The undisordered personality: Normative assumptions underlying personality disorder diagnoses.

Clinical diagnoses are impossible without referring to normative assumptions about what is desirable functioning. In this paper, the authors explicate the implicit normative assumptions that seem to have guided the formulation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–IV) personality disorder (PD) criteria. Then the authors discuss various conceptual reference frames in which such assumptions may be grounded: (1) a given diagnostician’s personal value system, (2) the expectations of the culture in which a person currently lives, (3) the expectations of the culture in which a person was raised, (4) models of “natural” personality functioning that are rooted in evolution theory, and (5) the presence of distress and/or impairment. In accordance with Wakefield (1992a, 2006), the authors argue that PD diagnoses necessarily involve both an evolutionary and a cultural component. If PDs were defined completely in cultural terms, investigating their biological underpinnings would be nonsensical. In addition, the values of any specific culture should not be given too much weight, because cultural expectations may themselves be harmful. Future editions of DSM should define personality pathology in less culture-relative terms, and address the inevitable issue of values more explicitly. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Radiation from one-dimensional dielectric leaky-wave antennas

Dielectric leaky-wave antennas consist of multiple dielectric layers above a ground plane, along with a simple source such as an infinite line current in the one-dimensional case. The layers act as a guiding structure for one or more leaky waves, which are responsible for producing a narrow-beam radiation pattern. Depending on the beam angle, the leaky waves may extend for a considerable distance from the source, and thus experience truncation effects due to a finite-size substrate. One of the purposes of the present investigation is to study efficient methods for calculating the patterns under such conditions. The chirp z-transform (CZT) is shown to be very efficient for this. Simple approximate formulas for calculating the radiation pattern are also investigated. In addition, a study is also made of the different contributions to the total aperture field, including the leaky-wave field, the space-wave field, and the surface-wave field