Personality disorder and violence: making the link through risk formulation

The extant research demonstrates that the combination of personality disorder and violence implies severe dysfunction, poor responsivity to treatment, more serious and persistent violence, and higher recidivism rates. Thus, it comes as no surprise that personality disorder is included in many of the available guidelines for assessing and managing violence. Unsurprisingly, the combination of personality pathology and violence frequently presents the greatest challenge to services, even those in whom violence risk assessment and management practice is established and routine. Conceptual and methodological limitations pervade the literature and a full explanation of the nature of the association between personality pathology and violence is still awaited. Furthermore, current approaches to risk assessment fail to provide a systematic framework for assessors to use to make sense of the heterogeneous presentations typically found in individuals with personality disorder and violence. In this paper, formulation is proposed as the critical process linking risk assessment and risk management. It is argued that assessors must move beyond a simple listing of risk factors and should instead produce detailed, comprehensive, individualized explanations of risk potential and risk management needs. Personality disorder is used in this paper to illustrate the important contribution of formulation to the risk assessment process, and in doing so, the link between personality pathology and violence is explored.     

Nonindependent and nonstationary response times in stopping and stepping saccade tasks

Saccade stop signal and target step tasks are used to investigate the mechanisms of cognitive control. Performance of these tasks can be explained as the outcome of a race between stochastic go and stop processes. The race model analyses assume that response times (RTs) measured throughout an experimental session are independent samples from stationary stochastic processes. This article demonstrates that RTs are neither independent nor stationary for humans and monkeys performing saccade stopping and target-step tasks. We investigate the consequences that this has on analyses of these data. Nonindependent and nonstationary RTs artificially flatten inhibition functions and account for some of the systematic differences in RTs following different types of trials. However, nonindependent and nonstationary RTs do not bias the estimation of the stop signal RT. These results demonstrate the robustness of the race model to some aspects of nonindependence and nonstationarity and point to useful extensions of the model.     

The relationship between gender,perceived career barriers,and occupational aspirations

The relationships between college student gender, perceived career barriers, and occupational aspirations were examined. Participants were 314 students located in the southeastern United States. Overall, college women reported higher levels of occupational aspirations than college men. While occupational aspirations were not correlated with perceived career barriers for women or men, women reported anticipating more barriers to their career advancement than their male peers. Perceived career barriers and the interaction between gender and perceived career barriers predicted occupational aspirations after controlling for gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and year in school. The relationship between occupational aspirations and the interaction between gender and perceived career barriers in college‐age adults enhances our understanding of occupational aspirations.     

Costs and benefits of strategy construction in a speeded discrimination task

The costs and benefits of constructing and utilizing a strategy for performing a speeded discrimination task were assessed in terms of time and mental resources. The strategy involved using information about the position a word occupied in order to respond to its identity more rapidly. The resources used to construct and utilize the strategy were assessed from responses to probes presented at various times during the task. In Experiment 1, the probe required a manual response, whereas in Experiment 2, the probe required a vocal response. Strategy construction interfered with the probe task in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2, suggesting that strategy construction required resources specific to the manual response system. There was also some evidence that strategy construction required general resources, but the evidence for specific resources was much stronger. The findings are consistent with our previous ideas about how the strategy is represented (Logan, 1980a; Logan & Zbrodoff, 1979). The different results with different responses to the probes point out important limitations on previous studies of probe interference and of cost-benefit analysis, which each focused on a single dimension of cost and benefit. The differences suggest that a multiple-resources approach to probe interference and cost-benefit analysis might be more appropriate.     

Depth Relevance and Hyperformalism

Journal of Philosophical Logic - Formal symptoms of relevance usually concern the propositional variables shared between the antecedent and the consequent of provable conditionals. Among the most...     

Executive control of thought and action

In addition to processing information about stimuli in the environment, the cognitive system performs executive functions to control and coordinate the processes that deal with environmental stimuli. Several executive functions may be distinguished: (1) Making choices about alternative strategies for processing environmental stimuli; (2) constructing or instantiating a version of the chosen strategy to enable performance on the task; (3) controlling and coordinating execution of the strategy during real-time performance on the task; and (4) disabling or disengaging the strategy in response to changes in goals or changes in the task environment that make the current strategy inappropriate. This paper presents a selective review of research addressing each of these executive functions, focusing on the time and resources used to accomplish each one.     

Testing the validity of conflict drift-diffusion models for use in estimating cognitive processes: A parameter-recovery study

Researchers and clinicians are interested in estimating individual differences in the ability to process conflicting information. Conflict processing is typically assessed by comparing behavioral measures like RTs or error rates from conflict tasks. However, these measures are hard to interpret because they can be influenced by additional processes like response caution or bias. This limitation can be circumvented by employing cognitive models to decompose behavioral data into components of underlying decision processes, providing better specificity for investigating individual differences. A new class of drift-diffusion models has been developed for conflict tasks, presenting a potential tool to improve analysis of individual differences in conflict processing. However, measures from these models have not been validated for use in experiments with limited data collection. The present study assessed the validity of these models with a parameter-recovery study to determine whether and under what circumstances the models provide valid measures of cognitive processing. Three models were tested: the dual-stage two-phase model (Hübner, Steinhauser, & Lehle, Psychological Review, 117(3), 759–784, 2010), the shrinking spotlight model (White, Ratcliff, & Starns, Cognitive Psychology, 63(4), 210–238, 2011), and the diffusion model for conflict tasks (Ulrich, Schröter, Leuthold, & Birngruber, Cogntive Psychology, 78, 148–174, 2015). The validity of the model parameters was assessed using different methods of fitting the data and different numbers of trials. The results show that each model has limitations in recovering valid parameters, but they can be mitigated by adding constraints to the model. Practical recommendations are provided for when and how each model can be used to analyze data and provide measures of processing in conflict tasks.