The impact of interpersonal style on aggression and treatment non-completion in patients with personality disorder admitted to a medium secure psychiatric unit

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine the impact of interpersonal style and psychopathy on treatment non-completion and aggressive behaviour. Participants were patients with personality disorder admitted for treatment to a structured group program operating within a medium secure psychiatric hospital. Assessment of personality disorder and psychopathy occurred prior to admission. Interpersonal style was assessed on admission with the Impact Message Inventory (IMI), a self-report transactional inventory. Files were subsequently reviewed to determine whether patients were aggressive during their hospital stay and whether they were prematurely expelled from the unit and therefore did not complete treatment. Results showed that patients who completed treatment were more nurturing and help-seeking. Aggressive patients were more competitive and dominant. Psychopathy did not differentiate treatment completers from non-completers or aggressive from non-aggressive patients. Clinical implications and opportunities for further research are explored.     

‘They are not my people’: Barack Obama on lobbying and lobbyists

This article traces the development of Barack Obama's sometimes ambiguous and sometimes antithetical attitudes and relationship to lobbyists. During his childhood in Indonesia, his stepfther was a lobbyist for a US oil company. Obama engaged himself in what many would consider to be lobbying in his career as a ‘community activist’ in Chicago. As an Illinois state senator, he befriended lobbyists and enjoyed poker and basketball games with them, in addition to raising about two thirds of his campaign finance from big business, unions, and political action committees. In the US Senate, Obama involved in ethics reforms that curbed the influence of lobbyists. His presidential campaign rhetoric was hard‐hitting, often decrying the irresponsibility of lobbyists while he had a number of lobbyists in key positions in his campaign team. On his first full day in office, President Obama signed an executive order restricting lobbyists from working in his administration. He later banned registered lobbyists from having personal meeting with officials about economic stimulus projects. Both these pledges have, however, had unforeseen or unwelcome consequences. More recently, Obama decided to ban lobbyists from membership of federal advisory panels but continues to meet frequently with favored lobbyists and corporate executives behind closed doors. The article questions whether Obama's history in this area adds up to a coherent or principled track record or whether it simply relates a series of inconsistent and political decisions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Missing Masculinities: Gendering Practices in Australian Alcohol Research and Policy

The issue of ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’ has been the subject of intense policy debate in Australia. While this debate is warranted, its contours and content have been informed and shaped by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. Narrow research engagements of this kind warrant scrutiny because they can exclude from consideration crucial issues. In this article we identify one such issue, that of gender. Following a review of the Australian literature on gender, alcohol and violence, our analysis explores four case studies drawn from the Australian research corpus, focusing on large quantitative studies as these tend to receive most attention and citation in policy debate. Such studies consistently erase the contribution of key gender dynamics, namely enactments of particular (often youthful) masculinities, to violence involving alcohol, even where they simultaneously provide strong support in their data for such a conclusion. We show how this research is mobilised specifically in support of claims about the causal role of alcohol in violence and of blanket population-level responses to the problem. There is an urgent need to map the character and scope of the tendency to erase certain gender issues in research on alcohol and violence in order to better inform policy responses.     

Attacks without Consequence? Candidates,Parties, Groups,and the Changing Face of Negative Advertising

Prior work finds that voters punish candidates for sponsoring attack ads. What remains unknown is the extent to which a negative ad is more effective if it is sponsored by a party or an independent group instead. We conducted three experiments in which we randomly assigned participants to view a negative ad that was identical except for its sponsor. We find that candidates can benefit from having a party or group “do their dirty work,” but particularly if a group does, and that the most likely explanation for why this is the case is that many voters simply do not connect candidates to the ads sponsored by parties and groups. We also find that in some circumstances, a group‐sponsored attack ad produces less polarization than one sponsored by a party. We conclude by discussing the implications our research has for current debates about the proper role of independent groups in electoral politics.     

Lords Reform: Some Inconvenient Truths

The failure of the Coalition government's attempt to reform the House of Lords has by no means taken further reform off the political agenda. The commitment to installing an elected upper chamber is still widely shared across the political spectrum, on the basis of perceptions that the House of Lords lacks democratic legitimacy. Against this view, this article considers recent literature upon non‐electoral representation, deliberative democracy and bicameralism, which together highlight the possibility of an unelected second chamber playing a legitimate role within a wider (democratic) system of government. The article then considers the House of Lords from this perspective, reflecting on changes in the upper chamber since the 1999 reforms and evaluating its role within the wider political system. The paper concludes by suggesting that political debate should focus upon small‐scale reforms to ensure that the Lords becomes more effective, representative and legitimate, within the constraints of its present role.