The typology of parricide and the role of mental illness: Data-driven approach

Parricide is a rare type of homicide in which mental illness is often an important factor. The aims of this study were (a) to describe the characteristics of parricide offenders with a focus on mental illness and clinical care and (b) to examine Heide's widely used typology of parricide through a data-driven approach. We analyzed all homicides in England and Wales between 1997 and 2014. Parricide offenders in our sample were most often male, unmarried, and unemployed, with a third of offenders diagnosed with schizophrenia; 28% had been in contact with mental health services before the offense. The latent class analysis resulted in three types of parricide offenders: middle-aged with affective disorder, previously abused, and seriously mentally Ill, which confirmed, to an extent, Heide's typology. Health and social care services should actively engage with carers of people with mental illness and support to those caring for older relatives and victims of abuse.     

Psychometric and Validity Issues in Machine Learning Approaches to Personality Assessment: A Focus on Social Media Text Mining

In the age of big data, substantial research is now moving toward using digital footprints like social media text data to assess personality. Nevertheless, there are concerns and questions regarding the psychometric and validity evidence of such approaches. We seek to address this issue by focusing on social media text data and (i) conducting a review of psychometric validation efforts in social media text mining (SMTM) for personality assessment and discussing additional work that needs to be done; (ii) considering additional validity issues from the standpoint of reference (i.e. ‘ground truth’) and causality (i.e. how personality determines variations in scores derived from SMTM); and (iii) discussing the unique issues of generalizability when validating SMTM for personality assessment across different social media platforms and populations. In doing so, we explicate the key validity and validation issues that need to be considered as a field to advance SMTM for personality assessment, and, more generally, machine learning personality assessment methods. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Diagnostic validity statistics and the MCMI-III

This article (a) describes and illustrates the nonredundant and clinically important information that may be obtained from 5 diagnostic validity statistics (DVSs): incremental validities of positive and negative test diagnoses, Cohen's kappas, Cohen's effect sizes, and areas under receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and (b) determines values of these DVSs for 24 Million Multiaxial Clinical Inventory III scales from results reported in 1994 and 1997 validity studies. The DVSs for the 1997 study (T. Millon, R. Davis, & C. Millon, 1997) were often more than 3 times larger than corresponding DVSs for the 1994 study (T. Millon, 1994). The author suggests these large differences could reflect not only effects of factors that caused underestimation of validities by DVSs of the 1994 study, but also effects of factors that may have caused overestimation of validities by DVSs of the 1997 study.     

Empathy in families of women with borderline personality disorder, anorexia nervosa, and a control group

This is a study of empathy in the families of 27 women with borderline personality disorder (BPD), 28 women with restricting anorexia nervosa (AN), and 27 women without a clinical diagnosis (NC). The daughters and both parents responded to the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), an instrument for assessing four dimensions of empathy. In addition, they were personally interviewed, with the Family Interview for Protectiveness and Empathy (FIPE), about the extent of empathy expressed by the parents to their daughter during her development. On the IRI, women with BPD scored highest on the immature and lowest on the mature aspects of empathy, whereas scores of AN and NC women were all within normal limits. Parents of BPDs had the lowest IRI scores, while parents of AN and NC groups were similar to each other and to criterion group scores. IRI scores of AN daughters were positively correlated with their parents' scores whereas BPDs' scores were negatively correlated with those of their parents. There were no correlations between the IRI scores of NC subjects and their parents. On the FIPE, borderline daughters and parents agreed about the relative absence of empathic parenting, whereas AN and NC daughters and parents agreed as to the presence of empathic parenting. The theoretical and clinical implications of these contrasting findings are discussed.     

The role of reinforcement contingencies in chronic alcoholism: An experimental analysis of one case

investigators have questioned chronic alcoholics and round that some of them have returned to normal social drinking (Davies, 1962; Lemere, 1953; Nørvig and Nielsen, 1956; Selzer and Holloway. 1957; and Shea, 1954). These findings would seem inconsistent with such notions as loss of control or craving as the basis of compulsive drinking. Moreover, antecedents and consequences of these explanatory constructs, have not been elucidated. The purpose of this research was to make an intensive study of a single subject to see if specific conditions could be identified under which a chronic alcoholic's drinking could be controlled, in a setting in which environmental variables could be systematically varied and drinking behavior documented.     

How Should a Speech Recognizer Work?

Although researchers studying human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) share a common interest in how information processing systems (human or machine) recognize spoken language, there is little communication between the two disciplines. We suggest that this lack of communication follows largely from the fact that research in these related fields has focused on the mechanics of how speech can be recognized. In Marr's (1982) terms, emphasis has been on the algorithmic and implementational levels rather than on the computational level. In this article, we provide a computational-level analysis of the task of speech recognition, which reveals the close parallels between research concerned with HSR and ASR. We illustrate this relation by presenting a new computational model of human spoken-word recognition, built using techniques from the field of ASR that, in contrast to current existing models of HSR, recognizes words from real speech input.     

Biases of success rate differences shown in binomial effect size displays

The intent of a binomial effect size display (BESD) is to show "the [real-world] importance of [an] effect indexed by a correlation [r]" (R. Rosenthal, 1994, p. 242) by reexpressing this correlation as a success rate difference (SRD) (e.g., treatment group success rate-control group success rate). However, SRDs displayed in BESDs generally overestimate real-world SRDs implied by correlations of (a) dichotomous X and Y variables (phi coefficients), (b) dichotomous X and continuous Y variables (point-biserial coefficients [rpbs]). and (c) continuous X and Y variables (rxys). Furthermore, overestimation biases are larger for rxys than for rpbs. Differences in the sizes of biases linked to different correlations suggest that BESD SRDs reported for different correlations are not comparable. The stochastic difference index (N. Cliff, 1993: A. Vargha & H. D. Delaney, 2000) is recommended as an alternative to the BESD.     

Reducing conflicts between motor vehicles and pedestrians: the separate and combined effects of pavement markings and a sign prompt

The effects of a symbolic "yield here to pedestrians" sign and advance yield pavement markings on pedestrian/motor vehicle conflicts, motorists' yielding behavior, and the distance motorists' yield in advance of crosswalks were evaluated at multilane crosswalks at uncontrolled T intersections. In Experiment 1, the sign, when used alone, reduced pedestrian/motor vehicle conflicts and increased motorist yielding distance. The use of fluorescent yellow-green sheeting as the background of the sign did not increase the effectiveness of the sign. Further reductions in pedestrian/motor vehicle conflicts and further increases in yielding distance were associated with the addition of advance yield pavement markings. In Experiment 2, advance yield pavement markings, when used alone, were as effective in reducing pedestrian/motor vehicle conflicts and increasing yielding distance as the sign combined with pavement markings. These data suggest that the pavement markings were the essential component for reducing conflicts and increasing yielding distance.