Specificity of the MMPI-2 Fake Bad Scale as a marker for personal injury malingering

Psychologists who evaluate patients in medicolegal contexts should utilize objective assessment data with empirically established sensitivity and specificity for identifying negative response bias. The purpose of this study was to investigate the specificity of the Fake Bad Scale for identifying negative response bias in personal injury claimants. The cutoff scores proposed by Lees-Haley and colleagues were applied a federal prison, medical outpatients, and patients from to inmate volunteers from substance abuse unit. Half of the inmates were given instructions to malinger psychopathology to affect the adjudication process, and the remaining inmates and all of the hospital patients were given standard instructions. The original cutoff scores correctly identified the majority of inmates instructed to malinger psychopathology, but these scores resulted in unacceptably high rates of false positive classifications. The revised cutoff scores resulted in fewer false positives, i.e., 8%-24%.     

Perceptual match effects in direct tests of memory: the role of contextual fan

The aim of the present study was to determine whether physical attributes of a memory representation would affect explicit memory performance and, if so, what type of factors would affect the size of a perceptual match effect. Subjects studied words in different, uncommon fonts and were later asked whether the word had been studied earlier. Words could be re-presented in the original font, a font studied with another word, or a font not seen earlier. In two additional experiments, we varied the numbers of words studied in the same unusual font (1 vs. 12 words per font). Recognition memory for the words was better if the test and study fonts matched, and this effect was larger for fonts not shared with other words. Moreover, old judgments were most likely to be classified as remember responses when words were re-presented in the same font when it had not been studied with other words. Although we found a significant effect of levels of processing, this factor did not interact with whether the font matched between study and test. These results are consistent with the predictions of the source of activation confusion model of memory and suggest that perceptual information operates according to the same memory principles as conceptual information.     

Tactile perception in blind Braille readers: a psychophysical study of acuity and hyperacuity using gratings and dot patterns

It is not clear whether the blind are generally superior to the sighted on measures of tactile sensitivity or whether they excel only on certain tests owing to the specifics of their tactile experience. We compared the discrimination performance of blind Braille readers and age-matched sighted subjects on three tactile tasks using precisely specified stimuli. Initially, the blind significantly outperformed the sighted at a hyperacuity task using Braille-like dot patterns, although, with practice, both groups performed equally well. On two other tasks, hyperacute discrimination of gratings that differed in ridge width and spatial-acuity-dependent discrimination of grating orientation, the performance of the blind did not differ significantly from that of sighted subjects. These results probably reflect the specificity of perceptual learning due to Braille-reading experience.     

Through their own eyes: a media-based group approach to adolescent trauma

This paper describes the process of two groups of students from high schools located in the immediate vicinity of the World Trade Center grappling to make sense of the events of September 11 through the creation of a documentary chronicling their experiences. The process of creating these videos mirrored the process and curative factors of a psychotherapy group in a non-stigmatizing, innovative, and accessible format, one generated by the students themselves with the assistance of professionals in the visual and performing arts. After reviewing the literature on the potential impact of violence on adolescents and the use of group treatment, especially in school settings, as an optimal choice for this population, we describe the distinctive process of the two separate groups of students, each culminating in different expressions of their very personal experience of September 11. We understand and contextualize their process through the lens of the therapeutic dynamics and elements of group work.     

The interaction of payoff structure and regulatory focus in classification

This report brings together research on motivation and learning by exploring how fit of regulatory focus affects people's ability to acquire new categories. Perceptual categories were learned by people with a promotion focus (a situationally determined sensitivity to gains) or a prevention focus (a sensitivity to losses). Classification performance was closest to optimal (as determined by models fit to individual subjects' data) when the regulatory focus matched the structure of the payoffs for the categories. Promotion-focus subjects performed best when the payoffs consisted of all gains. Prevention-focus subjects performed best when the payoffs consisted of all losses.     

Childhood amnesia in children and adolescents: their earliest memories

Investigations of childhood amnesia have almost exclusively focused on the earliest memories of adults. Here we investigate the earliest memories of children of 6--19 years old. Parents confirmed the memory events and dated the memories. There were surprisingly few developmental differences between the earliest memories of children. Although 6--9-year-olds recalled earlier events than did older children, there were no differences between older age groups. Memories from all age groups were similar in structure, social orientation, and the nature of the recalled event. However, memories of older children were more likely to involve negative affect. There were also few gender differences, although girls were more likely to recall traumatic or transitional events while boys were more likely to recall play events. Overall, results deepen the paradox of early memory: 6--9-year-olds have verbally accessible memories from very early childhood that then seem to disappear as they get older.     

Differential fan effect and attentional focus

As people study more facts about a concept, it takes longer to retrieve a particular fact about that concept. This fan effect (Anderson, 1974) has been attributed to competition among associations to a concept. Alternatively, the mental-model theory (Radvansky & Zacks, 1991) suggests that the fan effect disappears when the related concepts are organized into a single mental model. In the present study, attentional focus was manipulated to affect the mental model to be constructed. One group of participants focused on the person dimension of personlocation pairs, whereas the other group focused on the location dimension. The result showed that the fan effect with the focused dimension was greater than the fan effect with the nonfocused dimension, which is contrary to the mental-model theory. The number of associations with a concept is indeed crucial during retrieval, and the importance of the information seems to be accentuated with attentional focus.     

Cognitive modeling analysis of decision-making processes in cocaine abusers

This article examines the theoretical basis of decision-making deficits exhibited by cocaine abusers in a laboratory decision-making task first described by Bechara, Damasio, Damasio, and Anderson (1994). A total of 12 male cocaine abusers and 14 comparison subjects performed the task, and the cocaine group performed significantly worse than the comparison group. A cognitive modeling analysis (Busemeyer & Stout, 2002) was used to estimate three parameters that measure importance of the cognitive, motivational, and response processes for determining the observed performance deficit. The results of this analysis indicated, for the first time, that motivational and choice consistency factors, but not learning/ memory were mainly responsible for the decision-making deficit of the cocaine abusers in this task.     

GENDER AS A FACTOR IN THE RESPONSE OF THE LAW-ENFORCEMENT SYSTEM TO VIOLENCE AGAINST PARTNERS

…it is the worst oppression, that is done by colour of justice --Sir Edward Coke A sign that says "men only" looks very different on a bathroom door than on a courthouse door. --U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall "Is Parkinson's the toughest opponent you've ever faced, Muhammed?" someone asked. "Toughest was my first wife," he said. --Former World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Muhammed Ali A great deal of sociological evidence has been collected in the past three decades on the prevalence of abuse among adult heterosexual partners in domestic relationships of some degree of permanence. Partly as a result of this information, partner abuse has been identified as an important social ill that must be addressed aggressively through public-awareness campaigns, the funding of a broad range of support services, and the re-training of law-enforcement authorities--including police, prosecutors, and judges. However, in at least one important respect, these policy initiatives diverge substantially from what the sociological data, which ostensibly motivates them, would indicate: they have been, to date, overwhelmingly gender specific. That is, partner abuse is routinely portrayed and acted upon as though it were almost exclusively about men abusing and victimizing innocent women and, by extension, their children--despite the overwhelming sociological evidence that a significant amount of abuse is also suffered by male partners. Persistent anecdotal reports from victims and even some participants in the law-enforcement system suggest that this ideological emphasis on the male as perpetrator has had a deleterious effect on the impartial administration of justice, resulting in men being treated much more harshly than women who are accused of partner violence. This study attempts to determine whether the anecdotes are scientifically supportable.     

The formation of the therapeutic alliance in couple therapy

This study examines the predictive validity of several clinical variables--including marital distress, individual symptomatology, and family-of-origin experiences--on the formation of the alliance in couple therapy. Eighty people who were treated with a naturalistic course of integrative conjoint psychotherapy at a large midwestern outpatient clinic were assessed on the clinical variables before session 1. They also completed ratings of the therapeutic alliance after sessions 1 and 8. Individual symptomatology did not predict alliance formation at either treatment stage. Higher levels of marital distress predicted poorer alliances to treatment between partners at session 1. Marital distress also predicted therapeutic alliance quality for men and women at session 8. Family-of-origin distress predicted alliance quality for men at session 1, and for women at session 8. Family-of-origin distress for men and women predicted split alliances early in treatment, and marital distress predicted split alliances for women at session 8. Clinical implications for the assessment and treatment of couples are discussed.