Impacting Awareness of Child Abuse through a Performing Arts Project

A folk opera, AVE, explored issues of child abuse, sexual assault and violence through the character of Mary Magdelene. Using indigenous religious folklore images, Magdelene is befriended by Jesus's mother and healed of her childhood wound through a religious conversion. Six hundred secondary students attended three daytime performances and 486 returned a Likert‐scaled questionnaire. Results indicated most students perceived abuse as a personally relevant, real social problem, with felt relevance increasing with age. Significant trends supported initial expectations with an increase in community and personal awareness of child abuse/sexual assault and an increase in personal and community interest in helping others. Community risk factors contributing to denial of abuse were explored. More Hispanics responded positively to the sense of benefit. Findings suggest that performing arts can help increase awareness of child abuse as well as help stimulate personal and community interest in helping. This benefit increases with teacher discussion and age.     

Act First and Look Up the Law Afterward?: Medical Malpractice and the Ethics of Defensive Medicine

This essay examines the so-called phenomenon of "defensive medicine" and the problematic aspects of attempting to maintain the safest legal position possible. While physicians face genuine litigation threats they frequently overestimate legal peril. Many defensive practices are benign, but others alter patient care and increase costs in ways that are ethically suspect. Physicians should learn to evaluate realistically the legal risks of their profession and weigh the emotional, physical, and financial costs to the patient before employing a defensive measure.     

Source Monitoring: ERP Evidence for Greater Reactivity to Nontarget Information in Older Adults

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) were collected concurrently with stimulus presentation during a source monitoring task. Younger adults were less likely than older adults to make source monitoring errors and their ERP records showed far greater discrimination between target stimuli and familiar but nontarget foils. Older adults not only made more source errors but produced high amplitude late positivities to the nontarget foils even when these foils were correctly rejected. Under divided attention conditions, younger adults performance was similar to that of the older adults both behaviorally and electrophysiologically. These data illustrate the role that attentional resources play in the ability to inhibit response tendencies and suggest that age differences in source monitoring may be more related to attentional control than inefficiencies in the encoding of contextual information. As well, they suggest that the ERP late positivity may represent a more general response to item salience rather than serve as an index of recollection as is the current view.     

Evaluative Conditioning Is a Form of Associative Learning: On the Artifactual Nature of Field and Davey's (1997) Artifactual Account of Evaluative Learning

Field and Davey (1997) claimed that evaluative conditioning (EC), rather than being a genuine type of Pavlovian associative learning, represents nothing but an experimental artifact. They come to this conclusion by first identifying the prototypical experimental procedure of EC research, by next pointing to the potential methodological shortcomings of this prototypical procedure in order to infer associative learning, and by finally demonstrating that when the appropriate controls are added to this prototypical procedure, it becomes clear that apparent EC results represent nothing but an experimental artifact. In this paper, we first demonstrate that what Field and Davey identify as the “prototypical procedure” is, as a matter of fact, the exception rather than the rule in EC research, such that the potential scope of their criticism is rather limited. Next, we show how the results of their own experiment are actually due to an artifact that is not present in any EC study. Finally, we discuss how Field and Davey's criticism of EC research has its roots in a misconception of the appropriate within or between subject controls for Pavlovian associative learning.     

Female playwrights of the eighteenth century: Shaping the marketplace of love

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Mental health consumer survey on a shoestring budget — it is possible!

Consumers of service in a decentralized unit of a county mental health services organization were surveyed. Two samples, one of 100 and one of 386 former clients, were selected for a questionnaire survey of satisfaction and perception of ensuing changes. This report is offered as an example of what a busy clinical team can accomplish in the midst of its basic task of providing therapeutic and diagnostic help.     

Uncertainty and social comparison

Two experimetnal tests were conducted of a model which predicts social comparison choices of extreme scores on a personality inventory. In groups of nine, subjects completed a bogus personality inventory that ostensibly measured a desirable or undesirable trait, and were told that either the highest or the lowest obtained score was a positive instance of the trait. The highest score was located for the subjects either with certainty or uncertainty, and the two experiments employed different manipulations of this factor. In both experiments the pattern of subjects' social comparison choices of other subjects' scores was fit best by a model comprising main effects of each factor and interactions between desirability and positive instance and between desirability and certainty.