South Africa

A look at the historical development of the Commonwealth and the effect the Zimbabwe issue, most recently, but also the issue of South Africa under apartheid, had on it.     

The generalized instructional set of the Criminal Attribution Inventory (CRAI): socially desirable responding and faking

Accurate assessment of criminal attributions can assist in explaining crime and identifying offender treatment targets. The current study examines the relationship between a new method of assessing the cognition of criminal attributes, the Criminal Attribution Inventory (CRAI) and a measure of socially desirable responding. 300 participants including incarcerated offenders, released offenders, sex offenders, and university students participated in the current study. Results indicate minimal relationships between socially desirable responding and the CRAI. In a fake-good testing situation, the faking index had appropriate sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive power in identifying fake-good responses. The CRAI's instructional set of general observation as opposed to self-representation appears to limit socially desirable responding and also allows the CRAI to be administered to nonoffender populations.     

Gender, Threat/Control-Override Delusions and Violence

This study brings together the threat/control-override perspective and the literature on gender and stress coping to argue that gender moderates the association between threat delusions and violence. We suggest that men are more likely than women to respond to stressors such as threat delusions with violence. We test these ideas using data from the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study, a multi-wave study of post-discharge psychiatric patients. Within-person results from two-level hierarchical models support the idea that men and women cope with threat delusions differently. Specifically, we find that men are significantly more likely to engage in violence during periods when they experience threat delusions, compared with periods when they do not experience threat delusions. In contrast, women are significantly less likely to engage in violence during times when they experience threat delusions, compared with periods when they do not. We discuss these findings in light of the literature on gender and stress coping.