Correspondence between self-report and interview-based assessments of antisocial personality disorder

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is associated with suicide, violence, and risk-taking behavior and can slow response to first-line treatment for Axis I disorders. ASPD may be assessed infrequently because few efficient diagnostic tools are available. This study evaluated 2 promising self-report measures for assessing ASPD--the ASPD scale of the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire-4 (PDQ-4; S. E. Hyler, 1994) and the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI; L. Morey, 1991, 2007)--as well as the ASPD module of the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV Axis II (SCID-II; M. B. First, R. L. Spitzer, M. Gibbon, J. B. W. Williams, & L. S. Benjamin, 1997). The measures were administered to 1,345 offenders in court-mandated residential substance abuse treatment programs and prisons. PDQ-4 and PAI scores related strongly to SCID-II symptom counts (rs = .67 and .51, respectively), indicating these measures convey useful clinical information about the severity of offenders' ASPD pathology. The dimensional association between the measures was relatively invariant across gender, race, and site, although differences in mean scores were observed. Levels of agreement of the SCID-II with the PDQ-4 (kappa = .31) and PAI (kappa = .32) in classifying participants as ASPD was limited. Alternative thresholds for both self-report measures were identified and cross-validated.     

Perceptions of self-oriented and other-oriented “everyday” helpers

In two investigations, participants were asked to evaluate eight different young adults (Study 1) and children (Study 2) who had described (a) a situation in which they had offered assistance to another individual and (b) the reason why they had offered the assistance in that situation. Although other-oriented helpers and their motives were generally rated more favorably than self-oriented helpers and their motives, participants' evaluations were found to be influenced by the closeness of the helper-recipient relationship, the type of help provided (i.e., instrumental vs. expressive), and the participants' gender. A similar pattern of responses was found for the undergraduate (Studies 1 and 2) and preadolescent (Study 2) participants.     

Termination of parental rights: A neglected side effect of infant intervention programs

A significant proportion of infants receiving treatment in programs designed to prevent abuse and psychosocial disorders may be removed from the custody of their parents by social service agencies. In an effort to help distinguish those cases at risk for termination of parental rights (TPR), seven such cases were analyzed and compared to seven similar cases where TPR did not occur. All 14 cases were referred because of abuse/neglect, and were at risk for continued abuse. Results showed that TPR was most likely in families where the parents were viewed as being unpleasant, as having a poor relationship with their child, were seen as retarded by the social service agency, and whose infants showed large gains in developmental level, especially during foster placement. These findings were interpreted as indicating a mixture of actual lack of progress in treatment and a negative attitudinal set about these clients.     

Creatio Continua

Sometimes in the third-person and sometimes in the first of creativity itself, this transdisciplinary and intercultural essay performs the premise that creativity everywhere is the creatio continua of a cosmopoiesis fully reducible neither to any sum of supposed parts, nor to any terminate, finished totum of viewpoint, event, or objectifiable what. It suggests that in experiencing an ethic of releasement from fixed ego-perspectives in this holism of self-organizingly creative creatio, the contemplative temperament sustainingly embodies the paradoxical ecology of contrasting orientations and their integrated mutual coevolution.     

Causal explanation improves judgment under uncertainty,but rarely in a Bayesian way

Three studies reexamined the claim that clarifying the causal origin of key statistics can increase normative performance on Bayesian problems involving judgment under uncertainty. Experiments 1 and 2 found that causal explanation did not increase the rate of normative solutions. However, certain types of causal explanation did lead to a reduction in the magnitude of errors in probability estimation. This effect was most pronounced when problem statistics were expressed in percentage formats. Experiment 3 used process-tracing methods to examine the impact of causal explanation of false positives on solution strategies. Changes in probability estimation following causal explanation were the result of a mixture of individual reasoning strategies, including non-Bayesian mechanisms, such as increased attention to explained statistics and approximations of subcomponents of Bayes’ rule. The results show that although causal explanation of statistics can affect the way that a problem is mentally represented, this does not necessarily lead to an increased rate of normative responding.