Treatment of human-caused trauma: attrition in the adult outcomes research

Attrition or dropout is the failure of a participant to complete, comply, or the prematurely discontinuation or discharge from treatment, resulting in lost data and affecting outcomes. This review of 10 years of adult posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment outcome literature specific to Criterion A events of human origin examines how attrition is defined and addressed, methodologically and statistically. Of the 13 experimental or quasi-experimental studies, 11 report attrition information. Compared to treatment completers, attriters more often had elevated pretest scores on PTSD and other symptom measures. The characteristics of dropouts given the intentional nature of the traumatic events reviewed in this study are shared to inform clinical practice. Recommendations for consistent methods in examining, analyzing, and interpreting treatment outcome data are also discussed.     

Contextual information renders experts vulnerable to making erroneous identifications

We investigated whether experts can objectively focus on feature information in fingerprints without being misled by extraneous information, such as context. We took fingerprints that have previously been examined and assessed by latent print experts to make positive identification of suspects. Then we presented these same fingerprints again, to the same experts, but gave a context that suggested that they were a no-match, and hence the suspects could not be identified. Within this new context, most of the fingerprint experts made different judgements, thus contradicting their own previous identification decisions. Cognitive aspects involved in biometric identification can explain why experts are vulnerable to make erroneous identifications.     

The Indefinable Concept of Terrorism

As the concept of terrorism fulfils multiple functions, thebetter way to think of terrorism is not as a crime but as adifferent dimension of crime, a higher, more dangerous versionof crime, a kind of super-crime incorporating some of the characteristicsof warfare. There are at least eight primary factors that bearon terrorism: the factor of violence; the required intention;the nature of the victims; the connection of the offender tothe state; the justice and motive of their cause; the levelof organization; the element of theatre; and the absence ofguilt. However, one cannot draw from these variables a simple(or indeed even a complex) definition of terrorism. The reasonis that not all the factors apply all the time. Any proposeddefinition produces counterexamples. The way to think aboutterrorism is, therefore, to become aware of all the relevantfactors but not to expect that they will all be fulfilled inany particular case. The specific cases of terrorism are relatedthe way the members of a family are related. Most, but not all,might have the same eye shape. Others might have hair colouror the shape of their nose in common; still others might betall or short. One should try to picture a series of overlappingsets in which no set intersects with all the others. That isthe way our intuitions of terrorism operate.     

Going nuclear in Northeast Asia: a global view

Northeast Asia (NEA) is on the international security agenda for a lot of reasons. The historical legacy, territorial disputes, the region’s growing importance as an economic actor and a trading partner accompanied by increasing defence expenditures and acquisition of high tech weaponry and the political isolation of a “rogue” North Korea have all contributed to fear that NEA could open a Pandora’s box of a nuclear arms race. In this paper, I analyse recent strategic trends in Asia and try to evaluate the main motivations and objectives of a country like North Korea behind Weapons of Mass Destruction proliferation and the impact of this “nuclear diplomacy” on the evolution of defence policy of major military power like Japan.

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Interpersonal factors and personality disorders as discriminators between intra-familial and extra-familial child molesters

This article presents the results of research investigating the relation between interpersonal factors and personality disorders and intra-familial versus extra-familial child molesters. The sample contained 41 intra-familial and 43 extra-familial child molesters as well as a matched comparison group of 80 subjects. The analysis of the research results show that interpersonal factors, such as parental sensitivity, trust, and adult romantic attachment, discriminate between intra-familial and extra-familial child molesters. These findings structure the heterogeneous field of child molesters, as intra-familial child molesting seems to be related to relational attitude as well as personality disorders, whereas extra-familial child molesting is mainly related to personality disorders without showing significant deficits in the interpersonal factors that were measured. These results contribute to the explanation of this deviant sexual conduct and to the development and differentiation of the treatment of child molesters.     

The evolution of health-policy making in Italy

An analysis of the dynamics of health care policy in Italy suggests that in recent years the pace of change in the health care system has accelerated. Although the basic features of universalism, comprehensiveness, and funding from general taxation have remained remarkably constant, the capacity to innovate policy tools and their settings and to take account of domestic and international experience seems to have increased. The political will and capacity to combat entrenched interests may also have increased, although implementation is still weak. The imperative to contain public expenditure has heavily conditioned health policy and will continue to do so. This has occurred mainly at the national level, but as the principal locus of health-policy making progressively shifts to the regions, so too will the constraining effect of this imperative move downward. If the decentralization process continues, problems could arise due to interregional differences in capacities to formulate and implement appropriate policies and to tackle special interest groups.     

Explaining Sexual Harassment Judgments: Looking Beyond Gender of the Rater

Law and Human Behavior - In two decades of research on sexual harassment, one finding that appears repeatedly is that gender of the rater influences judgments about sexual harassment such that...     

Dynamic Tempered Transitions for Exploring Multimodal Posterior Distributions

George Casella Department of Statistics, University of Florida, Griffin-Floyd Hall, P.O. Box 118545, Gainesville, FL 32611 e-mail: casella{at}stat.ufl.edu Multimodal, high-dimension posterior distributions are wellknown to cause mixing problems for standard Markov chain MonteCarlo (MCMC) procedures; unfortunately such functional formsreadily occur in empirical political science. This is a particularlyimportant problem in applied Bayesian work because inferencesare made from finite intervals of the Markov chain path. Toaddress this issue, we develop and apply a new MCMC algorithmbased on tempered transitions of simulated annealing, addinga dynamic element that allows the chain to self-tune its annealingschedule in response to current posterior features. This importantfeature prevents the Markov chain from getting trapped in minormodal areas for long periods of time. The algorithm is appliedto a probabilistic spatial model of voting in which the objectivefunction of interest is the candidate's expected return. Wefirst show that such models can lead to complex target formsand then demonstrate that the dynamic algorithm easily handleseven large problems of this kind.