Crime and amnesia: A review

The present article reviews amnesia for criminal offenses. It discusses the organic disorders most likely to be implicated, and the nature and differentiation of psychogenic amnesia. With the exception of alcohol and drug intoxication, organic dysfunction is a rare (though important) cause of amnesia for crime. Likewise, fugue states may occasionally be triggered by an offence, but are a very rare cause of the amnesia claimed by offenders. Amnesia is most commonly seen in homicide cases, in which it is claimed by 25% to 45% of offenders, but it occurs also in other types of violent crime, and occasionally in nonviolent crime. It arises in states of extreme emotional arousal, in alcoholic intoxication, and in states of florid psychosis; and it is also associated with depressed mood. Various methods have been advocated for the differentiation of genuine amnesia from deliberate simulation: this distinction can be difficult, but it is noticeable that many amnesic subjects either have reported the crime themselves or have made no attempt to conceal it. The nature of the deficit in this type of amnesia, and its implications for assessment, are also discussed.     

Directionally different expectancy theory predictions of work motivation and job satisfaction

Conventionally, expectancy theory has utilized a multiplicative combination of expectancy and value scores in predicting both job behavior (work motivation and job performance) and job-related affect (job satisfaction). An extensive clinical literature, however, suggests that affect is a function of the discrepancy between expectancies and values. Hence, two hypotheses were advanced and tested in organizational settings: (1) that the multiplicative formulation (EV) will yield superior predictions of work motivation and job performance in comparison to the discrepancy model (E-V), (2) that the discrepancy model (E-V) will yield superior predictions of job satisfaction in comparison to the multiplicative model (EV). Results from three studies (of 399 engineers, 202 librarians, and 1,777 engineers) were highly supportive of both hypotheses.An early version of this paper was presented at the 10th Annual National Meeting of the American Institute for Decision Sciences, November 1, 1978, and an abbreviated write-up appeared in the AIDSProceedings. The author is greatly indebted to the following people: Susanne P. Wahba, for allowing the use of her data (Study Two); Gene Dalton and Paul Thompson, for their contribution to the research in Study One; and Joe Folkman for his help with the data analysis in Study Three. Financial support was provided in part by the Research Foundation of the City University of New York (RF10662).     

Psychological stages of careers in engineering: An expectancy theory taxonomy

Expectancy and value scores from 376 engineers were used to develop a taxonomy of nine psychological categories, these being differentially related to motivation and satisfaction. Static and longitudinal analyses (over 4 years) revealed significant relationships between age, prior category, and organizational reward practices, on the one hand, and the distribution and movement of respondents across categories, on the other. Results suggested a dynamic, three-stage psychological model of careers in engineering.     

Cooperation or Tension? Dyadic Coping in Cystic Fibrosis

Following a rise in the life expectancy of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients, many adults with CF form couple relationships. Yet, dyadic coping has not been previously examined in people with CF. This study examined how adults with CF and their partners cope as a couple with the illness, and what meanings each partner and the couple as a unit attribute to the experience. Seventeen adult CF patients and their partners participated in separate semi‐structured in‐depth interviews. Two main patterns of dyadic coping with CF were identified as follows: cooperation and tension. For couples in cooperation, the marital relationship served as a resource for adaptive coping. These couples were characterized by similarities in their perception of the place of CF in their lives and of their roles in the marital relationship. Couples in tension described the couple relationship as strained by difficulty of accepting the disease, proliferation of negative emotions, and a sense of burden and loneliness in the process of coping. Findings point to the importance of mutual empathy, clear and accepted division of roles between the partners, and open communication for facilitating coping as a couple.     

Is there a Preferred Performance Rating Format? A Non-psychometric Perspective

Les échelles d'appréciation constituent une forme d'évaluation des performances qui a rencontré un grand succès ces dernières décennies. En particulier, de gros efforts ont été consacrés au développement d'échelles relativement insensibles aux erreurs et biais cognitifs. Mais on s'est beaucoup moins intéressé au fait de savoir si et comment le type d'évaluation affecte les attitudes professionnelles et les réactions des personnes évaluées. Des données en provenance de quatre études différentes avec des échantillons tirés dans deux pays (lsraël et le Canada) apportent des éléments en faveur de l'idée selon laquelle une évaluation de la performance basée sur le BOS peut être supérieure aux autres méthodes en ce sens qu'elle entraîne des conséquences plus positives au niveau des attitudes.
One aspect of performance appraisal that has received considerable attention over past decades is the rating format. In particular, much effort has been devoted to developing rating scales that are relatively impervious to cognitive rating errors and biases. However, much less attention has been accorded the issues of whether and how an appraisal's format affects work attitudes and reactions of ratees. Data collected in four separate studies and with samples in two nations (Israel, Canada) lend credence to the proposition that a BOS-based performance appraisal and review may be superior to other appraisal methods in terms of yielding more favorable attitudinal effects.     

Recall of anomalous sentences in dementia and amnesia

Alzheimer-type dementing patients were compared with amnesic (Korsakoff) patients, depressed patients, and healthy controls in the immediate recall of semantically anomalous sentences. It was found that the dementing (Alzheimer) patients were severely impaired in their recall of these sentences, but that the amnesic (Korsakoff) patients were not. Alzheimer patients have a severe impairment of short-term memory, and it is argued that this deficit may make Alzheimer patients especially dependent upon the presence of semantic cues in immediate verbal recall--hence, the removal or reversibility of these cues results in a collapse of their performance. Other research has indicated that Alzheimer patients also show impaired semantic processing, and the possible interaction of their short-term memory and semantic processing deficits is briefly discussed.     

The memory deficits in alzheimer-type dementia: A review

This review is an account of recent experimental studies of memory deficits at the early stages of Alzheimer-type dementia, evaluating these studies in relation to current theories of memory functioning in humans. Whilst memory deficits are found to be widespread, some aspects are more resilient to impairment than others. For example, the processes associated with articulatory rehearsal in working memory are unimpaired despite a reduction in performance on most tests of primary memory. The “implicit” aspects of secondary memory appear to remain unimpaired, in contrast to a marked decline in “explicit” or “episodic” memory. In addition, there is evidence that the rate of forgetting from secondary memory is normal. Some aspects of episodic and semantic memory are found to be impaired as a consequence of a decline in the efficient organisation and processing of verbal material at encoding or retrieval. It is concluded that the deficits share particular features found in organic amnesia, but with additional deficits which relate to impairments in other domains of functioning.