Rational Suicide: An Empirical Investigation of Counselor Attitudes

This study investigated attitudes of mental health counselors toward rational suicide. Over 80% of respondents were moderately supportive of the idea that people can make well‐reasoned decisions that death is their best option, and further, they identified a consistent set of criteria to evaluate such decisions. Additionally, analyses revealed that as the scenario moved from client, to friend, to self, rational suicide seemed to gain in acceptability for these professionals. Implications for training and practice in light of the apparent responsibilities with suicidal clients defined in the 1995 American Counseling Association's Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice are discussed.     

Perceptual interference and hemispheric specialization

Two experiments evaluated the effect of stimuli presented at fixation on the recognition of faces or random shapes presented to the left or right visual half-field (VF). Increasing the processing demands of the center stimulus produced a large, linear decrease in recognition from both VFs for both faces and shapes. Recognition of random shapes was decreased more in the right visual field by center digits and in the left VF by center faces and shapes. In addition, interference was found between the VF faces and the center digits to the left of fixation. It was concluded that differences in the processing capacity of the two hemispheres are a function of the verbal-nonverbal nature of the stimuli at a later stage in processing but that the two hemispheres may also differ along other perceptual dimensions at an earlier stage of visual recognition.     

Order of feature recognition in familiar and unfamiliar faces

Three experiments measured order of processing for single faces presented to the left or right visual field (VF) using a same-different matching task. In contrast to earlier studies, the stimuli in the present experiments were carefully matched for overall similarity prior to the actual experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that a significant top-to-bottom order of processing occurred for line drawings of unfamiliar faces but not for line drawings of familiar faces. Experiment 3 found evidence supporting top-to-bottom processing for unfamiliar photographic face stimuli. The photographic stimuli in Experiment 3 were matched more quickly when presented in the left VF (right hemisphere); however, this VF asymmetry was not related to previously reported differences in order of processing. It is suggested that under some conditions faces presented to the right hemisphere may be processed more like familiar faces than faces presented to the left hemisphere; however, this difference is not critical for the left VF (right hemisphere) superiority often found in face recognition tasks.     

BORDERLINE PERSONALITY TRAITS AND INTIMATE PARTNER AGGRESSION: AN INTERNATIONAL MULTISITE, CROSS-GENDER ANALYSIS

Although research has consistently shown that men and women use intimate partner aggression (IPA) at approximately equal rates, there is little empirical research on whether the predictors of IPA are the same for men and women. The current study investigated whether borderline personality (BP) differentially predicted the use of IPA for men and women across 67 university sites from around the world. Results showed that BP predicted several forms of IPA and that gender did not moderate the association between IPA and BP. Although the strength of the association between IPA and BP significantly differed across sites, it was in the predicted direction for the overwhelming majority of sites. Implications of these results and suggestions for future research are discussed.