Megan's Law and its impact on community re-entry for sex offenders

Community notification, known as "Megan's Law," provides the public with information about known sex offenders in an effort to assist parents and potential victims to protect themselves from dangerous predators. The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of community notification on the lives of registered sex offenders. Two hundred and thirty-nine sex offenders in Connecticut and Indiana were surveyed. The negative consequences that occurred with the greatest frequency included job loss, threats and harassment, property damage, and suffering of household members. A minority of sex offenders reported housing disruption or physical violence following community notification. The majority experienced psychosocial distress such as depression, shame, and hopelessness. Recommendations are made for community notification policies that rely on empirically derived risk assessment classification systems in order to better inform the public about sex offenders' danger while minimizing the obstacles that interfere with successful community reintegration.     

The role of prior experience in language acquisition

Learners exposed to an artificial language recognize its abstract structural regularities when instantiated in a novel vocabulary (e.g., Gómez, Gerken, & Schvaneveldt, 2000; Tunney & Altmann, 2001). We asked whether such sensitivity accelerates subsequent learning, and enables acquisition of more complex structure. In Experiment 1, pre-exposure to a category-induction language of the form aX bY sped subsequent learning when the language is instantiated in a different vocabulary. In Experiment 2, while naíve learners did not acquire an acX bcY language, in which aX and bY co-occurrence regularities were separated by a c-element, prior experience with an aX bY language provided some benefit. In Experiment 3 we replicated this finding with a 24-hour delay between learning phases, and controlled for prior experience with the aX bY language's prosodic and phonological characteristics. These findings suggest that learners, and the structure they can acquire, change as a function of experience.     

Child maltreatment, non-suicidal self-injury, and the mediating role of self-criticism

We examined the relation between child maltreatment and non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). Participants were 86 adolescents who completed measures of child maltreatment, self-criticism, perceived criticism, depression, and NSSI. Analyses revealed significant, small-to-medium associations between specific forms of child maltreatment (physical neglect, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse) and the presence of a recent history of NSSI. Emotional and sexual abuse had the strongest relations with NSSI, and the data supported a theoretical model in which self-criticism mediates the relation between emotional abuse and engagement in NSSI. Specificity for the mediating role of self-criticism was demonstrated by ruling out alternative mediation models. Taken together, these results indicate that several different forms of childhood maltreatment are associated with NSSI and illuminate one mechanism through which maltreatment may be associated with NSSI. Future research is needed to test the temporal relation between maltreatment and NSSI and should aim to identify additional pathways to engagement in NSSI.     

Sudden gains in interpersonal psychotherapy for depression

Sudden, precipitous improvements in depressive symptom severity have been identified as occurring among unipolar depressed individuals. These "sudden gains" have been associated with superior acute treatment outcome in several treatment modalities, including cognitive therapy. A better understanding of sudden gains may provide insight into the mechanisms of action in these and other psychotherapies. One efficacious therapy that has been overlooked in sudden gains research is interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT; Weissman, M. M., Markowitz, J. C., & Klerman, G. L. (2000). Comprehensive guide to interpersonal psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books). The present research examined the rates and concomitant features of sudden, precipitous improvements in depressive symptomotology among 185 women receiving IPT for recurrent depression. Sudden gains, defined using extant criteria for the Beck Depression Inventory, were assessed over 12 weeks of acute IPT treatment for depression and occurred for 33.5% of the sample. Sudden gains were not associated with diagnostic and demographic characteristics or with differential likelihood of achieving depression remission with IPT monotherapy during active treatment. Further, those with sudden gains were no more likely to maintain their recovery through maintenance treatment. The lack of impact of sudden gains on eventual outcome is discussed in terms of potentially disparate emphases and mechanisms of change between IPT and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT).     

Reviews: Books and Films

INFINITE GRACE: WHEN THE WORDS OF SCIENCE AND SPIRITUAL HEALING MEET. By Diane Goldner. 346 pp. Hampton Roads, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 1999, $23.95. DEATH ANXIETY AND CLINICAL PRACTICE. By Robert Langs. 250 pp. London: Karnac Books, 1997. $33. THE FORCE OF CHARACTER AND THE LASTING LIFE. By James Hillman. 236 pp. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999. $14. THE DEAD MOTHER: THE WORK OF ANDRE GREEN. Edited by Gregorio Kohon. 228 pp. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. $. A DARWINIAN LEFT: POLITICS, EVOLUTION AND COOPERATION. By Peter Singer. 70 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Hardback $. THE ECSTATIC IMAGINATION: PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCES AND THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF SELF-ACTUALIZATION. By Dan Merkur. 226 pp. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. $19.95. THE UNKNOWN GOD: SEARCHING FOR SPIRITUAL FULFILLMENT. By Alister McGrath. 123 pp. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999. $18.00. Films: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Girlfight; Gladiator; The Contender     

Integrity of Literature on Expressed Emotion and Relapse in Patients with Schizophrenia Verified by a p‐Curve Analysis

There is growing concern that much published research may have questionable validity due to phenomena such as publication bias and p‐hacking. Within the psychiatric literature, the construct of expressed emotion (EE) is widely assumed to be a reliable predictor of relapse across a range of mental illnesses. EE is an index of the family climate, measuring how critical, hostile, and overinvolved a family member is toward a mentally ill patient. No study to date has examined the evidential value of this body of research as a whole. That is to say, although many studies have shown a link between EE and symptom relapse, the integrity of the literature from which this claim is derived has not been tested. In an effort to confirm the integrity of the literature of EE predicting psychiatric relapse in patients with schizophrenia, we conducted a p‐curve analysis on all known studies examining EE (using the Camberwell Family Interview) to predict psychiatric relapse over a 9‐ to 12‐month follow‐up period. Results suggest that the body of literature on EE is unbiased and has integrity, as there was a significant right skew of p‐values, a nonsignificant left skew of p‐values, and a nonsignificant test of flatness. We conclude that EE is a robust and valuable predictor of symptom relapse in schizophrenia.     

The effect of anomalous utterances on language production

Speakers sometimes encounter utterances that have anomalous linguistic features. Are such features registered during comprehension and transferred to speakers’ production systems? In two experiments, we explored these questions. In a syntactic-priming paradigm, speakers heard prime sentences with novel or intransitive verbs as part of prepositional-dative or double-object structures (e.g., The chef munded the cup to the burglar or The doctor existed the pirate the balloon). Speakers then described target pictures eliciting the same structures, using the same or different novel or intransitive verbs. Speakers overall described targets with the same structures as the primes (abstract syntactic priming), but more so when the primes and targets had the same novel or intransitive verbs (a lexical boost), an effect that was only observed when the novel words served as the verbs in both the prime and target sentences. Such a lexical boost could only manifest if speakers formed associations between the verbs and structures in the primes during comprehension, and if these associations were then transferred to their production systems. We thus showed that anomalous utterance features are not ignored but persist (at least) in speakers’ immediately subsequent production.     

The Relationship between Sex Offender Height and Pedophilic Interest

The current study examined the relationship between offender height and pedophilic interest (as measured by having a victim under 13 years old) in a sample of 22,228 registered sex offenders in the United States. Results revealed that offenders with victims age 12 and under were, on average, nearly one-quarter inch shorter than offenders of adults, and .18 inches shorter than those with minor teen victims. Implications for future research about the biological etiology of child sexual abuse perpetration are discussed, including the role of adverse childhood experiences in the neurodevelopment of offenders.