Empathy deficits and sexual offending: A model of obstacles to empathy

Theoretical models of the role of empathy in sexual offending agree on five components relevant to the experience of empathy: a respectful and compassionate orientation to others, perspective taking, affective responding, the ability to manage personal distress, and situational factors. We identify overlap between these components of the empathic process and established risk factors for sexual offending and create a model detailing potential blocks to the empathic process during sexual offending. The model has external consistency and useful implications for interventions with sex offenders. Viewed in the light of this model, we argue that current sex offender treatment programs spend a disproportionate amount of time examining empathy for past victims. We recommend, instead, that treatment aims to enhance offenders' abilities in relation to the components of the empathic process more generally, using creative and engaging techniques akin to those used to develop “victim empathy”.     

Emotion at Work: To What Extent are We Expressing,Suppressing, or Faking It?

Emotions and emotion management are a prominent feature of organizational life and the concept of emotional labour was coined to describe the effort required to fake or suppress an emotional display because of the demands of the work role. Although much qualitative work has been conducted to investigate emotional labour, no attempts have been made to measure the degree to which this emotion work occurs. This omission is partly due to the difficulties in defining the construct and dimensions of emotional labour and this article discusses previous attempts at definition and reconceptualizes the concept in order to allow the development of a measurement tool. The process of development and testing of the tool within 12 UK companies is the focus of the remainder of the article and leads directly to the first quantitative answer to the question, to what extent are we expressing, suppressing, and faking emotion at work? Results suggest that emotional labour is performed in almost two-thirds of workplace communications, both at and away from the frontline. Implications for practitioners and researchers are outlined.     

Long‐term Effects of Dieting: Is Weight Loss Related to Health?

“Success” in dieting interventions has traditionally been defined as weight loss. It is implicit in this definition that losing weight will lead to improved health, and yet, health outcomes are not routinely included in studies of diets. In this article, we evaluate whether weight loss improves health by reviewing health outcomes of long‐term randomized controlled diet studies. We examine whether weight‐loss diets lead to improved cholesterol, triglycerides, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and fasting blood glucose and test whether the amount of weight lost is predictive of these health outcomes. Across all studies, there were minimal improvements in these health outcomes, and none of these correlated with weight change. A few positive effects emerged, however, for hypertension and diabetes medication use and diabetes and stroke incidence. We conclude by discussing factors that potentially confound the relationship between weight loss and health outcomes, such as increased exercise, healthier eating, and engagement with the health care system, and we provide suggestions for future research.     

Film Review

Tell Me Who Is Haunting You and I'll Tell You Who You Are. A Reading of the film Sixth Sense dir. M. Night Shyamalan (1999)     

The effects of receptive language training on articulation

The present study attempted to assess one condition of language exposure that might be operative in a normal environment, and experimentally determine its relevance to the acquisition of productive speech. The results demonstrated that the development of receptive language skills can be functionally related to productive speech. Specifically, the data indicated that exposure to words that have stimulus control over a subject's nonverbal pointing behavior can facilitate later articulation of those same words. Thus, this study draws attention to the fact that at least some classes of operants, in this case verbal, can be affected not only by their consequences, but by not obviously related antecedent events as well.