Factors predicting the type of tactics used to resist sexual assault: A prospective study of college women.

The purpose of the current study was to examine how women's intentions, as well as psychological and situational factors, predicted the actual use of resistance tactics in response to a sexual assault situation over a 2-month follow-up period. Twenty-eight percent of the 378 undergraduate women who participated at the baseline assessment and returned for the follow-up session 8 weeks later were victimized over the interim period. The results suggested that women's reported use of verbally assertive tactics was predicted by the intention to use verbally assertive tactics, concern about injury, greater confidence, and feelings of being isolated or controlled by the perpetrator. The use of physically assertive tactics was predicted by increased severity of the attack, greater confidence, and feelings of being isolated or controlled by the perpetrator. The use of nonforceful tactics was predicted by intentions to use nonforceful tactics, increased self-consciousness, knowing the perpetrator prior to the assault, fears of losing the relationship with the perpetrator, and no history of childhood sexual victimization. These findings have important implications in sexual assault risk-reduction programming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Expectancy change and adolescents' intentions to use marijuana.

Drug prevention campaigns commonly seek to change outcome expectancies associated with substance use, but the effects of violating such expectancies are rarely considered. This study details an application of the expectancy violation framework in a real world context by investigating whether changes in marijuana expectations are associated with subsequent future marijuana intentions. A cohort of adolescents (N = 1,344; age range = 12?18 years) from the National Survey of Parents and Youth was analyzed via secondary analysis. Nonusers at baseline were assessed 1 year later. Changes in expectancies were significantly associated with changes in intentions (p     

Does time between application and case assignment predict therapy attendance or premature termination in outpatients?

This study assessed whether timeliness of case assignment predicted 2 types of patient termination: nonattendance to therapy before intake but after completing the application process and premature termination once therapy had begun. The patients in this study represented all adults applying to an outpatient clinic for therapeutic services over a 5-year period (N = 313, 142 male). Results indicated that the timeliness of case assignment was a significant predictor of whether a patient attended intake, with those enduring a longer delay in case assignment more likely to not pursue therapeutic services. Timeliness of case assignment was not related to premature termination from therapy. Potential moderators, including patient ethnicity, gender, age, personality disorder diagnosis, and symptom severity, did not affect the relationship between the variables of interest. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Slipping and Tripping Reflexes for Bipedal Robots

Many robot applications require legged robots to traverse rough orunmodeled terrain. This paper explores strategies that would enablelegged robots to respond to two common types of surface contacterror: slipping and tripping. Because of the rapid response requiredand the difficulty of sensing uneven terrain, we propose a set ofreflexes that would permit the robot to react without modeling oranalyzing the error condition in detail. These reflexive responsesallow robust recovery from a variety of contact errors. We presentsimulation trials for single-slip tasks with varying coefficients offriction and single-trip tasks with varying obstacle heights.     

Presenting the Complex Client in Court: Practical Issues Related to the Assessment of Capacity.

This article discusses the complex client in guardianship proceedings with 2 case examples. Topics addressed include the role of the psychologist in court, options for the client (limited vs. full guardianship), and the type of information sought by attorneys and judges in these cases. In Case 1, Mrs. G., a woman with a long history of bipolar disorder and an emergent vascular dementia, is threatened with eviction because of fire starting. In Case 2, the family of Mr. J. is pressing for guardianship secondary to a history of substance abuse and poor medication compliance for HIV. In both cases, traits previously deemed eccentric by family members have become threats to safety. Fluctuation of cognitive functioning and the importance of medication compliance add to the complexity of these cases. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Group Behaviors for Systems with Significant Dynamics

Birds, fish, and many other animals travel as a flock, school, or herd. Animals in these groups must remain in close proximity while avoiding collisions with neighbors and with obstacles. We would like to reproduce this behavior for groups of simulated creatures traveling fast enough that dynamics plays a significant role in determining their movement. In this paper, we describe an algorithm for controlling the movements of creatures that travel as a group and evaluate the performance of the algorithm with three simulated systems: legged robots, humanlike bicycle riders, and point-mass systems. Both the legged robots and the bicyclists are dynamic simulations that must control balance, facing direction, and forward speed as well as position within the group. The simpler point-mass systems are included because they help us to understand the effects of the dynamics on the performance of the algorithm.     

Action-specific influences on distance perception: A role for motor simulation.

Perception is influenced by the perceiver's ability to perform intended actions. For example, when people intend to reach with a tool to targets that are just beyond arm's reach, the targets look closer than when they intend to reach without the tool (J. K. Witt, D. R. Proffitt, & W. Epstein, 2005). This is one of several examples demonstrating that behavioral potential affects perception. However, the action-specific processes that are involved in relating the person's abilities to perception have yet to be explored. Four experiments are presented that implicate motor simulation as a mediator of these effects. When a perceiver intends to perform an action, the perceiver runs a motor simulation of that action. The perceiver's ability to perform the action, as determined by the outcome of the simulation, influences perceived distance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Clustering of time-series subsequences is meaningless: implications for previous and future research

Given the recent explosion of interest in streaming data and online algorithms, clustering of time-series subsequences, extracted via a sliding window, has received much attention. In this work, we make a surprising claim. Clustering of time-series subsequences is meaningless. More concretely, clusters extracted from these time series are forced to obey a certain constraint that is pathologically unlikely to be satisfied by any dataset, and because of this, the clusters extracted by any clustering algorithm are essentially random. While this constraint can be intuitively demonstrated with a simple illustration and is simple to prove, it has never appeared in the literature. We can justify calling our claim surprising because it invalidates the contribution of dozens of previously published papers. We will justify our claim with a theorem, illustrative examples, and a comprehensive set of experiments on reimplementations of previous work. Although the primary contribution of our work is to draw attention to the fact that an apparent solution to an important problem is incorrect and should no longer be used, we also introduce a novel method that, based on the concept of time-series motifs, is able to meaningfully cluster subsequences on some time-series datasets.