The lntergenerational transmission of family violence: The long-term effects of aggressive behavior

This paper examines the contention that family violence is passed down from generation to generation. The sample was primarily nonclinical and was composed of 14 clients of community guidance clinics and 82 members of a randomly selected control group. The primary hypothesis that individuals who are exposed to a high degree of physical punishment as children are more likely to resort to family violence as adults was supported. Studies of the modeling of aggression were examined to suggest factors which may mediate the hypothesized relationship. It was found that respondents who had grown up in an environment characterized by either low family warmth or high stress in combination with exposure to a high degree of parental punishment were more likely to use physical punishment in their own families. Also, family violence was more likely to be transmitted in same-sex rather than cross-sex linkages.     

Recognition of facial affect in psychopathic offenders

The authors examined the reliability of facial affect processing deficits found in psychopathic individuals (R. Blair et al., 2004) and whether they could be modified by attentional set. One hundred eleven offenders, classified using the Psychopathy Checklist--Revised (R. Hare, 2003) and Welsh Anxiety Scale (G. Welsh, 1956), performed a facial affect recognition task under 2 conditions. On the basis of research linking psychopathy, amygdala dysfunction, and deficits in facial affect recognition, the authors predicted that psychopathic offenders would display performance deficits when required to identify the emotional expression of particular faces. In addition, given evidence linking the affective processing deficits in psychopathy to focus of attention, the authors predicted that any deficits in facial affect processing would disappear when participants could anticipate which affective cues would be relevant on a given trial. Contrary to expectation, psychopathic offenders performed as well as controls in both conditions. The authors conclude that the conditions that reveal affective deficits in psychopathic individuals require further specification.     

Effects of comorbid psychopathy on criminal offending and emotion processing in male offenders with antisocial personality disorder

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and psychopathy are two syndromes with substantial construct validity. To clarify relations between these syndromes, the authors evaluated 3 possibilities: (a) that ASPD with psychopathy and ASPD without psychopathy reflect a common underlying pathophysiology; (b) that ASPD with psychopathy and ASPD without psychopathy identify 2 distinct syndromes, similar in some respects; and (c) that most correlates of ASPD reflect its comorbidity with psychopathy. Participants were 472 incarcerated European American men who met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (4th ed., American Psychiatric Association, 1994) criteria for ASPD and Psychopathy Checklist criteria for psychopathy, who met the criteria for ASPD but not for psychopathy, or who did not meet diagnostic criteria for either ASPD or psychopathy (controls). Both individuals with ASPD only and those with ASPD and psychopathy were characterized by more criminal activity than were controls. In addition, ASPD with psychopathy was associated with more severe criminal behavior and weaker emotion facilitation than ASPD alone. Group differences in the association between emotion dysfunction and criminal behavior suggest tentatively that ASPD with and ASPD without prominent psychopathic features may be distinct syndromes.     

Activation of face expertise and the inversion effect

We used a contextual priming paradigm to examine top-down influences on the face-inversion effect. Adult participants were primed with either faces or Chinese characters and then tested on ambiguous figures that could be perceived as either faces or Chinese characters, dependent on the priming condition. The ambiguous figures differed from one another in their configural information, which is crucial for processing faces but not Chinese characters. The inversion effect was observed in the face-priming condition, but not in the character-priming condition. The present results provide the first direct evidence that top-down activation of the face-processing expertise system plays a crucial role in the face-inversion effect.     

The Jerusalem TeleRehabilitation System, a new low-cost, haptic rehabilitation approach.

Survivors of brain injury or stroke can improve movement ability with intensive, supervised practice. Since the hours of supervised therapy with a physical or occupational therapist are limited, telerehabilitation will enable patients to greatly expand the hours that they practice therapeutic exercises. The Jerusalem TeleRehabilitation System (JTRS) consists of patient and therapist systems plus a central server and database connected via the internet. The system can work in two modes: (1) a cooperative mode in which the therapist and patient are online at the same time, and (2) a stand-alone mode in which the patient uses the system on his own. In both cases, the system will monitor the status and progress of the patient and various parameters of his movement abilities, and prepare reports for the patient and for the therapist. From the clinic, the therapist will be able to change the screen seen by the patient and change the level and types of tasks, as needed. Compared to existing systems, our system will have the following advantages: (1) inexpensive and easy to use; (2) remote monitoring and control of the patient's computer by the therapist in the clinic; (3) more detailed analysis of patient status and progress; (4) a "smart" system which self-adapts to the patient's capabilities in real time, increasing or decreasing the difficulty of the exercise as needed; and (5) a central, international database which, by gathering data on many patients over time, will provide the basis for "smart" therapy and will also facilitate coordinated multicenter research studies.     

Intuitive Hedonism

The hoary philosophical tradition of hedonism – the view that pleasure is the basic ethical or normative value – suggests that it is at least reasonably and roughly intuitive. But philosophers no longer treat hedonism that way. For the most part, they think that they know it to be obviously false on intuitive grounds, much more obviously false on such grounds than familiar competitors. I argue that this consensus is wrong. I defend the intuitive cogency of hedonism relative to the dominant desire-based and objectivist conceptions of well-being and the good. I argue that hedonism is still a contender, and indeed that our current understanding of commonsense intuition on balance supports it. An erratum to this article is available at .