Psychopathy and recidivism from mid-adolescence to young adulthood: cumulating legal problems and limiting life opportunities

This study examined the ability of psychopathy as indexed by the following 4 scales: Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (A. E. Forth, D. S. Kosson, & R. D. Hare, 1996/2003), Antisocial Process Screening Device (P. J. Frick & R. D. Hare, 2001), Hare Self-Report Psychopathy Scale-II (R. D. Hare, 1991), and Personality Assessment Inventory-Antisocial Scale (L. C. Morey, 1991, 2007) to prospectively predict antisocial outcomes including general and violent recidivism across a 3- to 4-year time span. Results indicated that psychopathy was predictive of both general and violent recidivism from mid-adolescence to young adulthood even after accounting for 14 variables theoretically linked to offending. These findings add to the recent research showing stability in the psychopathy traits across time by also demonstrating that psychopathy in adolescents also has a real-world effect, including a cost to society with higher rates of offending in the community and a cost to youth with cumulating legal records that are likely to narrow their potential for prosocial growth in the community.     

Melody recognition at fast and slow tempos: effects of age, experience, and familiarity

Eighty-one listeners defined by three age ranges (18-30, 31-59, and over 60 years) and three levels of musical experience performed an immediate recognition task requiring the detection of alterations in melodies. On each trial, a brief melody was presented, followed 5 sec later by a test stimulus that either was identical to the target or had two pitches changed, for a same-different judgment. Each melody pair was presented at 0.6 note/sec, 3.0 notes/sec, or 6.0 notes/sec. Performance was better with familiar melodies than with unfamiliar melodies. Overall performance declined slightly with age and improved substantially with increasing experience, in agreement with earlier results in an identification task. Tempo affected performance on familiar tunes (moderate was best), but not on unfamiliar tunes. We discuss these results in terms of theories of dynamic attending, cognitive slowing, and working memory in aging.     

Synchrnoic consciousness from a neurological point of view: the philosophical foundations for neuroethics

Daniel Kolak’s theory of synchronic consciousness according to which the entire range of dissociative phenomena, from pathologies such as MPD and schizophrenia to normal dream states, are best explained in terms of consciousness becoming simultaneously identified as many selves, has revolutionary therapeutic implications for neurology and psychiatry. All these selves, according to Kolak—even the purely imaginary ones that exist as such only in our dreams—are not just conscious but also self-conscious, with beliefs, intentions, living lives informed by memories (confabulatory, in the case of the fictional ones) and personal histories. Kolak’s derivation of psychiatrically relevant aspects of his theory—a neurological rendition of a Kantian transcendental argument—can be given a straightforward neurological, and therefore open to scientific scrutiny, interpretation that would then more easily lend itself to the clinical setting in which these perplexing phenomena, along with their purveyors, must live and cope. This will be the main focus of this paper.     

Psychotropic placebos reduce the misinformation effect by increasing monitoring at test

A psychotropic placebo can help people resist the misinformation effect, an effect thought to be caused by a shift to more stringent source monitoring. When this shift occurs has been unclear. To address this issue we gave some people - but not others - a phoney cognitive-enhancing drug we called R273. Shortly afterwards, everyone took part in a misinformation effect experiment. To gather evidence about source monitoring we surreptitiously recorded time to read the misleading postevent narrative, and response time at test. Our findings suggest that people shifted to more stringent source monitoring at test. Moreover, people with higher working memory capacity (WMC) performed better than people with lower WMC - but only when they were told they had received R273, a finding that fits with research showing that WMC can confer advantages in situations demanding effortful control, but not when automatic heuristics suffice.     

Measuring Treatment Outcome for Children with Serious Emotional Disturbances: Discriminant Validity and Clinical Significance of the Child and Adolescent Functioning Assessment Scale

We investigated the use of a popular measure, the Children and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS), in treatment outcome research. The sample included 70 children who had been discharged from an elementary therapeutic classroom (Intensive Mental Health Program). Significant relationships were found between decreases in CAFAS scores and optimal educational placement, contributing to evidence of the scale’s discriminant validity. Clinically significant change in CAFAS scores was also investigated, with a 30 point change in score most accurately discriminating between placements after discharge. Further investigations of real world outcomes versus changes in score on this measure are warranted.     

Enhancing Therapeutic Gains: Examination of Fidelity to the Model for the Intensive Mental Health Program

Given that the development of treatment fidelity assessment protocol is an integral but too frequently ignored aspect of clinical trials for psychological treatments, the Intensive Mental Health Program (IMHP) sought to build fidelity activities into training, program evaluation, and clinical recordkeeping from the outset of a 3 year study period. We describe (a) operational definitions and measurement of the IMHP treatment model, (b) planned fidelity-promoting activities, (c) evaluation methods, and (d) fair to appreciable accomplishment of IMHP fidelity targets. Discussion of the circumstances and processes possibly hindering better fidelity for several IMHP treatment features accompanies presentation of fidelity data. We summarize pitfalls and compensatory strategies identified during IMHP program evaluation and offer practical suggestions to enhance accountability and evaluative activity in future clinical research.     

The role of the dorsal striatum and dorsal hippocampus in probabilistic and deterministic odor discrimination tasks

Three experiments explored the contribution of the cortico-striatal system and the hippocampus system to the acquisition of solutions to simultaneous instrumental odor discriminations. Inactivation of the dorsal striatum after rats had reached criterion on a three problem probabilistic set of discriminations--A (80%) vs. B (20%), C (67%) vs. D (33%), E(67%) vs. F(33%)--impaired test performance and disrupted performance when the rats were tested with novel cue combinations (C vs. F and E vs. D), where control animals chose C and F. In contrast, inactivating the dorsal hippocampus enhanced performance on this task and on a deterministic discrimination A (100%) vs. B (0%). These results are consistent with the complementary learning systems view, which assumes that the cortico-striatal and hippocampal system capture information in parallel. How this information combines to influence task performance depends on the compatibility of the content captured by each system. These results suggest that the trial-specific information captured by the hippocampal system can be incompatible with the across-trial integration of trial outcomes captured by the cortico-striatal system.