Childhood Maltreatment Increases the Risk of Intimate Partner Violence via PTSD and Anger Personality Traits in Individuals Consulting for Sexual Problems

Childhood maltreatment is a significant risk factor for the perpetration of intimate partner violence (IPV) in adulthood. This study tested, in a clinical sample, a conceptual model suggesting that childhood maltreatment contributes to the development of anger personality traits, directly and indirectly via posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and that anger personality traits, in turn, are associated with IPV. Adults consulting for sex therapy (n = 114) completed self-report measures of childhood maltreatment, PTSD, anger, and IPV. Participants were exposed to high rates of childhood maltreatment (83%). Path analysis supported the hypothesized model: Exposure to child maltreatment was associated with anger personality traits, and this association was partially mediated by PTSD symptoms. Anger personality traits were highly correlated with IPV.     

The link between school climate and violence in school: A meta-analytic review

There has been significant interest in whether and how school climate and violent behavior are meaningfully related. The present meta-analysis reviewed studies reporting a relationship between school climate and school violence in order to summarize the total effect and the direction of these research findings. Database consultation and literature hand searching yielded 145 articles which were reviewed by two experts. Studies were included if they reported a statistical effect size of the relationship between school climate and school violence. Exclusion criteria were unclear operationalization of the principal variables, research findings from multiple publications, studies using multi-level analysis and qualitative studies. The meta-analysis included 36 independent studies (N = 113,778) with correlations ranging from ? .02 to ? .53. Using a random-effects model a moderate mean effect size of r = ? .26, CI [? 30, ? 21] was found. Statistical findings indicated significant heterogeneity and a large range of variance between studies. Meta-regressions analyzed different potential moderators as relevant factors of heterogeneity, but none of these factors could be identified as a moderator. Due to the large variance between the studies, it remains difficult to draw final conclusions. Nevertheless, the moderate effect size underlines the role of environmental aspects for school violence intervention.     

Sticking to the Evidence? A Behavioral and Computational Case Study of Micro‐Theory Change in the Domain of Magnetism

Constructing an intuitive theory from data confronts learners with a “chicken‐and‐egg” problem: The laws can only be expressed in terms of the theory's core concepts, but these concepts are only meaningful in terms of the role they play in the theory's laws; how can a learner discover appropriate concepts and laws simultaneously, knowing neither to begin with? We explore how children can solve this chicken‐and‐egg problem in the domain of magnetism, drawing on perspectives from computational modeling and behavioral experiments. We present 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds with two different simplified magnet‐learning tasks. Children appropriately constrain their beliefs to two hypotheses following ambiguous but informative evidence. Following a critical intervention, they learn the correct theory. In the second study, children infer the correct number of categories given no information about the possible causal laws. Children's hypotheses in these tasks are explained as rational inferences within a Bayesian computational framework.     

Body satisfaction, eating disorders and suicide ideation in an Internet sample of self-harmers reporting and not reporting childhood sexual abuse

This study examined differences between self-harmers who had and who had not been sexually abused in childhood with regards to other risk factors and associated behaviours commonly identified in the research literature as being related to self-harm. Participants (N = 113, mean age = 19.92 years) were recruited via self-harm Internet discussion groups and message boards, and completed a web questionnaire assessing measures of body satisfaction, eating disorders, childhood trauma and suicide ideation. Self-harmers who reported a history of childhood sexual abuse scored higher on measures of body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, suicide ideation, physical abuse, physical neglect, emotional abuse and emotional neglect. These findings implicate sexual abuse as a powerful traumatic event that can have severe repercussions on an individual, not only in terms of self-harming behaviour but also in terms of developing a wide range of maladaptive behaviours in conjunction with self-harm.     

Improving comprehension of jury instructions with audio‐visual presentation

This study examined whether mock‐jurors' comprehension of judicial self‐defence instructions improved when an audio‐visual instructional format involving computer animations and a flow chart was used. In a mock‐juror paradigm, 90 law students (experts) and 90 legally untrained adults (novices) were randomly allocated to one of three instructional conditions (audio, audio‐elaborated, audio‐visual). Dependent measures of self‐defence comprehension included verdict delivery, multiple‐choice (recognition), paraphrasing (recall) and novel scenarios (transfer). Law students performed better on self‐defence comprehension tests than novices in the audio‐only conditions. The audio‐visual format significantly enhanced novices' comprehension, with their comprehension scores matching those of law students. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Defending Exclusivity

‘Exclusivity’ is the claim that when deliberating about whether to believe that p one can only be consciously motivated to reach one's conclusion by considerations one takes to pertain to the truth of p. The pragmatist tradition has long offered inspiration to those who doubt this claim. Recently, a neo‐pragmatist movement (Carl Ginet ( 2001 ), Keith Frankish ( 2007 ), and Conor McHugh ( 2012b )) has given rise to a serious challenge to exclusivity. In this article, I defend exclusivity in the face of this challenge. First, I dispute a crucial assumption underlying the challenge, namely, that one can have evidence sufficient to enable but not compel belief. Secondly, I examine several cases that McHugh in particular offers to call exclusivity into question and argue on independent grounds that these cases do not threaten exclusivity. Whether or not exclusivity holds, in addition to being of intrinsic interest, has a decisive consequence for the contemporary debate over Bernard Williams’ ( 1973 ) claim that “beliefs aim at truth”. If exclusivity is true, as David Owens ( 2003 ) has argued, the deliberator cannot be said to literally aim at truth. So, in defending exclusivity, I thereby show that the notion of ‘aiming’ fails to illuminate the nature of belief.     

The Objectivity of Ordinary Life

Metaethics tends to take for granted a bare Democritean world of atoms and the void, and then worry about how the human world that we all know can possibly be related to it or justified in its terms. I draw on Wittgenstein to show how completely upside-down this picture is, and make some moves towards turning it the right way up again. There may be a use for something like the bare-Democritean model in some of the sciences, but the picture has no standing as the basic objective truth about the world; if anything has that standing, it is ordinary life. I conclude with some thoughts about how the notion of bare, “thin” perception of non-evaluative reality feeds a number of philosophical pathologies, such as behaviourism, and show how a “thicker”, more value-laden, understanding of our perceptions of the world can be therapeutic against them.     

Anodal transcranial direct current stimulation of right temporoparietal area inhibits self-recognition

Self–other discrimination is a crucial mechanism for social cognition. Neuroimaging and neurostimulation research has pointed to the involvement of the right temporoparietal region in a variety of self–other discrimination tasks. Although repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation over the right temporoparietal area has been shown to disrupt self–other discrimination in face-recognition tasks, no research has investigated the effect of increasing the cortical excitability in this region on self–other face discrimination. Here we used transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to investigate changes in self–other discrimination with a video-morphing task in which the participant’s face morphed into, or out of, a familiar other’s face. The task was performed before and after 20 min of tDCS targeting the right temporoparietal area (anodal, cathodal, or sham stimulation). Differences in task performance following stimulation were taken to indicate a change in self–other discrimination. Following anodal stimulation only, we observed a significant increase in the amount of self-face needed to distinguish between self and other. The findings are discussed in relation to the control of self and other representations and to domain-general theories of social cognition.     

Pre‐frontal‐insular‐cerebellar modifications correlate with disgust feeling blunting after subthalamic stimulation: A positron emission tomography study in Parkinson's disease

Subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) has recently advanced our understanding of the major role played by this basal ganglion in human emotion. Research indicates that STN DBS can induce modifications in all components of emotion, and neuroimaging studies have shown that the metabolic modifications correlated with these emotional disturbances following surgery are both task‐ and sensory input‐dependent. Nevertheless, to date, these modifications have not been confirmed for all emotional components, notably subjective emotional experience, or feelings. To identify the neural network underlying the modification of feelings following STN DBS, we assessed 16 patients with Parkinson's disease before and after surgery, using both subjective assessments of emotional experience and ¹⁸[F]fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (¹⁸FDG‐PET). The patients viewed six film excerpts intended to elicit happy, angry, fearful, sad, disgusted, and neutral feelings, and they self‐rated the intensity of these feelings. After DBS, there was a significant reduction in the intensity of the disgust feeling. Correlations were observed between decreased disgust experience and cerebral glucose metabolism (FDG uptake) in the bilateral pre‐frontal cortices (orbitofrontal, dorsolateral, and inferior frontal gyri), bilateral insula, and right cerebellum. We suggest that the STN contributes to the synchronization process underlying the emergence of feelings.