Validation of the Propensity for Abusiveness Scale in Diverse Male Populations

The Propensity for Abusiveness Scale (PAS; Dutton, 1995) was designed as a self-report perpetrator profile for intimate abusiveness. It was empirically validated through reports of abuse by intimate partners. The original PAS (Dutton, 1995) was given to 144 men in treatment for partner abuse and 44 demographically matched controls. It correlated significantly with partner reports of abusiveness and correctly classified men 82.2% of the time, as one standard deviation above or below the mean partners' report score for abusiveness. In the present study, the PAS was given to clinical outpatients, gay males, male college students, and a group of spousal assaulters. A criterion measure for abusiveness (the Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory; Tolman 1989, or the Psychological Maltreatment Inventory; Kasian & Painter, 1992) was collected from intimate partners. In all groups, the PAS correlated significantly with partners' reports of both physical and psychological abusiveness on subscales of the criterion measures: Dominance/Isolation and Emotional Abuse. For the college students and wife-assault groups, a new criterion measure was used: the Severity of Violence Against Women Scale. The PAS correlated significantly with partners' reports of threats and violence measured by this scale. The PAS appears to provide a nonreactive assessment instrument that is a strong predictor of intimate abusiveness across a variety of populations.     

Assessing callous-unemotional traits in adolescent offenders: validation of the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits

The presence of callous-unemotional (CU) traits designates an important subgroup of antisocial youth. To improve upon existing measures, the Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits (ICU) was developed to provide an efficient, reliable, and valid assessment of CU traits in samples of youth. The current study tests the factor structure and correlates of the ICU scale in a sample (n=248) of juvenile offenders (188 boys, 60 girls) between the ages of 12 and 20 (M=15.47, SD=1.37). Confirmatory factor analyses are consistent with the presence of three independent factors (i.e., Uncaring, Callousness, and Unemotional) that relate to a higher-order callous-unemotional dimension. Also, CU traits overall showed associations with aggression, delinquency, and both psychophysiological and self-report indices of emotional reactivity. There were some important differences across the three facets of the ICU in their associations with these key external criteria.     

Religious Characteristics and the Death Penalty

Using one mock trial scenario, this study investigated whether religious and demographic factors were related to death penalty attitudes and sentencing verdicts. Those who favored the death penalty differed from those who had doubts about the penalty in gender, affiliation, fundamentalism, evangelism, literal Biblical interpretism, beliefs about God’s attitudes toward murders, and perceptions of how their religious groups felt about the death penalty. These relationships generally held after mock jurors were death qualified. Gender, fundamentalism, literal interpretism, beliefs about God’s death penalty position, and perceptions of how one’s religious group felt about the death penalty predicted death penalty sentencing verdicts. Future research could determine whether using peremptory challenges to exclude potential jurors based on religion can help lawyers choose a more favorable jury. The present research was supported by the National Science Foundation award number 0351811, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the American Psychology-Law Society, and the University of Nebraska Law-Psychology Program. This research was presented at the 2006 conference of the American Psychology-Law Society. The authors are grateful for the research assistance of Nick Fanning and Beth Herschlag and for the helpful comments from Brian Bornstein, Rich Wiener, Bob Schopp, Dick Dienstbier, and several anonymous reviewers.     

Institutional Collective Action on Drugs: Functional and Vertical Dilemmas of Unused Pharmaceuticals

The authors use the Institutional Collective Action Framework to analyze the barriers, opposition, and opportunities for residential pharmaceutical disposal programs in the United States via a case study on a series of take‐back programs pioneered in the state of Washington by local and state governments, as well as the corresponding backlash from federal agencies. While successful in some ways, these innovative solutions directly challenged the competing federal policy regimes controlled by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and, to a lesser extent, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Findings from case studies suggest that functional dilemmas created by existing institutions with entrenched regulatory regimes are a key challenge to finding efficient solutions to vertical ICA dilemmas. Conclusions, then, connect to the broader ICA research agenda, and implications for multi‐level governance issues.     

Piteşti: a project in reeducation and its post-1989 interpretation in Romania

The purpose of this article is twofold: to provide a critical account of the Pite?ti experiment and its significance within the history of Romanian Communism and to examine current public disputes relative to memorializing the Pite?i experiment that concern issues of legitimacy, collective memory, and identity construction. The main argument pursued here is that within the recent postcommunist politics of memory, one major prevailing trend is to reincorporate a nationalist ideology within a postcommunist rhetoric. This leads to the conclusion that such mnemonic practices indicate a strong relationship between collective memory and political culture.