The assessment of child abuse potential and the prevention of child abuse and neglect: A policy analysis

A frequently advocated strategy for increasing the efficiency of child abuse prevention programs is to deliver prevention services to "high-risk" populations. This article critically reviews procedures for the reliable and valid assessment of child abuse potential within an ecological perspective. Factors that limit the usefulness of child abuse risk assessment are discussed. These factors include the uncertain criteria of child abuse and neglect, the low base rate of the phenomenon, and the financial and social costs of such procedures. Finally, the prevention implications of the current and future state of the art in child abuse risk assessment are considered and preventive interventions that do not depend on individual case risk screening are advocated.     

The social supports of suicide attempters: The different roles of family and friends

The social support patterns of a sample of 101 suicide attempters were compared with the patterns of a control sample on the basis of structured interview data. Network characteristics and the extent of support in different functional categories were examined as to their absolute and relative power to discriminate between the suicide attempters and the controls. A clear separation of the functions of kin and of friends/acquaintances emerged. The crucial difference between the attempters and the controls lay in the number of friends with whom the subjects had agreeable everyday interactions and in the number of kin that provided crisis support, both psychological and instrumental. Other support differences between the two groups were of secondary importance. While there was no overall difference in the frequency of social interactions between the two groups, the size of the social network differed greatly. Consequences for the conceptualization and measurement of social support as well as for the prevention of suicidal behavior are discussed.     

Resilient children,psychological wellness,and primary prevention

The concept of heightened resilience or invulnerability in young profoundly stressed children is developed in terms of its implications for a psychology of wellness and for primary prevention in mental health. Relevant literature is reviewed, a skeletal model for studying resilience is outlined, and needed research directions are considered. The latter include expansion of the construct's nomological definitional net, inquiry into the antecedents and determinants of resilience, and the application of such generative information to frame preventive interventions for young, profoundly stressed children.     

Bias in the use of base rates: Racial prejudice in decision-making

Two studies investigated biases in the use of base rate information when assessing the probability of a witness' accurate identification of a white or West Indian as a burglar. An adapted version of the Kahneman-Tversky cab problem was used, to provide a social decision in which biases could be measured against some normative standard. Ethnicity of youth (white/West Indian) and nature of base rate (incidental/causal) were manipulated in a 2 × 2 between-subjects design. A significant interaction effect revealed that subjects took no account of the base rate for a West Indian subject, but used the base rate only when it was causal and the youth was white. This ‘prejudice effect’ against a West Indian youth and ‘exoneration effect’ for a white youth were replicated in a second study, using a microcomputer and chronometric analyses. Results are discussed in terms of heuristic decision-making, social schemata, and the cognitive versus motivational bases of bias in the use of base rates.     

The discrimination of human odour by the dog

In reply to a suggestion made by Galton in 1875, the ability of dogs to discriminate between the odour of human twins was investigated. In a matching-to-sample simultaneous discrimination task, dogs were tested on their ability to discriminate odours from twins differing only in genetic relatedness or only in environmental factors, particularly diet, or from twins identical in both genetic relatedness and environmental factors. Dogs could discriminate between the odours from twins who differed only in environmental factors and between the odours of twins who differed only in genetic relatedness. However, they were unable to discriminate between odours produced by infant twins identical in both genetic relatedness and environmental factors. Thus twins may be discriminated by dogs as long as they differ in genetic relatedness or environmental factors. The possible source of discriminable odours is discussed and how the effects of genes and environment are mediated considered.     

Visual stimulation affects the perception of voluntary leg movements during walking

When a limb is used for locomotion, patterns of afferent and efferent activity related to its own motion are present as well as visual, vestibular, and other proprioceptive information about motion of the whole body. A study is reported in which it was asked whether visual stimulation present during whole-body motion can influence the perception of the leg movements propelling the body. Subjects were tested in conditions in which the stepping movements they made were identical but the amount of body displacement relative to inertial space and to the visual surround varied. These test conditions were created by getting the subjects to walk on a rotatable platform centered inside a large, independently rotatable, optokinetic drum. In each test condition, subjects, without looking at their legs, compared, against a standard condition in which the floor and drum were both stationary, their speed of body motion, their stride length and stepping rate, the direction of their steps, and the perceived force they exerted during stepping. When visual surround motion was incompatible with the motion normally associated with the stepping movements being made, changes in apparent body motion and in the awareness of the frequency, extent, and direction of the voluntary stepping movements resulted.     

Two forms of persistence in visual information processing

Iconic memory, which was initially regarded as a unitary phenomenon, has since been subdivided into several components. In the present work we examined the joint effects of two such components (visible persistence and the visual analog representation) on performance in a partial report task. The display consisted of 15 alphabetic characters arranged around the perimeter of an imaginary circle on the face of an oscilloscope. The observer named the character singled out by a bar-probe. Two factors were varied: exposure duration of the array (10, 50, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400 or 500 ms) and duration of blank period (interstimulus interval, ISI) between the termination of the array and the onset of the probe (0, 50, 100, 150, or 200 ms). Performance was progressively impaired as both exposure duration and ISI were increased. The results were explained in terms of a probabilistic combinatorial model in which the timecourses of visible persistence and of the visual analog representation are regarded as time-locked to the onset and to the end of stimulation, respectively. The impairing effect of exposure duration was attributed to the relatively high spatial demands of the task that could be met optimally by information in visible persistence (which declines as a function of exposure duration), but less adequately by information in the visual analog representation. A second experiment, employing a task with lesser spatial demands, confirmed this interpretation.     

Does nondirectional signalization of target distance contribute to navigation in the Morris water maze?

The possibility that rats can navigate in the Morris water maze by reducing the difference between the memorized platform scene and the current sensory input was tested in nine blind rats. A computerized videosystem monitored the rats' movements in the pool and converted the rat-target distance into tones the frequency of which increased in 64 equal steps from 120 Hz at 128 cm to 7680 Hz at 0 cm. During 15 days of training to find a fixed platform position from different starting points (12 trials per day) average escape latencies decreased from 39.0 to 25.4 s. The performance significantly deteriorated when the acoustic distance signalization was omitted and/or when the target position was changed form trial to trial. It is concluded that blind rats solved the task by simultaneously employing search strategy based on position responses, mapping using acoustic background beacons, and distance reduction navigation. It is argued that the various strategies are additive and that their relative significance depends of the conditions of the experiment.