Common topics
- ADHD
- Alcohol
- Child
- Confessions
- Drugs
- Evaluation
- IPV (Intimate Partner Violence)
- Memory
- Online Offense
- Paraphilia
- Pathology
- Personality
- PTSD
- Sex Offense
- Trial
- Victim
- Violence
Browse all topics
Memory for Crimes and Alcohol
This article reviews how alcohol may affect memory formation and reconstruction for criminal events, including attention, episodic memory, and the encoding of new information. It also collects research on alcohol and eyewitness or suspect reporting, describing findings that vary across studies and memory tasks rather than treating intoxication as having one uniform effect.
Memory for Traumatic Events
This compilation reviews research on how trauma and stress can affect memory, including stability, recall, organization, and susceptibility to later information. Its cited studies describe varied findings, such as memory impairments or disorganization in some samples and vulnerability to misinformation, so it does not treat every traumatic memory as either uniformly accurate or uniformly impaired.
MEMORY: Counterfactual Thinking
Counterfactual thinking involves imagining how past events might have turned out differently and considering the consequences of those alternatives. The overview discusses types of counterfactuals and proposed functions, then summarizes research on topics including risk, behavior intentions, and how people identify causes.
MEMORY: Serial Position Effects
This overview describes the serial-position effect, in which people tend to recall the first and last items in a sequence better than items in the middle. It explains primacy through rehearsal and longer-term storage, and recency through working-memory availability and temporal context, noting that intervening tasks can weaken recency.
MEMORY: Strangling
The material reviews neurological and psychological consequences reported after strangulation or attempted hanging, including cerebral oxygen deprivation and memory impairment. It also summarizes shelter and emergency-care studies in which intimate-partner strangulation was reported frequently, alongside symptoms and patterns of seeking medical help.
Misattribution of Memory
This overview explains misattribution of memory, also known as a source-monitoring error, as assigning a recollection to the wrong origin. It describes cryptomnesia, false memories, and source confusion, and summarizes how incomplete encoding and judgment processes can contribute to these errors.
ONLINE OFFENSE: Age deception online
This resource brings together research on adolescents’ MySpace profiles under the topic of online age deception. The cited studies examine disclosure of identifying details and changes in privacy practices over time, rather than directly measuring how often youths misrepresent their ages.
ONLINE OFFENSE: Cat Fishing
Online catfishing involves falsely presenting oneself to a potential romantic partner without intending to meet in person. The summarized study of 1,107 adults examined attachment anxiety, avoidance, and gender, reporting associations between attachment anxiety and both perpetrating and being targeted by this form of deception.
ONLINE OFFENSE: Conviction Rates
A US Justice Department bulletin reports federal prosecution outcomes for child sex exploitation offenses referred in 2006, including child pornography, sex transportation, and sex abuse cases. It records conviction rates of 95%, 92%, and 86%, respectively, among defendants in those offense categories, and compares those figures with 1996 data.
ONLINE OFFENSE: Estimating Youth Images
This overview discusses how young-looking adults and youths may be represented in sexual images and the difficulty of estimating age from images. It summarizes research on online searches and sexual fantasies, then describes a study in which pediatric endocrinologists frequently judged images of adult women as under 18, with substantial variation in the features they relied on.
PARAPHILIA: Asphyxiophilia
This overview describes erotic asphyxiation, its reported historical context, and literature discussing the effects and risks associated with oxygen deprivation. It also collects research abstracts on injury and death, hypoxyphilia, the “choking game,” and consent in BDSM, with the cited authors addressing distinct practices and contexts.
PATHOLOGY: Hypochondriasis, Somatic Symptom Disorder, and Illness Anxiety Disorder
The DSM-5 replaced the former hypochondriasis category with Somatic Symptom Disorder and Illness Anxiety Disorder, reflecting different patterns of bodily symptoms and illness-related anxiety. The article describes how the distinction may clarify diagnosis and shape psychological approaches, while noting scholarly disagreement about whether the categories should remain separate.
PATHOLOGY: Paranoia and Violence
The studies collected here examine how paranoid delusions, fear, anger, and other clinical factors relate to violent behavior and judgments of dangerousness. One small case series found fear and defensive anger commonly accompanied delusions and some offenses, while a hospital-record study found diagnosis and delusions less influential than institutional progress and prior assaultiveness.
PATHOLOGY: Parkinson’s Disease and Paranoia
This review describes cognitive, psychiatric, and emotional symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease, including psychosis with visual hallucinations or paranoid delusions. It notes that symptoms may reflect underlying disease processes, dopaminergic medication, or both, and that treatment options can be limited by adverse effects on motor symptoms.
PATHOLOGY: Social Anxiety Disorder
Social Anxiety Disorder involves marked fear or anxiety in social situations where a person may be scrutinized, such as conversations, being observed, or performing before others. The DSM-5 material says the person fears negative evaluation or embarrassment and typically avoids these situations or endures them with intense anxiety, while also discussing diagnostic features, course, differential diagnosis, and comorbidity.
PERSONALITY: Antisocial Personality and Violence
This collection surveys research on antisocial personality features and violence, including intimate-partner violence and severe offending. The cited studies examine how comorbidity, psychopathy, trauma, biological markers, and personality traits relate to different forms of aggression, and report that associations vary across samples and outcomes.
PERSONALITY: Antisocial Personality Disorder
This overview describes antisocial personality disorder in terms of persistent disregard for social norms and others’ rights, impulsivity, irresponsibility, and difficulties in relationships. It also reproduces a DSM-5 passage explaining how clinicians distinguish the diagnosis from antisocial behavior associated with substance use, including the relevance of a childhood history.
PERSONALITY: Avoidant Personality Disorder
Avoidant Personality Disorder is described as a persistent pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and heightened sensitivity to criticism or rejection. The source says that fear of embarrassment or negative evaluation can lead people to avoid social interactions, and it lists diagnostic features such as reluctance to take interpersonal risks and viewing oneself as socially inept or inferior.
PERSONALITY: Dependent Personality Disorder
Dependent Personality Disorder is characterized in the source by a strong need for care and support from others, accompanied by fear that important relationships will end. This pattern may involve difficulty disagreeing, making independent decisions, or beginning tasks alone, and the article describes seeking a replacement source of support after a dependent relationship ends.
PERSONALITY: Psychopathy vs. Antisocial Personality Disorder
Psychopathy describes a grouping of personality traits that may include impulsivity, deception, limited emotional responsiveness, and disregard for others, while antisocial personality disorder is the closest equivalent in the APA diagnostic manual. The article explains that the diagnosis captures many antisocial behaviors but not all interpersonal and emotional traits associated with psychopathy.
Psychosis and Alcohol
This clinical overview describes alcohol-related psychosis, which may arise during or soon after heavy drinking or during withdrawal and can involve hallucinations, paranoia, or fear. It reviews diagnostic considerations, possible causes, evaluation, and management, and emphasizes distinguishing alcohol-induced symptoms from schizophrenia, delirium, and other medical causes.
PTSD and Substance Abuse
The resource surveys research on posttraumatic stress disorder and substance use, including diagnostic overlap and patterns of use among affected populations. Its studies include findings on drug-use reports by veterans seeking PTSD care and on links between PTSD symptoms, coping motives, and marijuana use, alongside reviews of treatment and co-occurring conditions.
PTSD: Delayed Onset
Research on delayed PTSD considers whether symptoms begin after a substantial interval or are recognized later, with studies reporting differing estimates across populations. A review of Vietnam veteran treatment samples found reported onset delays in 35% to 50% and awareness delays in 60% to 65%, often alongside intervening negative life events.
PTSD: DSM-5 Definition
The US National Center for PTSD summarizes the DSM-5 diagnostic framework, which organizes PTSD criteria around trauma exposure, re-experiencing, avoidance, negative changes in thoughts or mood, and arousal or reactivity. It also reviews revisions from DSM-IV and reports that national prevalence estimates were typically about one percentage point lower under DSM-5.
PTSD: General Features
This resource surveys PTSD symptoms, diagnostic questions, and research on how traumatic experiences may affect people. It includes discussion of hyperarousal, intrusive recollection, avoidance and emotional numbing, alongside studies addressing stress responses, childhood trauma, and cognitive or biological findings.