Improvements to Suicide Prevention Training for Prison Staff in England and Wales

Suicide prevention training for the prison service in England and Wales has been criticized. STORM is a package emphasizing the practice and review of interactions with suicidal persons and was evaluated in a pilot study for use in prisons. Trainees completed questionnaires immediately before and after training and at 6 to 8 months follow‐up. Training significantly improved attitudes, knowledge, and confidence, and improvements were maintained at follow‐up. Satisfaction with training was very high. STORM was successfully adapted for prison settings, and showed good effects among staff trained. It should be provided to the wider prison estate, with regular refresher training.     

The Ubiquity of Self-Deception

My paper is a discussion of Bas van Fraassen’s important, but neglected, paper on self-deception, “The Peculiar Effects of Love and Desire.” Paradoxes of self-deception are widely thought to follow from the ease with which we know ourselves. For example, if self-deception were intentional, how could we fail to know as target of our own deception just those things necessary to undermine the deception? Van Fraassen stands that reasoning on its head, arguing that is the ease with which we accuse ourselves of self-deception that undermines our confidence in our claims to know ourselves. I unpack and modify his argument, attempting to show that it makes a powerful case for scepticism about self-knowledge. I argue, contra van Fraassen, that local scepticism about self-knowledge threatens our claims to know ourselves in a way that global scepticism does not threaten our claims about the external world. I support this claim by showing that the Wittgensteinian response to the sceptic in On Certainty—that we don’t know what to do with the sceptic’s doubts, that we don’t know how to incorporate those doubts into our practices—does not succeed in deflecting scepticism about self-knowledge because the local sceptic’s doubts—about whether we can distinguish genuine claims to know ourselves from self-deceived claims—are integral to language game of self-knowledge. The local sceptic’s doubts are our doubts because it is natural to ask whether we are deceiving ourselves when we claim to know ourselves. However, because, we have no way of distinguishing genuine claims to know ourselves from self-deceived claims, our claims to self-knowledge are systematically undermined.     

On-line brain stimulation: Measurement of threshold of reinforcement

This program and interface for a small computer (PDP8/e) performs the following operations: generates and delivers constant current stimulation to the brain of an animal, monitors electrical resistance at the stimulating electrode, and calculates the threshold of reinforcement based upon the frequency of characteristic pauses in the animal’s responding.     

Aging faces as viscal-elastic events: implications for a theory of nonrigid shape perception.

A theory for the perception of events is proposed using the concepts of transformational and structural invariants. This approach involves the application of a method of spatial coordinate transformation to characterize the remodeling of faces by growth. By construing growing faces to the viscal-elastic events, the perception of the relative age level faces in made amenable to the proposed event perception analysis. Shear and strain transformation are compared as alternative formulations of growth-produced changes in the shape of human profiles. Thes studies indicate that profiles transformed by strain elicit more reliable rank-order age judgments than those transformed by shear, although shear had a small significant effect. It is also shown that subjects are highly sensitive to small changes in strain, and that perceived identity of a shape is preserved under the strain transformation. The explanatory adequacy of the event perception theory of age information is compared to that of more traditional feature analytic theories.     

An investigation of relative preference for consistency motivation

The present experiment was designed to determine relative preference for fulfillment of consistency motivation. Ninety-two students rated their attraction to, identification with, and idealization of a hypothetical stimulus person who was represented as having fulfilled particular social motives such as approval, power, achievement and consistency. Results confirmed that subjects prefer persons who have satisfied traditional needs more so than others whose consistency desires have been fulfilled. Implications for the role of consistency motivation in social behavior are considered.