Issues in psychotherapeutic encounters of patients suspected of post-traumatic stress disorder malingering

The literature indicates on high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) malingering in various mental health settings but only few articles relate to therapeutic encounters with this population. The aim of this article is to present some of the difficulties that characterize psychotherapeutic encounters with patients suspected of PTSD malingering, and to examine the vicissitudes of significant elements of psychotherapy during these complex clinical situations. Some therapeutic interventions and indications that may help therapists to distinguish between patients with exaggerated symptomatology who suffer from true mental distress, and from full malingerers are also provided. It is argued that therapists and policy makers should relate to PTSD malingering more seriously due to the negative consequences of this phenomenon.     

John Scottus Eriugena on the Composition of Material Bodies

This paper examines John Scottus Eriugena's account of material bodies. Some scholars have argued that Eriugena's account prefigures Berkeleyan idealism. The interpretation offered in the paper rejects the Berkeleyan interpretation on the grounds that Eriugena, unlike Berkeley, did not propose a thoroughly immaterialist view of reality.     

Examining the positive effects of rapport building: When and why does rapport building benefit adult eyewitness memory?

Most investigative interviewing protocols recommend building rapport with cooperative adult witnesses to increase the accuracy of their reports. Although a few recent studies support the benefits of rapport building on adult witness recall, no study has examined whether the timing of rapport in relation to post-event misinformation affects recall accuracy, and whether these effects are related to witness anxiety levels throughout the interview. The present study provided two hundred and thirty-three undergraduates with a videotaped mock crime followed by building high or low rapport either before or after they received post-event misinformation. All witnesses were then interviewed about the mock crime. Results indicated that high rapport before misinformation increased the amount of accurate information reported in a subsequent witness interview compared to low rapport. However, these recall benefits were not due to a reduction in anxiety. Theoretical implications and practical recommendations for police interviewing practices are discussed.     

Transforming Training: A Perspective on the Need for and Payoffs From Common Standards

Standards today position the research community on the eve of scientific breakthrough. Efficiency and warfighter competency are likely to improve greatly as a result of the feedback and research studies enabled by the use of common standards for defining competencies, assessing performance, and enabling technologies to collect data. Such standards make it possible to evaluate warfighter performance across sites and across time. Standards also make it possible to do rigorous comparisons in the lab, operational simulator settings, and even live exercises. The standardized methods and leveraging of common data will yield unprecedented scientific power and opportunity to rapidly transform training.     

Motivational determinants of transportation into marketing narratives

This paper identifies factors that facilitate narrative transportation, where people become immersed in the storyline of an advertisement. Specifically, using a lottery context, this research shows that consumers who feel lucky or believe in personal good luck are motivated to engage in transportation, a process that is intensified as the attractiveness of the outcome increases. Further, this research shows that highly transported consumers (a) become more focused on ad outcomes and less on the low personal probability of winning, and that (b) attempts to attenuate consumers’ transportation are most efficacious if undertaken before the ad (and transportation) begins.     

Rapport‐Building During Witness and Suspect Interviews: A Survey of Law Enforcement

Building rapport with adult witnesses and suspects is recommended by major investigative interviewing protocols (e.g., Cognitive Interview and the Army Field Manual in the USA and PEACE in the UK). Although recent research suggests that building rapport can sometimes benefit police investigations by increasing the accuracy of adult eyewitness reports and potentially enhance the diagnosticity of evidence obtained from suspects, little data exist regarding how law enforcement interviewers actually define and build rapport in real‐world investigations. To fill this void, the present study distributed a questionnaire containing open and closed‐ended questions to 123 law enforcement interviewers in police training courses to determine how they conceptualize and build rapport with adult interviewees. Results indicate that a majority of law enforcement interviewers define rapport as a positive relationship involving trust and communication, with a strong minority defining rapport as a ‘positive or negative’ relationship. Further, law enforcement interviewers reported building rapport with adult witnesses and suspects in a similar manner, often by using verbal techniques (e.g., discussing common interests via small talk) and non‐verbal techniques (e.g., displaying understanding via empathy and sympathy). Theoretical and applied implications of these results are discussed. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Participatory Evaluation: A Case Study of Involving Stakeholders in the Evaluation Process

ABSTRACT

One way to ensure that an evaluation has “utility” is to use a participatory evaluation approach where the evaluator partners with primary users to carry out various phases of an evaluation. This article provides a case study of how participatory evaluation was used in an out-of-school youth development and employment program at the Science Museum of Minnesota's Kitty Andersen Youth Science Center. Youth staff participated in a series of evaluation workshops where they learned about evaluation, made their own meaning of evaluation data, generated recommendations to improve their museum work, and ultimately took more ownership and control of their program. As a result of the workshops, youth also carried out their own formative evaluation of four museum programs. The program manager and the youth staff reaped a number of benefits from this process. The factors leading to its success are discussed.     

Harry and Sally Revisited: The Influence of Spirituality and Education on Sexual Tension in Cross-Sex Friendships in Secular and Christian Universities

A sample of 406 subjects completed a questionnaire testing the influence of personal spirituality, education and several other factors on sexual tension in cross-sex friendships (CSF Tension). The subjects included 143 students from a Christian university (CU), 137 from a secular junior college (JC), and 127 non-students (NS). The primary criterion variable was the amount of CSF Tension experienced: Each subject rated to what extent sexual tension made friendship difficult due to different characteristics (e.g., he/she is physically attractive, dressed seductively) of 16 hypothetical friendships. A measure of sexuality—a composite of 12 questions adapted from the Self-Assessment Survey—assessed sexual activity, values, and ideation. Other predictors included neuroticism, openness to experience, extraversion, and demographics. JC students rated significantly more liberal than CU students on all 12 of the sexuality questions but no CSF-Tension differences were found for 15 of the 16 hypothetical CSF comparisons. JC students also rated two standard deviations lower on spirituality than CU students. Also, NS differed from students by being older, more spiritual, more educated, less involved in sexual activities, and experienced less CSF Tension. For the entire sample, spirituality was associated with sharply lower levels of sexual activities and ideation (r = ?.601) and significantly lower levels of CSF Tension. The influence of education was similar to that of spirituality but not as robust.     

Prior knowledge: the effects of natural category size on memory for implicitly encoded concepts

Studying a familiar word activates its associates, and these associates affect the likelihood of recalling the studied word in a cued recall task. These experiments examined variables that normally affect memory for the studied word to determine if they have similar effects on memory for the word's associates. Memory for associates was tested by cued recall (Experiments 1-3) or by recognition (Experiments 4-5), with the number and strength of the associates varied in all experiments. In different experiments, test instructions (direct-indirect), distractor tasks, lag, and amount of practice were manipulated. Provided that subjects were not distracted prior to test, the probability of recalling associates of the studied word decreased with the number of associates activated and with their strength under all conditions. The strength of the associates but not their number affected recognition. In general, variables that affected recall and recognition of studied words had parallel effects on their associates.