“Revised standards for psychology services in jails, prisons, correctional facilities and agencies” plus 1 more

Revised standards for psychology services in jails, prisons, correctional facilities and agencies

Posted: 08 Jul 2010 02:02 PM PDT

Public release date: 8-Jul-2010
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Contact: Jim Gilden
media.inquiries@sagepub.com
SAGE Publications

Published in Criminal Justice and Behavior

Los Angeles, CA (July 8, 2010) Revised standards for psychology services in jails, prisons, correctional facilities, and agencies appear in the July special issue of the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior (published by SAGE).

The three largest mental health institutions in the U.S. are not hospitals, but penal institutions: New York's Riker's Island, Chicago's Cook County Jail and the Los Angeles County Jail. Seriously mentally ill individuals compose about 15% of the over two-million individuals currently incarcerated in the U.S.. Unfortunately, many correctional systems lack resources to meet the constitutionally mandated needs of mentally ill individuals in their custody.

The standards represent the International Association for Forensic and Correctional Psychology's (IACFP) second revision of psychology services standards in correctional settings, which were first published in 1980. They are the result of more than a year's effort by the IACFP's revision committee, chaired by Richard Althouse, Ph.D., president of the IACFP.

"Offenders, mentally ill or not, entrusted to the custody of correctional facilities and agencies, benefit in a number of ways from the highest quality of rehabilitative and mental health services," writes Althouse in the introduction to the special issue. These benefits include helping to maintain institutional security, an increased likelihood of successful integration back into the community, and reduced likelihood of expensive civil litigation or other legal actions that can result from inadequate correctional mental health services.

IACFP's revised standards provide information for both administrators and clinicians in areas relevant to providing optimal mental health services, including organizational policies and ethical principles, intake screening, staffing rations, mental health services, suicide prevention and intervention, records, research, and references. They can be read free for a limited time at http://cjb.sagepub.com/content/37/7/749.full.pdf+html.

Criminal Justice and Behavior (CJB) is the official publication of the International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology (www.ia4cfp.org). CJB promotes scholarly evaluations of assessment, classification, prevention, intervention, and treatment programs to help the correctional professional develop successful programs based on sound and informative theoretical and research foundations. Publishing timely, well-conceived, and lively scholarship, CJB advances the knowledge and expertise of professionals and academics involved in forensic psychology, with a concentration on correctional psychology. http://cjb.sagepub.com

SAGE is a leading international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational, and professional markets. Since 1965, SAGE has helped inform and educate a global community of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, humanities, social sciences, and science, technology, and medicine. A privately owned corporation, SAGE has principal offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC. www.sagepublications.com

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The Psychology of Minimalist and Abstract Art

Posted: 08 Jul 2010 12:14 PM PDT

Ever wonder why you find some minimalist or abstract art so appealing? There could be some science to it.

Minimalist Obama.jpg I just came across this series of ~~minimalist~~ reductive drawings of public figures by Ali Jabbar (that's Obama at right; h/t Buzzfeed). I found it oddly appealing, which reminded me of a psychological principle called "peak shift." The basic idea behind the principle is that animals sometimes respond more to an exaggerated stimulus than a normal one.

Take the now-famous seagull experiment. When a mother seagull brings her chicks food, the babies peck at her beak, which has a red dot on it. Chicks will peck just as much at both the disembodied head of a mother -- creepy, I know -- or even a popsicle stick with a red dot on it.

But it gets even weirder, as V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist, and William Hirstein, who specializes in the philosophy of the mind, explained in a popular 1999 paper titled "The Science of Art:"

[A] very long, thin brown stick, with three red stripes at the end is even more effective in eliciting pecks than the original beak, even though it looks nothing like a beak to a human observer.
The gull's form recognition areas are obviously wired-up in such a way that Tinbergen had inadvertently produced a super stimulus, or a caricature in 'beak space' (e.g. the neurons in the gull's brain might embody the rule 'more red contour the better'). Indeed, if there were an art gallery in the world of the seagull, this 'super beak' would qualify as a great work of art--a Picasso.

That last part is obviously an extrapolation, but the finding is still bizarre. There are other examples of peak shift, too. A rat that is conditioned to respond to a rectangle, but not a square -- by getting food when the former is presented -- will have a more vigorous response to a rectangle that is longer and skinnier than the original. The more exaggerated the rectangle, the better. Ramachandran argues that this is what artists and caricaturists often do: find the essence of what they want to depict, magnify it and throw out the rest.

Of course this isn't a definitive explanation of the appeal of art, but it does offer a new way of thinking about our reaction to it: essence may matter more than intricacy.

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Psychology

Friday, July 9, 2010