Cues and knowledge structures used by mental-health professionals when making risk assessments

Background: Research into mental-health risks has tended to focus on epidemiological approaches and to consider pieces of evidence in isolation. Less is known about the particular factors and their patterns of occurrence that influence clinicians’ risk judgements in practice. Aims: To identify the cues used by clinicians to make risk judgements and to explore how these combine within clinicians’ psychological representations of suicide, self-harm, self-neglect, and harm to others. Method: Content analysis was applied to semi-structured interviews conducted with 46 practitioners from various mental-health disciplines, using mind maps to represent the hierarchical relationships of data and concepts. Results: Strong consensus between experts meant their knowledge could be integrated into a single hierarchical structure for each risk. This revealed contrasting emphases between data and concepts underpinning risks, including: reflection and forethought for suicide; motivation for self-harm; situation and context for harm to others; and current presentation for self-neglect. Conclusions: Analysis of experts’ risk-assessment knowledge identified influential cues and their relationships to risks. It can inform development of valid risk-screening decision support systems that combine actuarial evidence with clinical expertise

Autonomy and Relatedness in Mother-Teen Interactions as Predictors of Involvement in Adolescent Dating Aggression

This study examined autonomy and relatedness in mother adolescent interactions as longitudinal predictors of adolescent involvement in dating aggression. Research indicates that dating aggression, defined as perpetration and/or victimization of physical, psychological, or sexual aggression, affects one-third to two-thirds of adolescents. Most studies of adolescent dating aggression have been cross-sectional, have lacked a developmental theoretical perspective, and have not adequately investigated contextual differences in dating aggression. This study adds to the existing literature in that it applies a developmental framework to a multi-method, longitudinal study (n=88) of adolescent dating aggression. Adolescents’ and their mothers’ demonstrations of support for and inhibition of autonomy and relatedness during a coded interaction task observed when adolescents were 16 years old were examined as predictors of adolescents’ reports of perpetration and victimization of physical and psychological aggression two years later, exploring gender, race/ethnicity, and environmental risk as moderators. It was expected that promotion of autonomy and relatedness would be negatively related to adolescent reports of involvement in dating aggression, whereas inhibition of autonomy and relatedness would be positively related to adolescent reports of dating aggression. Hierarchical multiple regressions revealed that, as expected, maternal inhibition of relatedness predicted slight increases in reports of psychological perpetration and victimization. However, maternal support for autonomy was related to increases in perpetration of psychological aggression for all adolescents and increases in perpetration and victimization of physical aggression for girls, but not boys. Adolescent support for autonomy was related to increases in perpetration of physical aggression only for environmentally at-risk teens and to increases in psychological perpetration for racial/ethnic minority participants, but not for Caucasians. It was also found that girls reported more physical and psychological perpetration than boys, and that racial/ethnic minority participants reported more physical perpetration than Caucasians. Results indicate that autonomy is a dynamic developmental process that operates differently as a function of the various ecological contexts in which adolescents live, as marked by gender, race/ethnicity, and risk, in predicting adolescent involvement in dating aggression

The return of the sacred: Collective action of Copts during Muslim Brotherhood rule

The outbreak of the Arab Spring and the subsequent overthrow of Mubarak in 2011 gave ‎way to the rise of Islamists to power. The Muslim Brotherhood’s regime was perceived ‎by the Coptic community, in particular, as a real threat to Copts’ collective identities. In ‎response, ordinary Christians started to organize around religion as well as the religious ‎group to which they belong in order to manage perceived as well as real fears and ‎uncertainties prevailing at the time. This has eventually incited new patterns of ‎communal political activism among Christians, who seemingly embarked on “street ‎politics” rather than “electoral politics” in resisting the incumbent, which was ‎noticeably seen in the massive protests of June 30th, 2013. This thesis is an engagement with the underlying causes and mechanisms that were ‎motivating collective action of Copts during the Brotherhood’s rule. Broadly, it seeks to ‎establish a linkage between religion and politics. Utilizing a social identity theory and a ‎mixed-method consisting of both qualitative and quantitative indicators, I argue that ‎communal behavior of Copts was basically shaped by growing religious fears shared by ‎Coptic constituencies at the time while the Islamists were in office. Dynamics which ‎were transforming religious worries into real action are further discussed. The current ‎thesis contributes to literature on transition through its emphasis on the causes and ‎mechanisms that construct and reconstruct identities of “subaltern” religious minorities ‎‎(i.e., Egypt’s Copts) during times of sociopolitical transformation.

Language Models Can Improve Event Prediction by Few-Shot Abductive Reasoning

Large language models have shown astonishing performance on a wide range of reasoning tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether they could reason about real-world events and help improve the prediction performance of event sequence models. We design LAMP, a framework that integrates a large language model in event prediction. Particularly, the language model performs abductive reasoning to assist an event sequence model: the event model proposes predictions on future events given the past; instructed by a few expert-annotated demonstrations, the language model learns to suggest possible causes for each proposal; a search module finds out the previous events that match the causes; a scoring function learns to examine whether the retrieved events could actually cause the proposal. Through extensive experiments on several challenging real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our framework -- thanks to the reasoning capabilities of large language models -- could significantly outperform the state-of-the-art event sequence models.Comment: NeurIPS 2023 camera-read

Back to black:values, ideologies, and the black box of political radicalization

This article focuses on the psychological drivers of anomic and violent behaviors described as ‘new radicalisms’ in the context of the Eurozone economic crisis. The authors make a conceptual and empirical distinction between the desire for change forward against the old (defined as radicalism) and the desire for change backward against the new (defined as reactionism). Using 2015 data from Greece, multinomial logit models test the role of core values that map on the desire for change against the new and the desire for change against the old as predictors of dormant and actualized anomic and violent behaviors. The findings support that desire for conservation triggered reactionist political engagement in Greece that spans across the left/right ideology spectrum

Policing Protests: An Exploratory Analysis of Crowd Management Policies

Several policing strategies have been used to manage protest crowds over the past 50 years. Research suggests that escalated force and command and control strategies were utilized until the 1990’s (Bourne, 2011; Schweingruber, 2000), while negotiated management has emerged as a prominent protest management strategy within recent decades (Gillham, 2011; Gillham & Noakes, 2006). While literature describes the general evolution of protest strategies over time, there has been no systematic documentation of police approaches to crowd management. This study examines police policies governing protest management to identify current U.S. police practices. The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) provides model policies to help police agencies become familiar with best practices and develop their own policies. The IACP’s model policy on crowd management and control was used to identify tactics that represent best practice standards for protest management in the United States. Through a content analysis of policies from a sample of U.S. police agencies, this study assesses agency compliance with the IACP model policy on crowd management and control, as well as alignment with existing protest management strategies. Findings inform our understanding of current police protest management practices and offer policy implications. First, this study shows that there is a great deal of variation among protest management policies used within the sample agencies. Second, sample agency policies tend to adopt best practice escalated force tactics more often than command and control or negotiated management practices. Finally, three specific themes related to community-oriented policing, strict enforcement and use of force, and regional differences emerge from bivariate and multivariate analyses. These themes offer direction for future theory development and protest management research

Attachment-related mentalization moderates the relationship between psychopathic traits and proactive aggression in adolescence

The lack of affective responsiveness to others' mental states - one of the hallmarks of psychopathy - is thought to give rise to increased interpersonal aggression. Recent models of psychopathy highlight deficits in attachment security that may, in turn, impede the development of relating to others in terms of mental states (mentalization). Here, we aimed to assess whether mentalization linked to attachment relationships may serve as a moderator for the relationship between interpersonal aggression and psychopathic traits in an adolescent community sample. Data from 104 males and females with a mean age of 16.4 years were collected on mentalization capacities using the Reflective Functioning Scale on the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Psychopathic traits and aggressive behavior were measured via self-report. Deficits in mentalization were significantly associated with both psychopathic traits and proactive aggression. As predicted, mentalization played a moderating role, such that individuals with increased psychopathic tendencies did not display increased proactive aggression when they had higher mentalizing capacities. Effects of mentalization on reactive aggression were fully accounted for by its shared variance with proactive aggression. Psychopathic traits alone only partially explain aggression in adolescence. Mentalization may serve as a protective factor to prevent the emergence of proactive aggression in spite of psychopathic traits and may provide a crucial target for intervention

Building a Call to Action: Social Action in Networks of Practice

The three research papers completed as part of this dissertation explore how people contributing to #BlackLivesMatter build knowledge, using social construction of knowledge (SCK), and what they are building knowledge about, using critical consciousness, because understanding how these processes play out on Twitter provides a way for others to understand this social movement. Paper 1 describes a new methodological approach to combining social network analysis (SNA) and social learning analytics to assess SCK. The sequential mixed method design begins by conducting a content analysis according to the Interaction Analysis Model (IAM). The results of the content analysis yield descriptive data that can be used to conduct SNA and social learning analytics. The purpose of Paper 2 was to use the typology of digital activism actions identified by Penney and Dadas (2014) from interviews with digital activists to validate them in a quantitative study. Paper 2 found that the actions taken by people who are helping to facilitate face-to-face action (p \u3c .0000001 , r = -0.076) or provide face-to-face updates (p \u3c .0000001 , r = -0.060) were negatively correlated with the actions of people who were facilitating online actions suggesting that digital activists should be treated as a unique population of activists. Paper 3 used the outcomes of a content analysis and lexicon analysis performed on #BlackLivesMatter data to determine 1) the levels of SCK and critical consciousness present in online data and 2) social learning analytics to ascertain the extent that SCK and critical consciousness can predict social action. Results of the content analysis and lexicon analysis found all levels of SCK and critical consciousness in the data. Results of social learning analytics conducted using Naïve Bayes classification indicate that SCK and critical consciousness can only predict information sharing behaviors of online social action like personal opinions, forwarding information, and engaging in discussion. Evidence of information sharing behaviors on Twitter provides a high degree of confidence that further research including replies and other interactions between users will reveal robust SCK

Dynamics of emotions in protracted intergroup conflict as microfoundations for violent action : insights for conflict transformation from the Palestinian territories

Living within prolonged intergroup conflict has detrimental psychosocial and societal consequences, especially for members of low-power groups. Experiencing repression creates intense emotions and raises serious dilemmas about handling resistance to achieve social change. In recent years, novel approaches that focus on microlevel factors, particularly emotions, have been suggested as useful predictors to understand how and why violent conflicts persist. Details of the exact dynamics between emotions and collective action, such as how emotional mechanisms predict violent action under different types of conflict escalation, remain an open question. Despite the theoretical and practical importance of the subject, limited data is available from a low-power group perspective. In this dissertation research, I investigate how emotional mechanisms predict how – mainly violent – collective action is moderated by different types of conflict escalation. These insights inform and support conflict transformation from a psychological perspective. The research is based on extensive longitudinal mixed methods fieldwork in Israel and the Palestinian Territories over three years. To contextually comprehend the complex issues, I first ‘mapped the space' between emotions and action, using explorative participatory-observation. Then, to investigate the exact mechanisms of these interrelations, particularly how emotions predict violent action under different conflict escalation settings, I surveyed two samples of West Bank Palestinians (N = 200, 450) before and during different escalations using a longitudinal design. Escalation contexts included the US embassy's highly publicized move to Jerusalem which led to widespread unrest in Palestine, the so-called 'Gaza Marches of Return', and a full lockdown of Ramallah by the Israeli army. Particular focus was placed on negative high-agency emotions such as anger, humiliation, and hate, as well as on the distinction between individual- versus group emotions. Finally, using activist narratives, I outlined how – in the light of these escalatory interrelations – constructive social change from violence to nonviolent action is possible. Results confirmed an oppressive conflict reality for low-power group members, in which years of standstill alternate with acute phases of conflict escalation. The participatory data showed how people employ agentic coping patterns similar to established interpersonal conflict styles. Situational context such as conflict escalation substantially affects how and which specific emotional dynamics predict violent responses. For example, in conditions of low conflict salience, anger was associated with citizens' support for violent action while after conflict aggravation feelings of humiliation elicited support for violent resistance. Furthermore, distinctive profiles of individual- versus group emotions shape an agentic response. For mainly indirectly experienced conflict escalations, group emotions predicted violent collective action, while for closely experienced conflict events, individual emotions were associated with violent engagement. The qualitative narratives of formerly violent activists showed change pathways including emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects. For most participants, the change sequence was triggered by an unforeseen respectful intergroup encounter. This encounter elicited empathy towards the outgroup and reduced negative emotions, resulting in the cognitive reappraisal of their situation concerning the conflict context. Despite experiencing difficult conflict events and against the mechanisms outlined above, emotional and behavioral change from radical violent to nonviolent activism was possible. The data collected during different surges of conflict escalation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories shows how emotional mechanisms contribute to violence. Understanding psychological microfoundations, namely emotional dynamics, provides novel inroads for individual conflict transformation. The research contributes to current approaches of integrating political science with social psychology and adds more profound insights into the causes of violence, which is notoriously difficult to study. The gained insights hold the potential to positively influence detrimental intergroup behaviour in the Middle East and beyond