The violent adolescent: the urge to destroy versus the urge to feel alive

The dynamics of adolescent violence are explored from theoretical and developmental perspectives applied to the review of psychoanalytic studies of violence and three cases: the case of Willie Bosket, presented in Fox Butterfield's All God's Children, an adolescent treated by one of the authors, and observation of staff dynamics in a juvenile detention facility. Studies indicate that violence is used to preserve a sense of existence and psychic equilibrium as well as to express rage and destroy unwanted projected parts of the self and dangerous intrusions into a fragile self-coherence. In the case studies, violent activity serves a number of psychic functions: it leads to high arousal states and the feeling of being alive thereby disavowing underlying feelings of deadness and depression, it serves to contain and discharge overwhelming chaotic and rageful feelings, and it enacts object ties and the unconscious fantasies of the parent. Staff dynamics in a treatment setting for juvenile offenders reflect the intrapsychic dynamics of the juvenile offender prone to acting out, projection, hypervigilance to signs of disrespect, and disavowal of unwanted affects including helplessness and vulnerability.     

Screening for adolescent psychopathy among at-risk youth: initial validation of the Survey of Attitudes and Life Experiences

Psychopathic youth pose special challenges to clinicians in providing effective treatment and safe management. Because comprehensive assessments of psychopathy are time intensive and require specialized training, programmatic research is needed to develop time-efficient and useful screens that eliminate from further consideration acting-out adolescents who are unlikely to be psychopathic. The clinical utility of the Survey of Attitudes and Life Erperiences as a psychopathy screen was investigated by combining three samples of adolescent offenders (total N = 223). Its primary purpose was the identification of nonpsychopaths who were distinguished from adolescents in either the mixed or psychopathic ranges. A Psychopathy Screen (PS) Scale was developed with 24-item (PS-24) and 11-item (PS-11) versions. Both appeared moderately effective in excluding nonpsychopaths from further evaluation. Preliminary data on response styles suggest that these scales are not susceptible to social desirability.     

Psychological verbs and the double-dependency hypothesis

The double-dependency hypothesis (DDH, Mauner et al., 1993) holds that where two dependencies of a certain kind are present, comprehension in Broca's aphasia will be random, but that where there is only one dependency, comprehension will be intact. We tested this hypothesis by examining the performance of Broca's aphasics on sentences with psychological verbs of two different classes. One class has an argument structure in which the Experiencer role is assigned to the subject. In the other class, the Experiencer role is assigned to the object. Subject-Experiencer verbs can form verbal passives which have two relevant dependencies, whereas object-Experiencer verbs can form adjectival passives and have only one relevant dependency. Thus these sentence types make contrasting predictions relevant to the DDH. Our results clearly demonstrate that patients understand the adjectival passive psychological verbs, as predicted by the DDH. On the verbal passive psychological verbs, patients perform at chance, again consistent with DDH predictions. These results firmly buttress the DDH account. They also contradict the results of an earlier study (of verbal passive psychological verbs only), a study which we argue is plagued with problems (namely, Grodzinsky, 1995b).     

Personality and affect characteristics of outpatients with depression

This investigation was designed to examine the relationship between depression severity and personality disorders measured by the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-II (Millon, 1987) and affectivity measured by the Positive Affectivity/Negative Affectivity Schedule (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988). Discriminant analyses were employed to identify the personality and affective dimensions that maximally discriminate between 4 different levels of depressive severity. Differences between the 4 levels of depressive severity are suggestive of unique patterns of personality characteristics. Discriminant analysis showed that 74.8% of the cases were correctly classified by a single linear discriminant function, and that 61% of the variance in depression severity was accounted for by selected personality and affect variables. Results extend current conceptualizations of comorbidity and are discussed with respect to depression severity.     

Is Connectedness Necessary to What Matters in Survival

The standard version of the psychological criterion or theory of personal identity takes it that psychological connectedness is not necessary for personal identity, or for what matters in survival. That is, a future person can be you, and/or have what matters in survival for you, even though there is no psychological connectedness between you and that future person. David Lewis, however, holds that psychological connectedness is necessary to both identity and what matters (which he takes to coincide). This entails, Lewis acknowledges, that if a human body were to live longer than connectedness lasts, then that body would 'embody' or 'constitute' a different person later on than it did to begin with. Moreover, Lewis accepts, a body may embody more than one person at any one time. Lewis claims that this can be reconciled to some degree with common sense if we count by person stages rather than by persons. I show, though, that Lewis' view cannot be salvaged in this way, and, moreover, that it leads to further absurdities. I conclude that as an account of identity and of what matters in survival, it is highly implausible, and most unsatisfactory.     

The Truth Will Set You Free: Towards the Religious Study of Science

This article explores the notion that science can be viewed as a religion and that our understanding of science will be enhanced, if we study it in the same manner that we use to study any other religion. More specifically, it builds on concepts developed by Max Weber in his analysis of salvation religions to describe some ways in which science promises liberation and the institutional conditions under which that liberation will take place. While to a certain extent this exploration might be viewed as an effort to demythologize science, it is not an attack on science, as much as it is an attempt to demonstrate the potential benefits of opening up the scientific enterprise to more thorough and creative external examination.     

Personalized and generalized comparisons: causes and consequences of variations in the focus of social comparisons

When people compare with another person they can focus on how they compare either with just that target (a personalized comparison) or with others more generally (a generalized comparison). Four studies (two event-contingent diary studies, one study of comparisons during a triathlon, and one controlled experiment) showed that personalized comparisons were more likely when the target's attribute was distinctive or there was an interaction or a close or emotional relationship with the target. Perhaps because these conditions that increase interest in the target as a distinct individual were less common during the triathlon than in everyday life, personalized comparisons were relatively uncommon during the triathlon but relatively common in everyday life. Across studies, generalized comparisons magnified the impact of upward comparisons on overall feelings (but not on interpersonal feelings about the self-target relationship), presumably because generalizing broadens the implications of comparisons, whereas personalizing restricts their relevance to the self-target relationship.     

A Polychoric Instrumental Variable (PIV) Estimator for Structural Equation Models with Categorical Variables

This paper presents a new polychoric instrumental variable (PIV) estimator to use in structural equation models (SEMs) with categorical observed variables. The PIV estimator is a generalization of Bollen’s (Psychometrika 61:109–121, 1996) 2SLS/IV estimator for continuous variables to categorical endogenous variables. We derive the PIV estimator and its asymptotic standard errors for the regression coefficients in the latent variable and measurement models. We also provide an estimator of the variance and covariance parameters of the model, asymptotic standard errors for these, and test statistics of overall model fit. We examine this estimator via an empirical study and also via a small simulation study. Our results illustrate the greater robustness of the PIV estimator to structural misspecifications than the system-wide estimators that are commonly applied in SEMs. Kenneth Bollen gratefully acknowledges support from NSF SES 0617276, NIDA 1-RO1-DA13148-01, and DA013148-05A2. Albert Maydeu-Olivares was supported by the Department of Universities, Research and Information Society (DURSI) of the Catalan Government, and by grant BSO2003-08507 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. We thank Sharon Christ, John Hipp, and Shawn Bauldry for research assistance. The comments of the members of the Carolina Structural Equation Modeling (CSEM) group are greatly appreciated. An earlier version of this paper under a different title was presented by K. Bollen at the Psychometric Society Meetings, June, 2002, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.     

Does a Marriage Ideal Exist? Using Q-Sort Methodology to Compare Young Adults’ and Professional Educators’ Views on Healthy Marriages

This study sought to understand whether young adults and family educators share beliefs about the components of a successful relationship. Young adults viewed successful relationships as having partners who agree on most issues. Educators characterized successful partners as exhibiting positive communication patterns and using relationship maintenance strategies. A third prototype included young adults and educators who described successful relationships in terms of agreement and problem solving behaviors. Implications for researchers and practitioners conclude the article.