The New Orleans Forensic Aftercare Clinic: a seven year review of hospital discharged and jail diverted clients

This paper provides a review of the Forensic Aftercare Clinic Conditional Release Program (FAC), which has been operating since December, 1995, in New Orleans, LA. The FAC is a community based program that provides clinical, rehabilitative, and supervisory services to individuals who have been found not guilty by reason of insanity or unrestorably incompetent to proceed and who have been discharged from inpatient settings or diverted from jail settings and placed on conditional release by district court orders. 119 clients participated in FAC over a 7 year period. Forty-one (34.4%) had their conditional release revoked. Of the total population, 12 (10.1%) were re-arrested on at least one charge, 3 (2.4%) were arrested on felony charges, and 9 (7.6%) on misdemeanors. Only two of these charges were violent, resulting in no significant harm to victims. Twenty (16.8%) were hospitalized at least once due to relapse. Clients diverted from jail to community settings did not differ significantly on most variables from clients who were discharged from long-term hospitalization. Data related to public safety and client diversion demonstrate that clients, when appropriate, can be safely diverted to the community in lieu of hospitalization. The number of statewide clients who have been discharged from the forensic hospital into the community has increased steadily from 13 in 1995 to 29 in 2002, and statewide diversion clients have steadily increased from 0 in 1992 to 20 in 2002. The increase in statewide diversion clients and forensic discharges over this 7 year period indicates that stakeholders see the viability of the program as an alternative to as well as a step-down from long-term forensic hospitalization.     

“If I didn’t write it,why would I remember it?” Effects of encoding,attention, and practice on accurate and false memory

In two experiments involving recall and recognition, we manipulated encoding strategies, attention, and practice in the Deese, Roediger, and McDermott false memory procedure. During the study of auditory word lists, participants listened to the words, wrote the words, wrote the second letter of the words, or counted backward by threes and wrote numbers in time with the words. The results from both experiments showed that, relative to the full-attention hear word condition, the divided-attention write number condition impaired accurate memory, but not false memory. In contrast, the focused-attention write word and write second letter conditions were comparable to the hear word condition in producing accurate memory, yet they were better at reducing false memory. But even after multiple study-test trials, people still falsely recalled or recognized words that they had never written during study. These results are consistent with predictions generated from fuzzy trace theory and the activation/monitoring framework.     

The processing of pseudohomophones by adults with a history of developmental language disabilities

Psuedohomophones are nonwords that sound like real words (e.g., BRANE). These items were used to gauge phonological access in adults who have experienced developmental language processing deficits (DLD). The standard effect for these items in lexical decision is an increase in response times over nonpseudohomophone nonwords. This disadvantage reflects phonological processing. In our first experiment the DLD group did not produce this pseudohomophone effect whereas in a second experiment they showed semantic priming effects when pseudohomophones were used as primes in lexical decision. The results therefore indicate that phonological processing of nonwords by adults with DLD can be uncovered under certain carefully controlled experimental conditions.     

Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles

We report three studies investigating children's and adults' comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle only. In Experiments 1 and 2, four groups of participants (6-7 years, 8-10 years, 11-12 years and adult) compared sentences with only in different syntactic positions against pictures that matched or mismatched events described by the sentence. Contrary to previous findings (Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing and modularity. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Philip, W., & Lynch, E. (1999). Felicity, relevance, and acquisition of the grammar of every and only. In S. C. Howell, S. A. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University conference on language development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press) we found that young children predominantly made errors by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to restrict the scope of the particle. Experiment 3 replicated these findings with pre-schoolers.     

Judging mens rea: the tension between folk concepts and legal concepts of intentionality

Concepts such as intention, motive, or forethought have generated a great deal of doubt, dispute, and confusion in legal decision making. Here we argue for an empirically based strategy of defining and using such mens rea concepts. Instead of the standard approach of settling these concepts by theoretical argument and the debaters' own intuitions, we rely on social psychological research to determine the meaning and significance of folk concepts concerning mens rea. We demonstrate the reliable and systematic use of people's concept of intentionality, contrast it with the bewildering variety of related legal concepts, and apply the folk model of intentionality to debated distinctions between intention and intentionality, desire and intention, and belief and intention. This folk-conceptual approach promises clarity of mens rea concepts and a reconciliation of the legal and layperson's view of human behavior.     

New developments in electroconvulsive therapy and magnetic seizure therapy

New findings regarding the mechanisms of action of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) have led to novel developments in treatment technique to further improve this highly effective treatment for major depression. These new approaches include novel placements, optimization of electrical stimulus parameters, and new methods for inducing more targeted seizures(eg, magnetic seizure therapy [MST]). MST is the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation to induce a seizure. Magnetic fields pass through tissue unimpeded, providing more control over the site and extent of stimulation than can be achieved with ECT. This enhanced control represents a means of focusing the treatment on target cortical structures thought to be essential to antidepressant response and reducing spread to medial temporal regions implicated in the cognitive side effects of ECT. MST is at an early stage of development. Preliminary results suggest that MST may have some advantages over ECT in terms of subjective side effects and acute cognitive functioning. Studies designed to address the antidepressant efficacy of MST are underway. As with all attempts to improve convulsive therapy technique, the clinical value of MST will need to be established through controlled clinical trials. This article reviews the experience to date with MST, and places this work in the broader context of other means of optimizing convulsive therapy in the treatment of depression.     

Universal sex differences in the desire for sexual variety: tests from 52 nations, 6 continents,and 13 islands

Evolutionary psychologists have hypothesized that men and women possess both long-term and short-term mating strategies, with men's short-term strategy differentially rooted in the desire for sexual variety. In this article, findings from a cross-cultural survey of 16,288 people across 10 major world regions (including North America, South America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Oceania, South/Southeast Asia, and East Asia) demonstrate that sex differences in the desire for sexual variety are culturally universal throughout these world regions. Sex differences were evident regardless of whether mean, median, distributional, or categorical indexes of sexual differentiation were evaluated. Sex differences were evident regardless of the measures used to evaluate them. Among contemporary theories of human mating, pluralistic approaches that hypothesize sex differences in the evolved design of short-term mating provide the most compelling account of these robust empirical findings.     

Referential understanding of videos in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), and children (Homo sapiens)

Performance on identical search tasks based on cues directly perceived or indirectly perceived through video were compared among a group of 4 adult chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), a group of 2 adult orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), and a group of 36 children (between 2 and 3 years of age). Children comprehended directly perceived cues but had difficulty with video cues. In contrast, chimpanzees and 1 orangutan were successful in using video to guide their search for a hidden object. Two follow-up studies with 3-year-old children demonstrated the importance of more distinct perceptual and verbal cues in aiding children's understanding of video as referring to real-world events.     

Time and resource limits on working memory: cross-age consistency in counting span performance

This longitudinal study separated resource demand effects from those of retention interval in a counting span task among 100 children tested in grade 2 and again in grades 3 and 4. A last card large counting span condition had an equivalent memory load to a last card small, but the last card large required holding the count over a longer retention interval. In all three waves of assessment, the last card large condition was found to be less accurate than the last card small. A model predicting reading comprehension showed that age was a significant predictor when entered first accounting for 26% of the variance, but counting span accounted for a further 22% of the variance. Span at Wave 1 accounted for significant unique variance at Wave 2 and at Wave 3. Results were similar for math calculation with age accounting for 31% of the variance and counting span accounting for a further 34% of the variance. Span at Wave 1 explained unique variance in math at Wave 2 and at Wave 3.     

Reading disappearing text: cognitive control of eye movements

Participants read sentences containing high- or low-frequency target words under normal reading conditions or disappearing-text conditions (in which the word that was fixated disappeared after 60 ms). Even though the fixated word had disappeared after 60 ms, there was still a robust frequency effect wherein readers fixated longer on low-frequency words than on high-frequency words. Thus, the results are consistent with cognitive-control models of eye movement control and inconsistent with visual/oculomotor-control models. Although the uptake of visual information is clearly important for reading, it is the cognitive processes associated with understanding the fixated words that drive the eyes through the text.