Matthew Huss

There exists a valid concern among forensic psychology scholars that measures intended for sexual offenders have plateaued in their predictive accuracy. The current study examined this concern using the "coffee can" methodology of Kroner, Mills, and Reddon (2005). The Iowa Sex Offender Risk Assessment (ISORA8), Level of Service Inventory - Revised (LSI-R), and Static-99R were used to predict various methods of detected recidivism (general, sexual, and violent recidivism) as compared to three randomly generated measures and a weighted generated measure. Independent correlation and receiver operating characteristic comparisons found that in almost all cases, generated measures outperformed established measures. Analyses indicated that the current conceptualization of risk for sexual offenders has not been thoroughly integrated into established measures. Current measures appear incomplete, but have a clear and empirically-noted ability to improve.

... DOI: 10.1080/10683160902998025 Leah C. Skovran a ... Various theorists have suggested that the motivations underlying a sexual offender's crime are most likely influenced, on some level, by sexual fantasies (Baumgartner, Scalora, & Huss, 20023. Baumgartner, J., Scalora, M ...

It has been argued that battered women who kill their abusers represent a special class of defendants being unfairly treated in the legal system. As a result, commentators have argued for reforms to permit the judicial system to respond more fairly. Researchers have investigated the influences of these prescribed legal modifications and the possible influence of various demographic and psychological factors on legal reforms. However, social scientists have not yet asked some fundamental, psychological questions. Is the law consistent with what society believes is right and just? Is there a commonsense notion of justice in these cases? What factors constitute cognitive decision rules and influence judgments in cases of battered women who kill their abusers? This study uses a basic, psychological method to identify psychological factors that are important in judgments regarding battered women who kill and to better understand commonsense notions of justice in these cases.

Psycholegal researches have largely ignored the relevance of nonverbal auditory information in earwitness memory, nor have they compared its retention with visual or verbal information. Memory of nonverbal auditory stimuli was investigated in two different contexts. In Experiment 1, participants recalled more sounds (i.e., nonverbal auditory stimuli) than the sounds' verbal labels. However, with a more ecologically valid method in Experiment 2, participants recalled more verbal stimuli in conjunction with visual information than they did nonverbal stimuli. Even after a 1-week delay, participants' retention of the verbal-visual combination was highest.

Preparing undergraduate information systems students to be successful systems analysts is a challenging task. The students require higher-order thinking skills to successfully solve many real life business problems. Traditional lecturing alone is not entirely effective in ...

... Correspondence: Valerie M. Gonsalves, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 238 Burnett Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588 ... Psychological effects of methamphetamine include hallucinations, delusions, anxiety, paranoia, insomnia and aggression (Murray 1998; Donovan and Marlatt 2005). ...

The following colleagues have generously given their time and energy to review papers for Law and Human Behavior in the last year. We are grateful for their contributions to this journal. ... Rebecca Allen Adam Alter Jamie Arndt Karl Ask Steve Basile Jennifer Beaudry Gershon Ben-Shakhar Donald Bersoff JP Blair Anita Blanchard Jeremy Blumenthal Marcus Boccaccini Doug Boer Gary Bond Brian Bornstein Bette Bottoms Martin Bourgeois Neil Brewer Maggie Bruck Brooke Butler Elizabeth Cauffman Steve Charman Annette Christy Steven Clark Kimberly ...

This study proposed that domestic violence perpetrators in a clinical sample could be categorized into distinct subgroups and that a particular subgroup of batterers would exhibit sufficient psychopathic characteristics to be clinically meaningful. Participants were interviewed in order to gather a relevant social, familial, educational, criminal, and substance abuse history. They were then administered several psychological measures including the Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL:SV). Results lent support to the empirical batterer typology identified by Holtzworth-Munroe, A., Meehan, J. C., Herron, K., Rehman, U., & Stuart, G. L. (2000). However, despite the presence of a more antisocial subgroup, psychopathy did not consistently differentiate among batterers across the measured dependent variables.

The Wilson Sex Fantasy Questionnaire (WSFQ; Wilson, 1978) is a 40-item self-report questionnaire that assesses 4 types of sexual fantasies: Exploratory, Intimate, Impersonal, and Sadomasochistic. The goal of the present study was to examine the differences between child molesters (n = 64) and nonsexual offenders (n = 41) on the WSFQ. Comparisons included the four underlying factors, 2 factors associated with the fantasizer's role in the fantasy (active vs. passive), and 2 items most closely related to sexual molestation behavior. Results found that molesters reported higher scores on the Exploratory and Intimate subscales, as well as overall fantasy. Scores on the Impersonal and Sadomasochistic subscales were not significantly different. Molesters also reported higher scores on fantasies where they were the actor, and higher scores on fantasies most closely related to sexual molestation behavior. Subsequent analyses found that both offender groups reported significantly lower levels of fantasies than college comparison subjects and noncriminal sexual deviants. Differences among the 2 study groups are discussed in terms of social and cognitive characteristics of molesters.

Amid growing psychological controversy and legal interest surrounding the uses of PCL-R and biological evidence in the legal system, this mock jury study assessed the effects of PCL-R and biological evidence on outcomes in an insanity defense case. A sample of 428 undergraduates read a trial transcript of an insanity defense murder case. Three variables of interest were manipulated: rebuttal illness (no mental illness, personality disorder, or psychopathy), evidentiary basis (biological or psychological), and evidentiary strength (moderately strong or moderately weak). Consistent with the hypotheses, biological evidence was more persuasive than psychological evidence, and the rebuttal was slightly more successful when the prosecution labeled the defendant as a “psychopath” than when they described him simply as “not mentally ill.” Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

It has been proposed that domestic violence offenders can be classified into distinct subgroups based on psychopathology and generality and severity of violence. This study examined a clinical sample of batterers to identify whether there were differ-ences across batterer subtypes ...