Search

This pilot study (N = 30) experimentally examines the effects of an adaptive intervention in a misdemeanor drug court. The adaptive algorithm adjusted the frequency of court hearings and case management sessions according to prespecified criteria in response to participants' performance. Results reveal that the adaptive algorithm was acceptable to clients and staff, was feasible to implement with greater than 85% fidelity, and showed promise for eliciting substantial improvements in drug abstinence and graduation rates. Compared to drug court as usual, participants in the adaptive condition were more likely to receive responses from the drug court team for inadequate performance and received those responses after a shorter period. This suggests the adaptive algorithm more readily focused the team's attention on poorly performing individuals, allowing them to address problems before they developed too fully. These preliminary data justify further research evaluating the adaptive algorithm in a fully powered experimental trial. Keywords: drug court; adaptive treatment; criminal justice; antisocial personality disorder

Abstract This paper considers neurocognitive models of aggression and relates them to explanations of the antisocial personality disorders. Two forms of aggression are distinguished: reactive aggression elicited in response to [...]

Mealey argued that sociopathy is an evolutionary stable strategy, subject to frequency-dependent selection--high levels of sociopathy being advantageous to the individual if population-wide frequencies of it are low, and vice versa. I argue that at least one alternative hypothesis exists that explains her data equally well. Alternative hypotheses must be formulated and tested before any theory can be validated.

The Perception-Action Model of empathy (PAM) is both sufficiently broad and sufficiently detailed to be able to describe and accommodate a wide range of phenomena--including the apparent 'cold-heartedness' or lack of empathy of psychopaths. We show how the physiological, cognitive, and emotional elements of the PAM map onto known and hypothesized attributes of the psychopathic personality.

BBS 18(3):523-99. Sociopaths are 'outstanding' members of society in two senses: politically, they draw our attention because of the inordinate amount of crime they commit, and psychologically, they hold our fascination because most of us cannot fathom the cold, detached way they repeatedly harm and manipulate others. Proximate explanations from behavior genetics, child development, personality theory; learning theory, and social psychology describe a complex interaction of genetic and physiological risk factors with demographic and micro environmental variables that predispose a portion of the population to chronic antisocial behavior. More recent, evolutionary and game theoretic models have tried to present an ultimate explanation of sociopathy as the expression of a frequency-dependent life strategy which is selected, in dynamic equilibrium, in response to certain varying environmental circumstances. This paper tries to integrate the proximate, developmental models with the ultimate, evolutionary ones, suggesting that two developmentaly different etiologies of sociopathy emerge from two different evolutionary mechanisms. Social strategies for minimizing the incidence of sociopathic behavior in modern society should consider the two different etiologies and the factors that contribute to them.