A survey of psychological test use patterns among forensic psychologists

Clinical psychologists are frequently called on to testify in court regarding mental health issues in civil or criminal cases. One of the legal criteria by which admissibility of testimony is determined includes whether the testimony is based on methods that have gained "general acceptance" in their field. In this study, we sought to evaluate the psychological tests used in forensic assessments by members of the American Psychology-Law Society Division of the American Psychological Association, and by diplomates in the American Board of Forensic Psychology. We present test results from this survey, based on 152 respondents, for forensic evaluations conducted with adults using multiscale inventories, single-scale tests, unstructured personality tests, cognitive and/or intellectual tests, neuropsychological tests, risk assessment and psychopathy instruments, sex offender risk assessment instruments, competency or sanity-related instruments, and instruments used to evaluate malingering. In addition, we provide findings for psychological testing involving child-related forensic issues.     

Psychoanalytic patients in the U.S., Canada,and Australia: II. A DSM-III-R validation study

A study was conducted to validate our previous work on the DSM-III-R disorders diagnosed in patients in psychoanalysis in the U.S., Canada, and Australia and to determine which specific mood, anxiety, and personality disorders were the most common in these patients. The earlier study consisted of three surveys of psychoanalytic practice that together obtained data on 1,718 patients, through extensive mail surveys to analysts in the three countries. In the validation study, 206 patients were diagnosed using a different technique. Analysts similar in important respects to those who participated in the original surveys rated patients diagnostically before and after DSM-III-R training. After training, no significant changes appeared in the rates for any of the specific mood disorders. For the thirty disorders examined, training effects decreased the identification of the generalized anxiety disorder, and increased the identification of three personality disorders: avoidant, dependent, and personality disorder not otherwise specified. Thus, analysts slightly underdiagnosed the number of personality disorders, and some "anxious" patients appear to have qualified for personality disorders. Some limitations of the DSM-III-R notion of narcissistic personality are discussed, as are the importance and stability of the self-defeating (masochistic) personality disorder. The most common Axis I disorder in psychoanalytic patients was dysthymia, followed by major depression, recurrent. This study reinforces the findings of the original three surveys. Minor corrections were developed to adjust the original three surveys.     

Sociocultural influences on adolescent boys' body image and body change strategies

Society provides messages about how people should ideally look and previous research has indicated these messages, both the actual messages provided and the perception of the message, influence body image. Research into male body image has shown males are concerned with having a lean and muscular body and as such, may want to decrease fat and increase their muscles. This paper explored the influence of a range of messages from parents, peers, and the media on a number of different measures of 362 adolescent boys’ body image and body change strategies. Specifically, messages about shape, food, exercise, losing weight and increasing muscles were explored in relation to satisfaction with weight and muscles, and the use of strategies to decrease weight and increase muscles. The findings indicated that parental messages were the strongest influence on body image and that parents, the media, and to a lesser extent messages from male friends were the strongest predictors of body change strategies.     

Career and personal counseling: Comparing process and outcome

Increasingly, there is a call to support the integration of career and personal counseling. However, few empirical studies have examined the overlap between these 2 domains. This study examined how career and personal counseling compared on both process and outcome measures. The participants included real clients who sought career and personal counseling at 3 college counseling centers in the U.S. The findings indicated that except in the area of expectations about counseling, there were no significant differences between career counseling and personal counseling. The implications for counseling practice and training are discussed.     

Effects of Diversity Management on Attachment

The theoretical underpinnings of this paper explain the process of organizational transformation to value differences and the attitudinal transformation of minority and majority individuals to appreciate diversity. As an empirical test of these theories, the research investigated absenteeism and psychological attachment in 2 Fortune 100 conglomerates in different stages of managing their diversity. Cox (1991) suggests that organizations evolve toward multiculturalism, a state in which employee differences are valued and appreciated. Analyses of 284 respondents reveal that majority and minority employees in a more multicultural firm experienced greater attitudinal attachment. Study results suggest that a culture that stresses inclusion of all individuals will have a positive impact on the demographic majority.     

Stability of nonlinear principal components analysis: an empirical study using the balanced bootstrap

Principal components analysis (PCA) is used to explore the structure of data sets containing linearly related numeric variables. Alternatively, nonlinear PCA can handle possibly nonlinearly related numeric as well as nonnumeric variables. For linear PCA, the stability of its solution can be established under the assumption of multivariate normality. For nonlinear PCA, however, standard options for establishing stability are not provided. The authors use the nonparametric bootstrap procedure to assess the stability of nonlinear PCA results, applied to empirical data. They use confidence intervals for the variable transformations and confidence ellipses for the eigenvalues, the component loadings, and the person scores. They discuss the balanced version of the bootstrap, bias estimation, and Procrustes rotation. To provide a benchmark, the same bootstrap procedure is applied to linear PCA on the same data. On the basis of the results, the authors advise using at least 1,000 bootstrap samples, using Procrustes rotation on the bootstrap results, examining the bootstrap distributions along with the confidence regions, and merging categories with small marginal frequencies to reduce the variance of the bootstrap results.     

Spiritual development: constructing an inclusive and progressive approach

This article examines the notion of spiritual development as it was conceptualised for state schools in Britain through the Conservative Government’s education reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, reforms which also introduced the National Curriculum. The article puts forward the argument that spiritual development was conceptualised in such a way as to attempt to reinstate progressive pedagogical values rejected by the National Curriculum reforms, but that the conceptualisation led to two conservative outcomes. First, spiritual development was not sufficiently robust to counteract the reforms and may have helped ease their passage. Second, education for the development of spiritual beliefs and values continued to be primarily located in Religious Education, even though a first principle of spiritual development was that spirituality should not be synonymous with religion in order that spiritual development should be inclusive. The article recommends that changes to Religious Education should be encouraged to ensure schools can provide opportunities for an inclusive and progressive education for spiritual development.     

Interaction Effects in the Theory of Planned Behavior: The Interplay of Self-Identity and Past Behavior

This research used a revised theory of planned behavior (TPB) model, which incorporated self-identity and past behavior—and the interaction between these constructs—in order to improve the model's predictive power in relation to consumer behavior (purchasing one's preferred beer). At Time 1, respondents ( N  = 108) completed measures of attitudes, perceived behavioral control, subjective norm, self-identity, past behavior, and intentions. Behavior was assessed 1 week later. All predictors were positively related to intentions. Self-identity and past behavior interacted to influence intentions: Self-identity had a stronger influence on intentions at low, rather than high, levels of past behavior. Intentions and past behavior were predictive of Time 2 behavior. These findings emphasize the need to consider identity issues in the TPB.     

Familiar other-race faces show normal holistic processing and are robust to perceptual stress

Other-race individuals are remembered more poorly and receive less holistic/configural processing than same-race individuals, at least when faces are novel. Here, we examine the amelioration of these effects with familiarity, using distinctiveness-matched Caucasian and Asian stimulus sets. We confirmed a cross-race deficit for upright faces following a single encoding trial, which disappeared rapidly with practice on a small set of other-race 'friends' and did not re-emerge when perceptual processing was put under stress (presentation in the periphery). We also examined holistic/configural processing for familiarised faces using the peripheral inversion effect (McKone, 2004 Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 30 181 - 197). A test for faces and nonface objects (dogs) confirmed the validity of this technique as providing a direct measure of holistic processing; we then showed that, after 1 h of training, holistic processing was as strong for other-race as same-race faces. We conclude that practice with other-race individuals can rapidly engage normal face-processing mechanisms.     

Gender Ideology and Motherhood: The Consequences of Race on Earnings

Using a nationally representative US sample, this study explores the relationship between gender ideology and the earnings of African American and white mothers over a 10-year period (1988–1998). We further investigate how factors related to fertility (i.e., age at first birth and the number of children) impact earnings for these mothers. Findings show, that regardless of race, a conservative gender ideology reduces women’s earnings but less so for African Americans compared to whites. With regard to fertility, the number of children is detrimental to the earnings of white mothers, but has no effect on the African American mothers in our sample. However, early childbearing does depress the earnings of African American women more so than for their white counterparts.