Beyond Restoration of Honor : Compensating Veterans for the Psychological Injuries of the Gay and Transgender Bans

This Article is titled “Beyond Restoration of Honor” specifically to introduce the policy priority of ensuring that all Sexual and Gender Identity Minority (SGIM) veterans who were harmed by...discriminatory policies [like Don\u27t Ask, Don\u27t Tell] can obtain and use Veterans Affairs (VA) disability benefits for injuries resulting from discrimination while in the military. While this Article highlights the value of codifying a series of specific SGIM stressor markers for PTSD in the VA’s regulations concerning personal assault and creating presumptions of service-connection for specific military experiences, existing laws and regulations permit service-connection for these injuries without further regulatory changes. In recognition of the policy concerns facing this large, under-served group of military veterans, this Article adopts a three-step approach. Part I briefly explores the relationship between SGIM status and adverse mental health outcomes among U.S. veterans. This Part pays particular attention to the characteristics of the anti-gay bans that have theoretically caused mental health injuries. Part III then examines the existing VA disability framework for compensating mental health injuries. This Part identifies VA disability compensation as the appropriate vehicle to address the unmet needs of impacted SGIM veterans. Part III describes the research methodology and results of a study that identified and analyzed VA disability appeals in which veterans claimed that SGIM orientation discrimination caused their mental health condition. Through natural language processing (NLP) strategies and machine learning (ML) algorithms, the study identified 118 Board of Veterans’ Appeals cases out of 123,011 decisions addressing service-connection for mental health disorders. This Part presents the results of statistical analysis of the relationships between case outcomes and case characteristics. It specifies the types of mental health conditions most often claimed and awarded in SGIM discrimination cases, the demographic background of the veterans who appealed, and other factors related to the success and failure of these claims. As an aid to practitioners, this Part introduces an Online Supplement containing a digest of summarized cases, indexed by different facts which may resemble the background of a future veteran’s claim. The last Part concludes with recommendations to ensure that those veterans who have been impacted by the military’s discriminatory policies are able to address longstanding needs and overcome persistent stigma surrounding requests for assistance. This Part discusses the benefits of developing a presumption related to SGIM discrimination in the regulations related to traumatic stressors. It also explores Canada’s recent experience developing a comprehensive governmental approach to veterans who experienced the Gay Purge and is a noteworthy example of success in the restoration of honor. It further draws salient lessons from cases litigated under the present adjudication framework. In sum, the Parts below offer a comprehensive roadmap for immediate action—well beyond simply the restoration of honor. This abstract has been adapted from the author\u27s introduction

Why laterality matters in trauma: sinister aspects of memory and emotion

This thesis presents an eclectic mix of studies which consider laterality in the context of previous findings of increased prevalence of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in male combat veterans with non-consistent right hand preference. Two studies extend these findings not just to civilian populations and women, but to left handers and find that left, rather than mixed, handedness is associated with increased prevalence of PTSD in both general population and clinical samples, and to severity of symptoms in the former. To examine issues relevant to the fear response in healthy populations, a movie excerpt is shown to be theoretically likely to target the emotion of fear and to generate subjective and physiological (skin conductance) responses of fear. The film is used as a laboratory analogue of fear to examine possible differences in left and right handers in memory (for events of the film) and in an emotional Stroop paradigm known to produce a robust and large effect specifically in PTSD. According to predictions based on lateralisation of functions in the brain relevant to the fear response, left handers show a pattern of enhanced memory for visual items and poorer memory for verbal material compared to right handers. Immediately after viewing the film, left handers show an interference effect on the Stroop paradigm to general threat and film words and increased response latency compared to right handers, approaching performance of previously reported clinical samples with PTSD. A novel non-word Stroop task fails to show these effects, consistent both with accounts of interference as language processing effects and compromised verbal processing in PTSD. Unexpected inferior performance of females in memory for the film, contrary to previous literature, may also be amenable to explanations invoking compromised left hemisphere language functions in fear situations. In testing one theory of left handedness as due to increased levels of in utero testosterone, the 2D:4D (second to fourth digit ratio) provides mixed evidence in two samples. A possible association of more female-like digit ratios in males with PTSD is a tentative finding possibly relevant to sex differences in prevalence of PTSD. A critique of existing and inadequate theoretical accounts of handedness concludes the thesis and proposes a modification of the birth stress hypothesis to one specifically considering peri-natal trauma to account for the above findings. This hypothesis remains to be empirically tested

Psychology

Psychology is designed to meet scope and sequence requirements for the single-semester introduction to psychology course. The book offers a comprehensive treatment of core concepts, grounded in both classic studies and current and emerging research. The text also includes coverage of the DSM-5 in examinations of psychological disorders. Psychology incorporates discussions that reflect the diversity within the discipline, as well as the diversity of cultures and communities across the globe.https://commons.erau.edu/oer-textbook/1000/thumbnail.jp

McNair Research Journal - Summer 2015

Journal articles based on research conducted by undergraduate students in the McNair Scholars Program Table of Contents Biography of Dr. Ronald E. McNair Statements: Dr. Neal J. Smatresk, UNLV President Dr. Juanita P. Fain, Vice President of Student Affairs Dr. William W. Sullivan, Associate Vice President for Retention and Outreach Mr. Keith Rogers, Deputy Executive Director of the Center for Academic Enrichment and Outreach McNair Scholars Institute Staf

JURI SAYS:An Automatic Judgement Prediction System for the European Court of Human Rights

In this paper we present the web platform JURI SAYS that automatically predicts decisions of the European Court of Human Rights based on communicated cases, which are published by the court early in the proceedings and are often available many years before the final decision is made. Our system therefore predicts future judgements of the court. The platform is available at jurisays.com and shows the predictions compared to the actual decisions of the court. It is automatically updated every month by including the prediction for the new cases. Additionally, the system highlights the sentences and paragraphs that are most important for the prediction (i.e. violation vs. no violation of human rights)

Proceedings of the 7th international conference on disability, virtual reality and associated technologies, with ArtAbilitation (ICDVRAT 2008)

The proceedings of the conferenc

Automatism and voluntariness: towards a new framework for assigning criminal responsibility

It is a fundamental principle of Anglo-American criminal law that an offender must have performed the relevant criminal offence voluntarily. An instance of an offence occurring as a result of involuntary movements of the body, such as spasms or reflexes, generally gives rise to a claim of automatism, which is overwhelmingly characterised by courts and scholars alike as a ‘defence’. However, such language has implications on the way in which we understand voluntariness in criminal law. Rather than categorising the situation as an instance in which a constituent element of the offence has not been fulfilled, courts seek to identify whether the defendant should be excused. This is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it gives rise to conceptual uncertainty, due to the inadequate labelling of the instance at hand. Second, it has the potential of casting the net of criminalisation too wide, as courts are sceptic and overwhelmingly cautious in acquitting defendants who allege to have moved involuntarily. This study adopts the view that automatism is not a defence, but rather a denial that the offence ever happened, due to the requirement of voluntariness having not been fulfilled. In turn, the question then becomes: ‘How should the voluntariness requirement be defined in the context of criminal responsibility?’ The present thesis seeks to answer this central question by adopting a multi-disciplinary perspective, engaging in philosophical and neuroscientific analyses on the nature of voluntary movement. Drawing from these areas of research, it is argued that the criminal law should adopt a definition of voluntariness based on one’s retention of sufficient bodily control to move otherwise. Such a conceptualisation would align the requirement with a philosophical understanding of free action based on the availability of alternative possibilities. Moreover, it would place the voluntariness requirement on a sounder empirical footing, given the existence of neuroscientific evidence that traces back the regulation and inhibition of movement to specific, identifiable cognitive processes. The proposed definition of voluntariness would apply to all assessments of criminal responsibility, as an element of the offence, thus relinquishing the application of an automatism ‘defence’. Beyond practical implications, the thesis is also methodologically significant, due to the incorporation of cognitive neuroscience and hypnosis research into the legal analysis of voluntariness. In this context, the present study contributes to the growing field of ‘neurolaw’, which combines law and neuroscience to influence legal standards through neuroscientific evidence

Proceedings of the 10th international conference on disability, virtual reality and associated technologies (ICDVRAT 2014)

The proceedings of the conferenc

Semantic Types for Decomposing Evidence Assessment in Decisions on Veterans’ Disability Claims for PTSD

This paper presents a semantic analysis for mining arguments or reasoning from the evidence assessment portions (fact-finding portions) of adjudicatory decisions in law. Specifically, we first decompose the reasoning into primary branches, using a rule tree of the substantive issues to be decided. Within each branch, we further decompose argumentation using two main categories: reasoning that deploys special legal rules and reasoning that does not. With respect to special legal rules, we discuss legal presumption rules, sufficiency-of-evidence rules, and the benefit- of-the-doubt rule. Semantic anchors for this decomposition are provided by identifying the inferential roles of sentences – principally evidence sentences, finding-of-fact sentences, evidence-based-reasoning sentences, and legal-rule sentences. We illustrate our methodology throughout the paper, using data and examples from a data set of veterans’ disability claims in the U.S. for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

The Police Officer as Survivor: The Psychological Impact of Exposure to Death in Contemporary Urban Policing

All human encounters with death, whether they involve a casual contact with the death of another person or the realistic threat of one\u27s own demise, have important psychological consequences that result in new modes of adaptation, thought and feeling. In the course of their duties, contemporary urban police officers frequently encounter the deaths of others and some participate in mortal combat situations that credibly threaten their own lives. The psychological dimensions of police officers\u27 professional exposures to the deaths of others are to a large extent shaped by the specific duties and responsibilities prescribed by their formal task environment, while the experience of surviving mortal combat is shaped by a range of objective and subjective situational variables. This dissertation applies Robert Jay Lifton\u27s formative-symbolic paradigm and his psychology of survival to explore police officers\u27 death encounters and their individual, cultural and organizational consequences and implications. These psychological transformations become manifest in the psychology of survival\u27s five themes: psychic numbing, the death imprint image, death guilt, suspicion of counterfeit nurturance, and the struggle to make meaning of the experience. Using a shared themes approach and relying upon depth interviews and other forms of direct observation, it examines the experiences of officers operating in four task environments (rookie officers, patrol sergeants, crime scene unit technicians and homicide detectives) as well as officers who survived mortal combat events in which they participated in the death of another person. The study illuminates how death encounters serve in a functional and integrative way to socialize new officers, how the \u27professional numbing\u27 they develop protects them from various emotional hazards of police work, how the themes of survivorship are reflected in the officer\u27s working personality and the occupational culture\u27s ethos, and how these encounters shape the development of the officer\u27s personal and professional self identity. Finally, it explores the formative-symbolic paradigm\u27s utility in explaining various aspects of police behavior through the paradigm\u27s emphasis on achieving and maintaining a sense of symbolic immortality and feelings of movement, connection and integrity in the face of profoundly threatening death immersions