Damage: Trauma and violence in a sample of women referred to a forensic service

Although there is evidence of a link between experienced trauma and later violence, most discussion of the long-term effects of trauma do no examine aggression and violence in any detail. This article presents a pilot study of 16 women referred to the department of Forensic Psychiatry at St George's Hospital, between 1987 and 1993. The cases were selected at random, although most were known personally to the author. The study attempts to draw out the links among sexual abuse in childhood, deliberate self-harm, dangerous behavior, and specifically danger to health care professionals. The concept of complex posttraumatic stress disorder is discussed in relation to both a history of sexual and physical abuse in childhood and later dangerous behavior.     

‘Outdoing Lewis Carroll’: Judicial Rhetoric and Acceptable Fictions

This paper examines the functions of narrative within legal argumentation. My purposes are these: 1) to repudiate common assumptions that differentiate argumentation and storytelling in the law; 2) to begin to theorize anew how legal argumentation functions; 3) to explore the difficulties of evaluating the law's argumentative narratives; and 4) to trace some of the anxiety that judges themselves reveal about their roles as storytellers. I conclude that narrative is necessary to law's claims to authority, even as it complicates our understandings about how legislative policy decisions produce effects, and even as judges themselves seek to mask its importance.     

Mental models of the earth, sun, and moon: Indian children's cosmologies

This study reports data on the acquisition of knowledge about astronomy in children from India. Based on prior research, we hypothesized that the cosmological models that children construct are influenced by both first-order and second-order constraints on knowledge acquisition. First-order constraints are the implicit assumptions that govern the construction of initial cosmological models. Examples of such constraints include the assumptions that the earth is flat and supported. Such first-order constraints are presumed to be universal. Second-order constraints arise from the specific properties ascribed to cosmological objects. For example, representations of the earth's shape and location relative to the sun and moon constrain the kinds of mechanisms that are generated to account for the day-night cycle. We hypothesized that in cultures where both folk cosmologies and the scientific cosmological model are accessible to children, aspects of folk models are likely to be incorporated in children's cosmologies if they provide a psychologically easier way of satisfying first-order constraints. This hypothesis is supported by our findings with regard to universality and culture specificity in children's cosmologies. Indian children's cosmologies honor a variety of universal first-order constraints. These include constraints on the shape of the earth (e.g., support and flatness) and on the relative locations and motions of objects in the cosmology (e.g., continuity). However, many Indian children borrow the idea that the earth is supported by an ocean or a body of water from folk cosmology. This solution to the support constraint on the shape of the earth is not found in American children's initial cosmologies.     

Immediate-early Fos protein levels in brainstem neurons of male and female gonadectomized mice subjected to cold exposure

The expression of the immediate early gene c-fos has been used extensively as a marker for neural activation in response to acute and chronic stressful stimuli in brain and spinal cord. The present study examined the expression of Fos protein in the brainstem nuclei of male and female gonadectomized mice in response to cold stress. Free-floating sections were processed immunohistochemically for Fos protein using standard avidin-biotin complex methods. The number of Fos-positive neurons in each nucleus was determined. Although the experiment was designed to look for gender differences, results were equivalent between females and males. After mice were exposed to a cold ambient temperature (4 degrees C) for 2 h, elevated numbers of Fos-positive neurons were counted in the medullary gigantocellular reticular nucleus, medullary raphe nucleus, nucleus of the solitary tract and in locus coeruleus. However, no elevated expression was found in nucleus ambiguus, nor in neurons of the A1 group, nor the C2 or C3 group. Similar to rats, these results with mice reveal a widespread arousal system in the lower brainstem activated by cold stress in both genders. These findings in gonadectomized mice have set the stage for investigations following hormonal and genetic manipulations.     

Putting stereotype content in context: image theory and interethnic stereotypes

Two studies apply intergroup image theory to better understand divergent interethnic images and to highlight the important role of intergroup context and perceived intergroup relations in shaping the content of social stereotypes. Image theory hypothesizes that specific interethnic stereotypes arise from specific patterns of perceived intergroup competition, relative power, and relative cultural status. Results from surveying Black, White, and Native Americans' appraisals of intergroup relations and reported outgroup stereotypes in various intergroup contexts suggest that the content of outgroup stereotypes varies systematically as a function of the perceived state of intergroup relations and the intergroup context in which these groups are situated. The data reported from both studies establish the importance of examining social stereotypes from a functional perspective in the context of intergroup relations.     

Contextual moderation of racial bias: the impact of social roles on controlled and automatically activated attitudes

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that the social roles implied by specific contexts can attenuate or reverse the typical pattern of racial bias obtained on both controlled and automatic evaluation measures. Study 1 assessed evaluations of Black and Asian faces in contexts related to athlete or student roles. Study 2 compared evaluations of Black and White faces in 3 role-related contexts (prisoner, churchgoer, and factory worker). Study 3 manipulated role cues (lawyer or prisoner) within the same prison context. All 3 studies produced significant reversals of racial bias as a function of implied role on measures of both controlled and automatic evaluation. These results support the interpretation that differential evaluations based on Race x Role interactions provide one way that context can moderate both controlled and automatic racial bias.     

Sport psychology service delivery: staying ethical while keeping loose

Although the parent discipline of sport psychology is psychology, the delivery of sport psychology services has its main roots in physical education and sports science (motor learning and control, skill acquisition). Thus, sport psychologists may look more like coaches than they look like clinicians or counselors. In this article, the authors trace the evolution of sport psychology services and contrast the temporal, spatial, and delivery issues of applied sport psychology with more mainstream counseling and clinical psychology. The looser boundaries of sport psychologist practice have both benefits and dangers, and the authors offer some examples to professional psychologists who are thinking of expanding their delivery of service to athletes and coaches.     

Good Ol’ Country Boys Playin’ on the Farm: Online Articulations of Rural Masculinity by Men Who Have Sex with Men

This study seeks to fill existing gaps in the literature about the lives of rurally-situated men who have sex with men (MSM). Much work in this field grapples with identity construction and the unique contexts faced by queer, gay, or MSM in rural areas. This study explores the ways in which this population utilizes Craigslist as a means to articulate and perform rural masculinity. Findings suggest that MSM located within rural topographies often deploy culturally contingent masculine traits specific to rural cultural and geographic locations. The relationship that rural MSM have with the Internet is complex and dialectical in nature. The present study leads the author to conceptualize rural MSM’s relationship to both rurality and same-sex sexual behavior in two primary ways: (1) to queer or fetishize the rural, and similarly, (2) to ‘ruralize’ the queer.