The Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire-Short Form (PAQ-S): A 6-item measure of alexithymia.

Background: Alexithymia is a trait characterized by difficulties identifying feelings, difficulties describing feelings, and externally orientated thinking. It is widely regarded as an important transdiagnostic risk factor for a range of psychopathologies, including depressive and anxiety disorders. Whilst several well-validated psychometric measures of alexithymia exist, these are relatively lengthy, thus limiting their utility in time-pressured settings.

The impact of voluntariness of apologies on victims' responses in restorative justice: findings of a quantitative study.

Apologies are ordered in law without certainty about whether or not recipients perceive ordered and voluntary apologies differently. This exploratory study investigates whether or not the voluntariness of apologies influences recipients' perceptions of their sincerity, acceptance of apologies, willingness to forgive and intended retributive behaviour. We manipulated the voluntariness of apologies whilst considering offender (age, gender, ethnicity and prior wrongful behaviour) and offence (seriousness) characteristics in 3 studies (s = 164, 121, 236).

Critical review of the use of the Rorschach in European courts.

In relation to the admissibility of evidence obtained using projective personality tests arose in (2018). The Court of Justice of the European Union has held that an expert's report can only be accepted if it is based on the international scientific community's standards, but has refrained from stipulating what these standards are. It appears timely for European psychologists to decide what standards should be applied to determine whether or not a test is appropriate for psycholegal use.

Assessing alexithymia in adults with acquired brain injury: Psychometric properties of the Perth Alexithymia Questionnaire.

Background: Alexithymia is a multidimensional personality trait comprised of difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, and externally orientated thinking. The assessment of alexithymia in people with acquired brain injury (ABI) is of clinical interest because alexithymia is linked to poor psychosocial functioning and community reintegration after ABI. To date, alexithymia measures have not been psychometrically investigated/validated in an ABI sample, restricting confident empirical work in this area.

Why is alexithymia a risk factor for affective disorder symptoms? The role of emotion regulation.

Background: Ever since alexithymia was defined in the 1970s, robust associations have been observed between alexithymia and a variety of symptoms of psychopathology. Alexithymia is now widely regarded as an important transdiagnostic risk factor, and it is frequently assessed in clinical and research settings. However, despite this strong interest, it remains unclear exactly why (i.

Assessing alexithymia in forensic settings: Psychometric properties of the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale among incarcerated adult offenders.

Background: Alexithymia is a trait involving difficulty identifying feelings (DIF), difficulty describing feelings (DDF) and externally orientated thinking (EOT). It is a risk factor for criminal behaviour. It is commonly assessed with the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), but the psychometrics of the TAS-20 have not been tested across the range of offender populations, and it has been suggested it might be unsuitable in incarcerated offenders.

Alexithymia in nonviolent offenders.

Background: Alexithymia is a trait involving difficulties processing emotions. Existing data suggest it is associated with violent offending. In violent offender programmes, therefore, violent offenders are screened for alexithymia and it is attended to if necessary.

Forensic Experts' Perspectives on Australian Indigenous Sexual Offenders and Factors Important in Evaluating the Risk of Recidivism.

Law and ethics require that risk assessment should be cross-culturally valid and fair, but Australian research in this regard is underdeveloped. A logical first step in progressing the work required to build a strong evidence base on culturally sensitive risk assessment in Australia is to determine the expert views of those in the field. We interviewed 13 Australian evaluators who assess Indigenous sexual offenders' recidivism risk to determine their perceptions of the risk assessment instruments they use and the attributes they believe evaluators doing cross-cultural assessments should have.

Structuring the debate about research ethics in the psychology and law field: an international perspective.

Forensic psychologists' role is well established, and they are rightly well regulated because their decisions and behaviour can have a significant impact on people's rights and interests. Their ethical integrity, however, partly hinges on the psycholegal research products (data, methods and instruments) that they and others use. The ethical regulation of researchers who produce products and their research processes is, however, fragmented, limited and narrow and largely focuses on domestic research.

What is alexithymia? Using factor analysis to establish its latent structure and relationship with fantasizing and emotional reactivity.

Objective: There is ongoing uncertainty about the structure and definition of alexithymia. Conceptually, alexithymia has traditionally been defined as a multidimensional trait with four components: difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, externally orientated thinking, and difficulty fantasizing. However, some authors suggest that difficulty fantasizing might not be a component, and others suggest low emotional reactivity is a fifth component.

Assessing the Risk of Australian Indigenous Sexual Offenders Reoffending: A Review of the Research Literature and Court Decisions.

The assessment of offenders' risk of reoffending, particularly sexual reoffending, is a core activity of forensic mental health practitioners. The purpose of these assessments is to reduce the risk of harm to the public, but they are controversial and become more contentious when Australian practitioners who want to undertake such assessments in an ethically responsible way must use reliable validated instruments, disclose the limitations of their assessment methods, instruments and data to judicial decision-makers and understand how decision-makers might use their reports. The purpose of this systematic literature review was to explore the practices of Australian practitioners and courts in respect of the assessment of Australian Indigenous male sexual offenders' risk of reoffending.

Moral Challenges for Psychologists Working in Psychology and Law.

States have an obligation to protect themselves and their citizens from harm, and they use the coercive powers of law to investigate threats, enforce rules and arbitrate disputes, thereby impacting on people's well-being and legal rights and privileges. Psychologists as a collective have a responsibility to use their abilities, knowledge, skill and experience to enhance law's effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability in preventing harm, but their professional behaviour in this collaboration must be moral. They could, however, find their personal values to be inappropriate or there to be insufficient moral guides and could find it difficult to obtain definitive moral guidance from law.

Apologies in a Legal Setting: Insights from Research into Injured Parties' Experiences of Apologies after an Adverse Event.

There is scholarly support for the use of apologies in the settlement of legal disputes and anecdotal evidence of their effectiveness in mediation and other dispute resolution processes. There is also a growing body of empirical psychological research regarding the use and effectiveness of apologies available to inform and guide the practice of lawyers, mediators and other professionals, and judicial officers when apologies arise in legal proceedings. This article critically reviews the research literature concerning the experience of apology recipients and offers a framework for understanding the circumstances in which an apology may contribute to the resolution of a legal dispute.

Adolescent bystanders' perspectives of aggression in the online versus school environments.

Researchers' understanding of bystanders' perspectives in the cyber-environment fails to take young people's perceptions into account and remains imperfect. Interventions encouraging adolescents to help targets of cyber-aggression are therefore typically based upon traditional school-based aggression research. Twenty-four in-depth interviews with Australian 13-16 year-olds revealed two themes that reflect how young bystanders perceive differences between aggression online and at school.

A case study of the neuropsychological outcomes following microsurgery, conventional radiotherapy and stereotactic radiotherapy for an adult's recurrent craniopharyngioma.

Objective: To examine the neuropsychological outcomes for an adult patient, 2 years after receiving microsurgery and conventional radiotherapy for a recurrent craniopharyngioma; and the impact of a further intervention, stereotactic radiotherapy, on this level of neuropsychological functioning.

Participant: JD, a 30 year old male whose recurrent craniopharyngioma had 2 years earlier been treated with two operations and conventional radiotherapy.

Design: JD was assessed (using standardized clinical tests) before and after a course of stereotactic radiotherapy.

Apologies following an adverse medical event: The importance of focusing on the consumer's needs.

Objective: The lack of a theoretical framework limits educators' ability to train health practitioners how to disclose, and apologise for adverse medical events. The multidimensional theory of apology proposes apologies consist of one or more components which can either be self-focused (focused on the apologiser's needs) or other-focused (focused on the needs of the consumer). We investigated whether the inclusion of other-focused elements in an apology enhanced its impact in a health setting.

Patients' and family members' views on how clinicians enact and how they should enact incident disclosure: the "100 patient stories" qualitative study.

Objectives: To investigate patients' and family members' perceptions and experiences of disclosure of healthcare incidents and to derive principles of effective disclosure.

Design: Retrospective qualitative study based on 100 semi-structured, in depth interviews with patients and family members.

Setting: Nationwide multisite survey across Australia.

The health implications of apologizing after an adverse event.

Australia is working towards a National Open Disclosure Standard in which all adverse incidents are disclosed to patients in all health-care facilities in the country. Among the many good reasons for this approach, one that has not attracted attention is the possibility that disclosure of an adverse incident may moderate its impact on the recovery and general health of patients. In this article, we discuss this perspective with reference to relevant psychological and physiological literature.

The past, present and future of mental health law: a therapeutic jurisprudence analysis.

This article uses a therapeutic jurisprudence perspective to review the evolution of mental health law in the Western world by examining developments at various stages in history, in particular the 20th century. It suggests that one of the major challenges for the future, from a therapeutic jurisprudence perspective, will be to help minimise the stigma, prejudice and discrimination associated with mental health law. The article concludes with the suggestion that the question of whether mental health law itself, because it contributes to discrimination against mentally disordered people, may be anti-therapeutic requires more investigation and consideration.

Exploration of the association between apology and forgiveness amongst victims of human rights violations.

Forgiving may lead to an improvement of mental health, and from a therapeutic jurisprudence perspective it is important to establish what aspects of judicial procedures can be changed to promote forgiving. The literature suggests that receiving an apology may encourage forgiving. However, there is a dearth of empirical research regarding the association between forgiving and apology in judicial settings.