ideology. The implications of these findings for theories of the attribution process and theories of intergroup relations are discussed.     

Regendering the U.S. Abortion Debate

This paper originated in a conference presentation with my colleague Michael Tooley, at which we were both asked to re-evaluate articles about abortion that each of us had written over twenty years earlier. While Tooley and I both contended that abortion should be legally unrestricted, there were striking differences in the style and content of our respective arguments. Contemplating these differences has reinforced my own belief in the importance of emphasizing the centrality of gender when discussing abortion. Since gender as we know it is a system of dominance as well as difference (MacKinnon 1987), I take this to mean that contemporary discussions of abortion must address the relationship between abortion access and the social status of women. My early article addressed this relationship to some extent, but the present paper will raise a number of additional gender issues that the early article did not mention.     

Distinguishing Context Effects From Context Errors in Judgments of Behavior1

Context effects (assimilation and contrast) are examined in relation to accuracy in judgments of stimuli. Context effects are distinguished from context errors. This is shown to depend on one's definition of true scores, rater tendencies (leniency-severity) relative to true scores, and the direction and magnitude of observed context effects. The framework is illustrated empirically in a study of contrast effects involving performance judgments. Implications for reliability, validity, and agreement of behavior judgments in practice are explored.