Health Outcomes by Closeness of Sexual Abuse Perpetrator: A Test of Betrayal Trauma Theory

Summary

In this chapter, practicing attorney Brooks Cooper illuminates how the legal tradition of applying different standards to the ad-missibility of expert and lay opinions as evidence in litigation complicates delayed-discovery sexual abuse cases. Admissibility standards have long been a source of controversy, and recent developments in law, such as the pre-trial evidentiary hearings that invoke the “gatekeeper” function of the judge under the standard enunciated in Daubert v. Mer-rell-Dow Pharmaceuticals, have become a favored strategy by the defense in an effort to bar delayed memory testimony by characterizing it as the product of unreliable science. To overcome this litigation hurdle, Mr. Cooper contextualizes the present controversy in the history of scientific evidence admissibility, tracing emerging trends in judicial opinion on scientific evidence from expert witnesses from the 1923 case Frye v. United States through the present, and offers strategies and techniques to maintain admissibility of the evidence before and during all phases of the trial.     

Identification,Reflection, And Correlation: Problems In The Bases Of Repertory Grid Measures

Repertory grids, deriving from George Kelly's personal construct theory, have been used to provide measures of a number of personality and cognitive variables. Several of these grid measures, such as the identification index, some measures of cognitive complexity, and other indices extracted from factor analyses of grids, are based on correlations between the columns (elements) of the grid data matrix. These measures are problematic and unstable because the intercolumn correlations depend on the direction of scoring across each of the matrix rows (constructs). This direction is not guided by explicit or theoretically justified rules and appears to be arbitrary and inconsistent between researchers. Also, correlation is a poor measure of element similarity, the basis of the identification measure. The importance of the valuating aspect of construing may provide a basis for the standardization of scoring. And scoring from the valued pole of a construct may help bring stability and meaning to the correlation-based measures.     

Do Unto Others?

Despite a widespread acknowledgement of the relationship between account offerings and facework, little research has provided evidence showing that different types of accounting moves actually foster diverse assessments of attentiveness to face. Following Goffman (1955, 1967), we coded the primary types of challenges, offerings, and evaluations from interactions between friends who discussed a previous failure event by the speaker. We analyzed the codes—and the complexity of the sequences—for differences in participants’ judgments of attentiveness toward other‐face. Not every accounting form resulted in significant differences; nevertheless, either the speakers or their partners perceived most forms differently in some way. Additionally, elicitors viewed more complex (i.e., longer) account sequences as less attentive to their own negative face, but accounters viewed more complex (i.e., more varied) offerings as more attentive to others’ negative face. Qualitative analyses revealed additional discourse forms that may count as offerings and evaluations, including a more direct form of self‐oriented facework, requests for advice from the accounter, rejections of account suggestions, and requests for information and acceptance.     

Banality Reinvestigated: A Computer-Based Content Analysis of Suicidal and Forced Death Documents*

Suicide and simulated notes and forced-death documents were processed on the Harvard III Psycho-Sociological Dictionary. For each text, frequencies of related words were generated; these were contrasted with each other and with baseline data using z scores. The results indicated that the suicidal groups were more “deviant.” Other findings are concreteness and constriction of focus for suicides—a pattern suggesting denial just prior to the deed. The forced-death group seemed to be more meaningfully in contact with life and aware of responsibility. The simulated group appeared to be fabricating a popular stereotype rather than exhibiting empathy. Implications were discussed.     

The role of stimulus preexposure in problem solving by Octopus vulgaris

Octopus vulgaris is able to open transparent glass jars closed with plastic plugs and containing live crabs. The decrease in performance times for removing the plug and seizing the prey with increasing experience of the task has been taken to indicate learning. However, octopuses’ attack behaviors are typically slow and variable in novel environmental situations. In this study the role of preexposure to selected features of the problem-solving context was investigated. Although octopuses failed to benefit from greater familiarity with the training context or with selected elements of the task of solving the jar problem, the methodological strategies used are instructive in potentially clarifying the role of complex problem-solving behaviors in this species including stimulus preexposure and social learning. Received: 27 April 1998 / Accepted after revision: 24 July 1998     

The transfer of specific and non-specific learning by severely subnormal adults

A modification of Bryant's (1965) study of the transfer of positive and negative learning in severely subnormal subjects was attempted. A third condition, where neither positive nor negative learning could be transferred, was added. Fifty-two adult non-institutionalized SSN trainees demonstrated transfer in all three conditions. Transfer was greatest in the positive learning condition, intermediate in the negative learning condition and least in the non-specific learning condition. Two main interpretations are offered. First, a significant degree of transfer, which cannot be attributed to specific approach-avoidance learning, occurs with naive subjects. Second, such general transfer effects are inevitably confounded with specific transfer effects in the traditional transfer experiment design.     

Teaching serial position sequences to monkeys with a delayed matching-to-sample procedure

Comparison was made of two methods for training monkeys to “observe” a two-member serial position sequence by pressing two consecutively lighted keys and then to “report” the sequence by pressing the same two keys in the same order but without the lights. A fading technique involving gradual elimination of brightness cues from “reporting” keys was found more effective than a no-fading procedure in which the cues remained bright during training and then were suddenly removed. Animals that failed to learn to report a new sequence with the no-fading procedure sometimes developed behavior incompatible with that desired. They made repeated and specific errors that prematurely terminated trials of the sequence to-be-learned, even though the correct key was cued by a bright light. They behaved appropriately, however, on succeeding trials of other sequences. Thus, the errors were followed by trials on which reinforcement occurred. Manipulation of this contingency indicated its importance in maintaining the stereotyped error patterns.     

The effect of knowledge of results on learning and performance IV. the direction of the error in very simple skills

Re-examination of the data discussed in previous papers of this series shows a greater tendency toward “overshooting” when the time interval between trials, in some of the experiments, is short than when it is longer. The subject tends to make a bigger movement or exert more pressure with short intervals. This seems to be true with or without visual knowledge of results. On the other hand, with the experiments in which the task was to press a key for a given short interval, the effect was not conclusively shown.

A hypothesis is put forward to explain these results in terms of proprioceptive adaptation.