The Use of the Adult Attachment Scale with Domestically Violent Men

Empirical evidence highlights the utility of examining attachment styles in exploring the etiology of intimate partner violence perpetration, with insecure attachment styles regularly identified as underscoring domestically violent men. This study applied the 18-item self-report Adult Attachment Scale (Collins & Read, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(4), 644–663 1990) to 176 men entering a domestic violence perpetration counseling program. Factor analyses failed to result in the three factor model of the AAS. Subsequent item analyses indicated participants’ random and contradictory response style negated the possibility of any coherent factor structure. The results of this study caution investigators on the validity of self-report data with domestically violent men and offers both research and clinical/conceptual implications.     

A plea for thresholds, i.e., maximal allowed levels for prohibited substances, to prevent questionable doping convictions

With the development of highly sensitive drug testing technologies that can detect a minute quantity of a prohibited substance in an athlete's body, accidental contamination through contact with publicly circulated materials can more readily result in a "positive" reading. To discharge the burden of a positive finding, the athlete must show the "factual circumstances" in which the prohibited substance entered his/her system. In cases of accidental contamination, the athlete generally cannot even know how it occurred, as there are many known and unknown possible sources of contamination. When an athlete does give an account, it cannot generally be proven or disproven. Outside the realm of sports anti-doping, the use of scientifically established thresholds for drug testing is standard practice. Basic logic dictates that thresholds would enable one to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant amounts in the context of a possible sports doping offence. Such a threshold should be functionally motivated, i.e., enable the differentiation between relevant and irrelevant quantities in the context of a possible doping offence, rather than based on instrument performance limits.     

Separated Powers in the United States: The Ideology of Agencies,Presidents, and Congress

Government agencies service interest groups, advocate policies, provide advice to elected officials, and create and implement public policy. Scholars have advanced theories to explain the role of agencies in American politics, but efforts to test these theories are hampered by the inability to systematically measure agency preferences. We present a method for measuring agency ideology that yields ideal point estimates of individual bureaucrats and agencies that are directly comparable with those of other political actors. These estimates produce insights into the nature of the bureaucratic state and provide traction on a host of questions about American politics. We discuss what these estimates reveal about the political environment of bureaucracy and their potential for testing theories of political institutions. We demonstrate their utility by testing key propositions from Gailmard and Patty's (2007) influential model of political control and endogenous expertise development.     

Accuracy of eyewitness identification is significantly associated with performance on a standardized test of face recognition

OBJECTIVES: This study assessed the relationship between Eyewitness Accuracy regarding a person met under conditions of high stress and performance on a standardized, neutral test of memory for human faces. METHOD: Fifty-three U.S. Army personnel were exposed to interrogation stress. Forty-eight hours later, participants were administered the Weschler Face Test and then asked to identify the one interrogator who they had encountered 48 h earlier. RESULTS: A significant positive relationship was observed between performance on the Weschler Face Test and performance on the Eyewitness task. Inaccurate eyewitnesses exhibited more False Negative errors when performing the Weschler Face Test. DISCUSSION: Trait ability to remember human faces may be related to how accurately people recall faces that are associated with highly emotional circumstances. Detection probability methods, such as ROC curve analyses, may be of assistance to forensic examiners, the police, and the courts, when assessing the probability that eyewitness evidence is accurate.     

Australia and Israel: a Diasporic,Cultural and Political Relationship

Australia and Israel: a Diasporic, Cultural and Political Relationship. Edited by Shahar Burla and Dashiel Lawrence (Brighton, Chicago and Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2015), pp. vi + 246. US$34.95 (cloth).     

World society,international society and the colonization of Africa

This article utilizes an English School approach to examine the European colonization of Africa between 1871 and 1908. Drawing upon Clark's framework for understanding the relationship between world society, international society and international institutions, it argues that the colonization of Africa was very much dependent upon the activity of non-state actors who essentially pushed European states into the formal colonization of the African interior. Such a case sheds important light on the destructive role world society has played in international politics, a topic which has received no attention in the English School literature. Moreover the study provides additional empirical insights into the relationship between world society, international society and international institutions, while also bringing much needed empirical discussion of colonization into the English School catalogue.     

Inspire Magazine: A Critical Analysis of its Significance and Potential Impact Through the Lens of the Information,Motivation, and Behavioral Skills Model

This article presents an analysis of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's English language publication Inspire that was conceptualized and conducted on the basis of the Information-Motivation-Behavioral Skills (IMB) framework. The IMB model has been widely tested, validated, and applied across a range of behavior change interventions, and provides both a conceptual and analytic framework to examine the range and quality of content featured across the 11 issues of Inspire that were published and distributed online starting in July of 2010. Inspire has been implicated in multiple instances of terrorism cases in the U.S. and its impact and potential can be analyzed on the extent to which it effectively targets core attitudes, perceptions of social normative support for violence, and its regular featuring of behavioral skills such as bomb making, weapons training, and emphasizing a creative and do-it-yourself ethos.