Attentional and intellectual deficits in unmedicated behavior-disordered adolescent inpatients

The authors examined the hypothesis that impairments in attention and verbal intelligence are associated with seriously maladaptive social behavior in behavior-disordered, hospitalized adolescents. Twenty-five unmedicated inpatients with disruptive behavior disorder diagnoses were rated during a one-month period for frequency of severe disruptive episodes, or critical incidents (CI); these included assaults, behavior resulting in the use of restraints, etc. All subjects independently received intelligence testing and continuous performance testing (CPT). Based on CI scores, subjects were divided into a high-CI group (CI>5; N=9) and a low-CI group (CI<4; N=16). On the CPT, the high-CI group showed more impairment in perceptual sensitivity (d; this group also had lower verbal IQ scores. (Both findings were significant at the p<.05 level.) The latter result was largely due to differences in Comprehension subtest scores. These results support the hypothesis, and may have implications for the treatment of behavior-disordered adolescents.Received M.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Major research interests are adolescent psychopathology, disruptive behavior disorders, and information processing.Received Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Major research interests are outcomes measurement, psychosis proneness, and psychodiagnostic assessment.Received Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Major research interests is adolescent psychopathology.Received M.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Major research interests are adult attachment and mental representation.Received M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Major research interests are schizophrenia, personality disorders, and trauma.     

Unravelling Identities: Performance and Criticism in Australian Feminisms

The following article is an exploration of the non-linear and non-unified identities that make up Australian feminism. The main premise is that the divergent strands of rational and romantic thought, central to the project of liberalism, are inherent in the characterization of Australian feminisms. As a result, there have always been tensions between feminists, centred around politics of self-identification. These tensions continue to exist, but to be articulated in different ways in different decades as a result of the ever changing relationships between feminist, state and media/public discourses. These ideas are explored through comparing two key moments in our recent past in which differences between feminisms were declared. These two events - the Mary Daly visit to Australia to promote Gyn/Ecology in 1981, and the debate engendered by Helen Garner's The First Stone in 1995 - are taken to be performative metaphors through which the continuities and discontinuities of the nature of Australian feminisms can be subjectively explored.     

Coping with Maternal Depressed Affect and Depression: Adolescent Children of Depressed and Well Mothers

This study examined the strategies adolescents use to cope with their mothers' depressive symptoms and/or episodes. An open-ended semistructured interview and a closed-ended coping scale, the Maternal Affectivity Coping Scale derived from the Self-Report Coping Scale (D. L. Causey and E. F. Dubow [1992] Development of a Self-Report Measure for Elementary School Children, Journal of Clinical Child Psychology, Vol. 21, pp. 47–59), was administered to pairs of adolescent siblings (N = 179) from families (N = 94) in which the mother was either depressed or well. With a few important exceptions, the results reveal similar coping styles in the offspring of depressed and well mothers. One difference was that mothers' current psychological distress was weakly related to young adolescents' coping patterns (e.g., problem solving, externalizing). Also, adolescents' coping styles (e.g., provide support) were related to the type of depressive symptoms the mother exhibited (e.g., anger, irritability). Second, greater sibling differences were found for emotion-focused coping strategies (e.g., distancing) in children of depressed mothers than in children of well mothers. Third, the results suggest that the sex of the adolescent may be important in attempting to understand individual differences in coping. Females were more likely than males to engage in interpersonally focused coping strategies (e.g., provide support to their mother, seek support from others). The feelings of responsibility for contributing to their mother's depression that were more evident in females than males may offer some insight into gender differences and may also have implications for placing females at higher risk for internalizing disorders.     

Bystander Intervention Efficacy to Reduce Teen Dating Violence Among High School Youth Who Did and Did Not Witness Parental Partner Violence: A Path Analysis of A Cluster RCT

Journal of Family Violence - Youth who witness parental intimate partner violence (IPV) are at increased risk of teen dating violence (DV). This analysis of secondary data investigated whether a...     

A Reaction to Popular Hysteria: The Titles Deprivation Act 1917

The Titles Deprivation Act represents the `other side of the coin' of King George V's decision in 1917 to divest the Royal Family of its appearance of German-ness and adopt an outwardEnglishness by renouncing the German titles of its members and adopting the surname of Windsor. The Act created a mechanism by which German holders of British royal titles and peerages could be deprived of those honours on grounds which had no precedent in earlier law and practice, this mechanism being used for the first and only time in an Order in Council of 28th March 1919 to deprive three German princes and one Austrian, two of them first cousins of George V and a third an uncle by marriage, of the British titles which they held. This paper considers, first, the background to the Act and, in particular, the reason why legislation on this highly controversial issue was introduced in Parliament only after theFirst World War had been going on for two-and-a-half years. It identifies the reason for this delay as the reluctance of the Asquith Government to involve the King as the `fountain of honour' with a course of action which he personally considered to be petty and undignified and of no importance to the war effort, and hypothesises that the Government's change of heart resulted from the trial and execution of Roger Casement for treason, with which there is an exact coincidence in time. Second, the paper considers the manner in which the Bill was drafted, identifies its distinctive features and follows its passage through Parliament. Third, it considers the manner in which the provisions of the Act were put into effect, in particular the manner in which evidence was gathered to create a case against the persons affected by it. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Sexual dimorphism in America: geometric morphometric analysis of the craniofacial region

One of the four pillars of the anthropological protocol is the estimation of sex. The protocol generally consists of linear metric analysis or visually assessing individual skeletal traits on the skull and pelvis based on an ordinal scale of 1-5, ranging from very masculine to very feminine. The morphologic traits are then some how averaged by the investigator to estimate sex. Some skulls may be misclassified because of apparent morphologic features that appear more or less robust due to size differences among individuals. The question of misclassification may be further exemplified in light of comparisons across populations that may differ not only in cranial robusticity but also in stature and general physique. The purpose of this study is to further examine the effect of size and sex on craniofacial shape among American populations to better understand the allometric foundation of skeletal traits currently used for sex estimation. Three-dimensional coordinates of 16 standard craniofacial landmarks were collected using a Microscribe-3DX digitizer. Data were collected for 118 American White and Black males and females from the W.M. Bass Donated Collection and the Forensic Data Bank. The MANCOVA procedure tested shape differences as a function of sex and size. Sex had a significant influence on shape for both American Whites (F = 2.90; d.f. = 19, 39; p > F = 0.0024) and Blacks (F = 2.81; d.f. = 19, 37; p > F = 0.0035), whereas size did not have a significant influence on shape in either Whites (F = 1.69; d.f. = 19, 39; p > F = 0.08) or Blacks (F = 1.09; d.f. = 19, 37; p > F = 0.40). Therefore, for each sex, individuals of various sizes were statistically the same shape. In other words, while significant differences were present between the size of males and females (males on average were larger), there was no size effect beyond that accounted for by sex differences in size. Moreover, the consistency between American groups is interesting as it suggests that population differences in sexual dimorphism may result more from human variation in size than allometric variation in craniofacial morphology.