Coherent career practice

Coherent career practice is conceptualized as an integrated reciprocal system involving 4 core elements: career literacy, career gumption, career context, and career integrity. Within this framework, clients are clients because 1 or more of the elements is either poorly developed or disconnected from the others.     

A comparative analysis of North American adolescent and adult mass murderers

Thirty adult mass murderers and 34 adolescent mass murderers in North America are compared on both offender and offense variables to delineate similarities and differences. Findings indicate a plethora of psychiatric disturbances and odd/reclusive and acting-out personality traits. Predisposing factors include a fascination with weapons and war among many of the adolescents and the development of a "warrior mentality" in most of the adults. Precipitating factors indicate a major rejection or loss in the hours or days preceding the mass murder. Results are interpreted through the lens of threat assessment for targeted violence (Borum, Fein, Vossekuil, & Bergland 1999), recognizing that a fact-based, dynamic behavioral approach is most useful for mitigating risk of such an extremely low-base-rate violent crime.     

Being dishonest about our prejudices: moral dissonance and self-justification

We applied the moral dissonance reduction framework, used to explain the maintenance of a positive self-concept in dishonest behavior, to understand self-justification of prejudice. Participants identified ambiguously negative intergroup behaviors, then evaluated those behaviors when performed by others and themselves. As predicted by moral dissonance reduction, participants were less critical of their own behavior when considering others’ behaviors before their own. In a third study directly comparing prejudiced and dishonest behavior, participants’ responses showed the greatest self-justification in the initial question about their behavior regardless of the content of the question, whereas subsequent questions showed more stability, consistent with the idea that participants adjusted their initial self-reports to avoid damage to their self-concepts.     

Incarcerated Mothers: Mutual Support Groups Aimed at Reducing Substance Abuse Relapse and Recidivism

Interventions to reduce relapse and recidivism for the increasing number of mothers incarcerated for illicit drug use are needed to prevent maternal/child separation and high public expenditures. This paper describes mutual support groups for women inmates aimed at strengthening family coping skills, especially communication, anger management, and parenting skills. Qualitative data collected during the group sessions indicated that the healing support of shared experiences, stories, poetry, and staying in the present were identified as spiritually uplifting. Problem solving and improved family interactions constituted additional themes extracted from the qualitative data. Future plans include including quantitative outcome measures of success.     

EXTENDED SIMPLES AND QUALITATIVE HETEROGENEITY

The problem of qualitative heterogeneity is to explain how an extended simple can enjoy qualitative variation across its spatial or temporal axes, given that it lacks both spatial and temporal parts. I discuss how friends of extended simples should address the problem of qualitative heterogeneity. I present a series of arguments designed to show that rather than appealing to fundamental distributional properties one should appeal to tiny and short-lived tropes. Along the way, issues relevant to debates about material composition, persistence over time and existence monism are discussed.         

The societal and psycho-sociological background of football hooliganism

On October 11, 1985, the Belgian Council of Ministers ordered scientific research on violence on the football terraces. This research was conducted in the years 1986 and 1987 by the “Onderzoeksgroep Jeugdcriminologie” (Research group on Juvenile Criminology) of the K.U. Leuven in close relationship with the general police of the home office. (The report was submitted on December 23, 1987 [VAN LIMBERGEN, COLAERS en WALGRAVE, 1987].)     

Family of Origin Violence Predictors of IPV by Two Types of Male Offenders

The aim of this study was to determine the role of family of origin violence in predicting intimate partner violence (IPV). Male participants were divided into generally offending and family-only groups according to whether their violence occurred exclusively within intimate partner and family contexts or toward others outside the family as well. Results showed that exposure to family of origin violence affected IPV differently between the two groups of offenders. For generally offending offenders, exposure to family of origin violence significantly predicted IPV above and beyond demographic factors, alcohol and drug use, and bidirectional aggression. For family-only offenders, witnessing father-initiated violence toward the mother had a significant influence on their violent behavior toward their intimate partners. Clinical implications of these findings are addressed.     

Contextual conditioning in rats as an animal model for generalized anxiety disorder

Animal models of psychiatric disorders are important translational tools for exploring new treatment options and gaining more insight into the disease. Thus far, there is no systematically validated animal model for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), a severely impairing and difficult-to-treat disease. In this review, we propose contextual conditioning (CC) as an animal model for GAD. We argue that this model has sufficient face validity (there are several symptom similarities), predictive validity (it responds to clinically effective treatments), and construct validity (the underlying mechanisms are comparable). Although the refinement and validation of an animal model is a never-ending process, we want to give a concise overview of the currently available evidence. We suggest that the CC model might be a valuable preclinical tool to enhance the development of new treatment strategies and our understanding of GAD.     

The lure of hypocrisy

Why are we susceptible to hypocrisy? Four preconditions for falling prey to hypocrisy are delineated. The reasons for our complex attitude to hypocrisy, both condoning and condemning it, are also explored. Hypocrisy is the false claim to virtue. It always refers to consciously intended deception by a person in a position of trust. Making use of literary examples, the investigation starts with the delineation of three readily apparent preconditions for falling prey to hypocrisy. Idealization of the hypocrite is seen as a defense against a dread of uncertainty on the part of the person who succumbs to hypocrisy. The addition of a third precondition, the force of powerful desire, completes the introduction. A selective review of historical and philosophical studies of hypocrisy over the past twenty-five hundred years situates the problem of the susceptibility to hypocrisy. Application of psychoanalytic formulations and clinical data, principally from the study of patients whose psychoanalysts committed ethical violations, produces a fourth precondition for succumbing to hypocrisy: transference, with a regression from mature trust to a condition of unmodified basic trust.