Identifying persons feigning limitations in their competence to proceed in the legal process

Accurate assessment of the response styles criminal defendants adopt when undergoing evaluations of their competence to proceed with the legal process is critical because some feign limitations in their abilities in an attempt to delay or avoid prosecution. This study examined the utility of the Inventory of Legal Knowledge (ILK) to identify persons motivated to feign competence related limitations. That the ILK has good potential as a screening tool is indicated by findings that the measure (1) has adequate test–retest reliability and (2) classified correctly the large majority of participants in two samples (i.e., college students and psychiatric patients) who completed the measure under “honest” or “fake bad” conditions. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Self‐Control Moderates Decision‐Making Behavior When Minimizing Losses versus Maximizing Gains

We examined (1) whether people would be more responsive to the delayed consequences of their decisions when attempting to minimize losses than when attempting to maximize gains in a history‐dependent decision‐making task and (2) how trait self‐control would moderate such an effect. In two experiments, participants performed a dynamic decision‐making task where they chose one of two options on each trial. The increasing option always gave a smaller immediate reward but caused future rewards for both options to increase. The decreasing option always gave a larger immediate reward but caused future rewards for both options to decrease. In Experiment 1 where the two options had equivalent expected value in the long run, participants were more prone to select the increasing option, which yielded larger benefits on future trials, in the loss‐minimization condition than in the gain‐maximization condition. Trait self‐control moderated the effect of losses by enhancing the effect for low self‐control participants while attenuating it for high self‐control participants. In Experiment 2 where selecting the increasing option was suboptimal, low self‐control participants still attempted to reduce losses on future trials by selecting the increasing option more often than high self‐control participants. These results suggest that decision makers value delayed consequences of their actions more in a losses domain relative to a gains domain and low self‐control individuals are more susceptible to such an effect. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Transference-Focused Psychotherapy for Borderline Adolescents: A Neurobiologically Informed Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

In this article we first contextualize and then outline a model of TFP adapted for working with adolescents with Borderline Personality Disorders. We discuss how to take the normal developmental challenges of adolescence, such as separation-individuation in consideration, and how to support this in the context of the therapeutic work, while at the same time stimulating curiosity through clarification and confronting the adolescent with self-defeating and destructive patterns and dangerous behavior. Furthermore, we give examples of working with split–off parts of self and other representations through clarification to increase self-awareness and confrontations with contradictions within the adolescents communication and nonverbal behavior, with the aim of facilitating the integration of identity.     

The Development of a Personal View of the Psychoanalytic Field

This paper summarizes the development of my professional identity as psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. It describes the influences on my dedication to the study of severe personality disorders, namely, the training experiences I had under the guidance of Ignacio Matte-Blanco, in Chile; the research team of Jerome Franck at Johns Hopkins; the work in the Psychotherapy Research Project of the Menninger Foundation under Robert Wallerstein, my personal working relationship in New York, with Edith Jacobson, Margaret Mahler, the introduction to British Psychoanalysis by John Sutherland, and to French analysis in sabbatical times in Paris. I conclude by a brief overview of my theoretical orientation, combining ego psychological, object relations, and Kleinian approaches in the development of a synthesis that inspired my present research on the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of severe personality disorders.     

Cortisol,stress, and attentional bias toward threat

Abstract

Attentional bias toward threatening stimuli is a central characteristic of anxiety and acute stress. Recent small-scale studies have provided divergent perspectives on the association between the stress hormone cortisol and attentional bias toward threat cues. In a larger sample size than previous studies, we examined this association by investigating the impact of cortisol on attentional bias in two studies using a psychological stressor (N=35) and a physical stressor (N=65), respectively. Attentional bias and salivary cortisol were measured prior to and following the administration of a stressful task designed to increase cortisol levels. Results across these studies were equivocal relative to the association between baseline cortisol and baseline attentional bias. In addition, the association between acute change in cortisol and change in attentional bias appeared to differ as a function of the presence or absence of psychological stress. There was a trend toward a stronger negative association between acute cortisol change and attentional bias change among women relative to men. These results imply that the association between cortisol and attentional bias may be moderated by additional factors, such as gender or presence of stress.     

Acceptance and Mindfulness Techniques as Applied to Refugee and Ethnic Minority Populations With PTSD: Examples From "Culturally Adapted CBT"

In this article we illustrate how we utilize acceptance and mindfulness techniques in our treatment (Culturally Adapted CBT, or CA-CBT) for traumatized refugees and ethnic minority populations. We present a Nodal Network Model (NNM) of Affect to explain the treatment's emphasis on body-centered mindfulness techniques and its focus on psychological flexibility. We explain the definition of mindfulness that guides our treatment, and we outline a typology of mindfulness states and show how many of the techniques in our treatment can be analyzed by these categories. We argue that acceptance and mindfulness are therapeutic for refugees and minority populations for several reasons. These include their increasing psychological flexibility, decreasing somatic distress, decreasing rumination, serving as emotion regulation techniques, decreasing the attentional bias to threat, and forming part of a new adaptive processing mode (which in CA-CBT centers on psychological flexibility). We describe the specific ways we teach acceptance and mindfulness with Latino and Southeast Asian refugee populations and present case examples of the treatment of a traumatized Latino and Cambodian patient.     

Jesus in Hollywood The Cinematic Jesus in a Christological and Contemporary Perspective

This article discusses what early Christian literary sources (Didascalia, the Apostolic Constitutions and Canons and John Chrysostom) say about the upbringing of children. It centres around three aspects:(1) the responsibility of parents to rear children in accordance with Christian ideals, including the responsibility to carry out the upbringing in daily life, (2) its goal and (3) its substance and methods. To put the ideals of the Christian texts in their wider cultural context, the article gives a brief outline of relevant aspects of the upbringing of children in the Greco-Roman world. The Christian sources seem to emphasise even more than pagan authors the need for moral formation, which is the ultimate goal of the upbringing, and argue that, in the end, the parents’ salvation depends on taking this task seriously. The texts reflect the ideal that it is mainly the parents themselves, and not nurses or other servants, who should carry out the Christian formation. Controlling the social lives of children and and leading them into a comprehensive life of piety are seen as significant. The Christian texts argue for a more extensive use of corporal punishment than the classical ideal of the bonus paterfamilias indicated.     

Wege der wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung

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