Neuroscience, Ethics and Legal Responsibility: The Problem of the Insanity Defense

The insanity defense presents many difficult questions for the legal system. It attracts attention beyond its practical significance (it is seldom used successfully) because it goes to the heart of the concept of legal responsibility. ??Not guilty by reason of insanity?? generally requires that as a result of mental illness the defendant was unable to distinguish right from wrong at the time of the crime. The many difficult and complex questions presented by the insanity defense have led some in the legal community to hope that neuroscience might help resolve some of these problems, but that hope is not likely to be realized.     

Infant word segmentation and childhood vocabulary development: a longitudinal analysis

Infants begin to segment novel words from speech by 7.5 months, demonstrating an ability to track, encode and retrieve words in the context of larger units. Although it is presumed that word recognition at this stage is a prerequisite to constructing a vocabulary, the continuity between these stages of development has not yet been empirically demonstrated. The goal of the present study is to investigate whether infant word segmentation skills are indeed related to later lexical development. Two word segmentation tasks, varying in complexity, were administered in infancy and related to childhood outcome measures. Outcome measures consisted of age‐normed productive vocabulary percentiles and a measure of cognitive development. Results demonstrated a strong degree of association between infant word segmentation abilities at 7 months and productive vocabulary size at 24 months. In addition, outcome groups, as defined by median vocabulary size and growth trajectories at 24 months, showed distinct word segmentation abilities as infants. These findings provide the first prospective evidence supporting the predictive validity of infant word segmentation tasks and suggest that they are indeed associated with mature word knowledge. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxzLi5oLZQ8 .     

Treating disturbed emotional regulation in sexual offenders: The potential applications of mindful self-regulation and controlled breathing techniques

It has been noted that some offenders are characterized by problems in the appropriate regulation of emotional states. Deficits in emotional regulation are particularly pertinent in sexual offenders. Therefore, therapeutic programs should, in part, focus on the development of effective strategies for the control of emotional arousal. In this review, we will provide an outline of how anatomical structures including the amygdala and regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are involved in the appropriate regulation of emotion. It is argued in this paper that the effective control of emotional states may be helped through the adoption of a group of meditational practices, known as mindfulness techniques, which have emerged from Buddhist philosophy. These techniques involve slow, deep breathing and have been shown to affect vagal modulation of the heart and the functioning of specific neural circuits which are critically involved in emotional regulation.     

Videoconferencing psychotherapy: a systematic review

Individuals with mental health problems may face barriers to accessing effective psychotherapies. Videoconferencing technology, which allows audio and video information to be shared concurrently across geographical distances, offers an alternative that may improve access. We conducted a systematic literature review of the use of videoconferencing psychotherapy (VCP), designed to address 10 specific questions, including therapeutic types/formats that have been implemented, the populations with which VCP is being used, the number and types of publications related to VCP, and available satisfaction, feasibility, and outcome data related to VCP. After electronic searches and reviews of reference lists, 821 potential articles were identified, and 65 were selected for inclusion. The results indicate that VCP is feasible, has been used in a variety of therapeutic formats and with diverse populations, is generally associated with good user satisfaction, and is found to have similar clinical outcomes to traditional face-to-face psychotherapy. Although the number of articles being published on VCP has increased in recent years, there remains a need for additional large-scale clinical trials to further assess the efficacy and effectiveness of VCP.     

Piety,Power, and the Purse: Religious Economies Theory and Urban Reform in the Holy Roman Empire

The religious economies model has been influential in the sociology of religion. Yet, propositions drawn from the model have been difficult to test in the comparative and historical study of religion, generally for lack of appropriate data. We develop a general theory of religious disestablishment and apply it to the Reformation in 16th‐century Europe to explain variation in the abolition of the Catholic monopoly. We suggest three principal factors—changes in demand, entry control mechanisms, and political incentives—that explain why incumbent religious firms may lose their monopoly. We then analyze the resulting hypotheses in a systematic analysis of cities in the Holy Roman Empire. Our analysis yields mixed support for demand‐side factors and entry control mechanisms, and firm support for political incentives in the institution of reform.     

Exploring actor-partner interdependence in family therapy: whose view (parent or adolescent) best predicts treatment progress?

Predictions of family therapy outcome consistently vary depending on which client rates the alliance. We used the actor-partner interdependence model (Kenny, Kashy, & Cook, 2006) to test the interdependence of parents' and adolescents' ratings of alliance, session depth/value, and improvement-so-far after Sessions 3, 6, and 9. Initial analyses found trivial between-therapists variance; therefore, a 3-level hierarchical model partitioned the variance in these variables into between families, between family members, and between session components. For alliance and session depth, results showed a significant parent actor effect and a significant adolescent partner effect. Specifically, when parents saw a stronger alliance, they also saw the session as more valuable, but when adolescents saw a stronger alliance, their parents saw the session as less valuable. Both the parents' and the adolescents' improvement scores showed significant linear growth over time, and adolescents' alliance ratings were positively associated with their own and their parents' views of therapeutic progress.     

Religious Socialization Among Malaysian Muslim Adolescents: A Family Structure Comparison

Despite the plethora of research on correlates of adolescent religiosity, few studies have examined the contribution of socialization factors to adolescent religiosity in the context of non-Western Muslim samples from different family contexts. To address this gap, the current study explored the contribution of parenting (direct socialization) and community engagement (indirect socialization) factors on religiosity among 895 Malaysian Muslim high school students from single-/non-parent and two-parent families. T-test results showed that religiosity was higher for students from two-parent families than single-/non-parent parent homes. After controlling for (a) social desirability, (b) gender and (c) school type, the hypothesized factors of: parental attachment, parental religious socialization, parental supervision, youth organization involvement, school attachment, and mosque involvement significantly predicted religiosity for the full sample of students from both types of families. Hierarchical regression results further revealed that while both indirect and direct parental socialization factors were stronger predictors of religiosity for two-parent families than single-/non-parent families, direct parental socialization effects were more robust. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

The relation of self-supporting personality, enacted social support, and perceived social support

This study examines the relational model of self-supporting personality, enacted social support, and perceived social support in a sample of 482 Chinese high school students using the Self-Supporting Personality Scale for Adolescent Students (SSPS-AS), the Social Support Rating Scale (SSRS), and the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS). Results from the cross-sectional structural equation analyses revealed that interpersonal initiative, interpersonal openness, personal openness and personal initiative predicted perceived social support through the mediating role of enacted social support, while interpersonal responsibility, interpersonal flexibility, and personal initiative predicted perceived social support directly. Thus, the hypothesized relational model of personality, enacted social support, and perceived social support was supported. The positive relational schema may be the main underpinning of the relation of self-supporting personality, enacted social support, and perceived social support. Culture also may influence the relation.