Moral transgression during the Vietnam War: a path analysis of the psychological impact of veterans’ involvement in wartime atrocities

Background and Objectives: Involvement in wartime combat often conveys a number of deleterious outcomes, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, hostility, aggression, and suicidal ideation. Less studied is the effect of engagement in wartime atrocities, including witnessing and perpetrating abusive violence.

Design and Methods: This study employed path analysis to examine the direct effects of involvement in wartime atrocities on hostility, aggression, depression, and suicidal ideation independent of combat exposure, as well as the indirect effects via guilt and PTSD symptom severity among 603 help-seeking male Vietnam War veterans.

Results: Involvement in wartime atrocities was predictive of increased guilt, PTSD severity, hostility, aggression, depressive symptoms, and suicidal ideation after controlling for overall combat exposure. Combat-related guilt played a minor role in mediating the effect of atrocity involvement on depression and suicidal ideation. PTSD severity had a larger mediational effect. However, it still accounted for less than half of the total effect of involvement in wartime atrocities on hostility, aggression, and suicidal ideation.

Conclusions: These findings highlight the heightened risk conveyed by involvement in wartime atrocities and suggest that the psychological sequelae experienced following atrocity involvement may extend well beyond guilt and PTSD.     

Differentiating emotional processing and attention in psychopathy with functional neuroimaging

Individuals with psychopathy are often characterized by emotional processing deficits, and recent research has examined the specific contexts and cognitive mechanisms that underlie these abnormalities. Some evidence suggests that abnormal features of attention are fundamental to emotional deficits in persons with psychopathy, but few studies have demonstrated the neural underpinnings responsible for such effects. Here, we use functional neuroimaging to examine attention–emotion interactions among incarcerated individuals (n = 120) evaluated for psychopathic traits using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R). Using a task designed to manipulate attention to emotional features of visual stimuli, we demonstrate effects representing implicit emotional processing, explicit emotional processing, attention-facilitated emotional processing, and vigilance for emotional content. Results confirm the importance of considering mechanisms of attention when evaluating emotional processing differences related to psychopathic traits. The affective-interpersonal features of psychopathy (PCL-R Factor 1) were associated with relatively lower emotion-dependent augmentation of activity in visual processing areas during implicit emotional processing, while antisocial-lifestyle features (PCL-R Factor 2) were associated with elevated activity in the amygdala and related salience network regions. During explicit emotional processing, psychopathic traits were associated with upregulation in the medial prefrontal cortex, insula, and superior frontal regions. Isolating the impact of explicit attention to emotional content, only Factor 1 was related to upregulation of activity in the visual processing stream, which was accompanied by increased activity in the angular gyrus. These effects highlight some important mechanisms underlying abnormal features of attention and emotional processing that accompany psychopathic traits.     

Clergy Burnout: A Comparison Study with Other Helping Professions

Clergy experience a large number of stressors in their work, including role overload and emotional labor. Although studies have found high rates of depression in clergy, the degree of work-related burnout in clergy compared to other occupations is unknown. The widely used Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) measures three aspects of burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment. We sought studies using comparable versions of the MBI for clergy; for social workers, counselors, and teachers because of those occupations’ emotional intensity and labor; and for police and emergency personnel because of the unpredictability and stress-related physiological arousal in those occupations. We found a total of 84 studies and compared the ranges of burnout scores between the studies of clergy, each additional occupation, and MBI published mean norms. Compared to U.S. norms, clergy exhibited moderate rates of burnout. Across the three kinds of burnout, clergy scores were relatively better than those of police and emergency personnel, similar to those of social workers and teachers, and worse than those of counselors. Clergy may benefit from burnout prevention strategies used by counselors. The moderate levels of burnout found for clergy, despite the numerous stressors associated with their occupation, suggest that clergy generally cope well and may be models to study. Overall, there is room for improvement in burnout for all professions, especially police and emergency personnel. It is important to remember the variation within any profession, including clergy, and prevent and address burnout for those in need.     

The role of overt language production in the Hebb repetition effect

The Hebb repetition effect (Hebb, 1961) occurs when recall performance improves for a list that is repeated during a serial-recall task. This effect is considered a good experimental analogue to language learning. Our objective was to evaluate the role of overt language production in language learning by manipulating recall direction during a Hebb repetition paradigm. In each trial, seven nonsense syllables were presented auditorily. Participants had to orally recall the items either in the presentation order or in reverse order. One sequence was repeated every third trial. In Experiment 1, we compared learning from a group that had recalled the items in their presentation order to learning from a group that had recalled the items in the reverse order. The two groups yielded similar learning rates. In Experiment 2, recall direction was varied between trials. The learning rate was not affected when recall direction varied between trials, suggesting a limited role of overt language production in language learning.     

Interrogating the ethics of operational psychology

Commissioned amidst allegations of collusion between American Psychological Association officials and Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Defense officials involved in the enhanced interrogation programme, the July 2015 Hoffman Report documented a decade of collusion between American Psychological Association and Department of Defense officials in unethical national security interrogations. However, interrogation support is but one of numerous areas where psychologists are directly aiding military and intelligence operations, an area known as operational psychology. The ethical issues posed by the larger field of operational psychology have received little public discussion apart from apologia by operational psychologists themselves. To stimulate public review of operational psychology, leaders of the movement to remove psychologists from national security interrogations convened, in September 2015, a group of experts to work towards a consensus set of principles to guide future discussion. Participants included psychologists, physicians, and social scientists; military and intelligence professionals; and attorneys, ethicists, and human rights advocates. The discussion also drew upon years of dialogue between participants and military health and intelligence professionals. The workshop produced “The Brookline Principles on the Ethical Practice of Operational Psychology,” with implications for the profession of psychology and for civil society.     

How does preference reversal appear and disappear? Effects of the evaluation mode

Preference reversal is a systematic change in the preference order between options when different response methods are used (e.g., choice vs. judgment). The present study focuses on procedures used to elicit preferences according to an evaluability hypothesis. Two experiments compared joint vs. separate evaluations and explicit vs. non‐explicit joint evaluations. Subjects had to express preferences between high‐variance gambles (HVGs) and low‐variance gambles (LVGs) either by choosing one gamble to play in a lottery or by assigning gambles minimum selling prices. We show that HVGs are preferred in both choice and pricing conditions when gambles are evaluated separately, and LVGs are preferred in both choice and selling conditions when gambles are evaluated in pairs: i.e., when the evaluation mode is held constant, classic preference reversal disappears. These results support the evaluability hypothesis, and suggest that preferences depend on whether subjects are allowed to compare the options they are asked to choose from or judge, independently of the nature of the scale (i.e., attractiveness vs. minimum selling price) they are required to adopt. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Short-term memory performances during sustained wakefulness in patients with obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome

Both working and immediate memories were assessed every 4h by specific short-term memory tasks over sustained wakefulness in 12 patients with obstructive sleep apnea and hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) and 10 healthy controls. Results indicated that OSAHS patients exhibited lower working memory performances than controls on both backward digit span and complex Sternberg tasks. Speed and accuracy on Sternberg tasks were affected by memory load in both groups. However, immediate memory was not impaired in OSAHS patients. Diurnal and nocturnal SaO(2) were correlated with speed and accuracy high-speed memory scanning performance on Sternberg tasks in patients. These results suggest specific working memory deficits associated with OSAHS over sustained wakefulness with a possible deficiency in the central executive responsible for the higher information processing, in addition to a potentially insufficient storage capacity. Among OSAHS patients, working memory ability involved in high-speed memory scanning may be impaired by chronic hypoxemia.