Factitious Illness by Proxy: Understanding Underlying Psychological Processes and Motivations

Children are put at risk of emotional and physical harm when parents seek unnecessary medical care. Understanding why parents seek medical interventions that create risk for their children requires us to consider how past experiences, and the mental representations of these experiences influence current behaviour. Past experiences of danger affect how parents interpret ‘dangerous’ situations in the present and how they organise protection of their child. This article demonstrates how the notion of mental representations (that dispose parents to act in particular ways) can assist in engaging, assessing and treating parents who display factitious illness by proxy behaviour. When classified using the Dynamic‐Maturational Method, the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) allows both assessment of implicit and explicit representations and also understanding of the developmental process through which parents have learnt to attribute meaning to information and to organise their behaviour. In this case study, psychosocial assessment of the family included an AAI with each parent. The use of this assessment tool both aided the therapy team in the process of case formulation and intervention planning, and had therapeutic value in and of itself. We argue that treatment is more likely to be effective if the parents and professionals have a shared understanding of the parents' intentions and the developmental process that led to unsafe behaviour, which requires change.     

A Summary and Commentary on D. and S. Premack’s Original Intelligence

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior -     

Flexible models for non-equidispersed count data: comparative performance of parametric models to deal with underdispersion

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - Count data as response variables are commonly modeled using Poisson regression models, which require equidispersion, i.e., equal mean and variance. However,...     

Pre‐Going Private Ownership Around the World

Going private transactions are often highly leveraged, and give rise to potential agency conflicts among existing shareholders. But who exactly are those shareholders, and under what legal conditions are these transactions more likely to occur? We examine ownership structure prior to going private transactions in 33 countries around the world from 2002 to 2014. The data indicate strong and consistent evidence that pre‐going private ownership is characterized by higher institutional and corporate ownership. Family ownership lowers the probability of a public to private transaction. Stronger creditor rights increase the probability of going private, particularly for whole company and institutional buyouts.     

Building a Values‐Informed Mental Model for New Orleans Climate Risk Management

Individuals use values to frame their beliefs and simplify their understanding when confronted with complex and uncertain situations. The high complexity and deep uncertainty involved in climate risk management (CRM) lead to individuals’ values likely being coupled to and contributing to their understanding of specific climate risk factors and management strategies. Most mental model approaches, however, which are commonly used to inform our understanding of people's beliefs, ignore values. In response, we developed a “Values‐informed Mental Model” research approach, or ViMM, to elicit individuals’ values alongside their beliefs and determine which values people use to understand and assess specific climate risk factors and CRM strategies. Our results show that participants consistently used one of three values to frame their understanding of risk factors and CRM strategies in New Orleans: (1) fostering a healthy economy, wealth, and job creation, (2) protecting and promoting healthy ecosystems and biodiversity, and (3) preserving New Orleans’ unique culture, traditions, and historically significant neighborhoods. While the first value frame is common in analyses of CRM strategies, the latter two are often ignored, despite their mirroring commonly accepted pillars of sustainability. Other values like distributive justice and fairness were prioritized differently depending on the risk factor or strategy being discussed. These results suggest that the ViMM method could be a critical first step in CRM decision‐support processes and may encourage adoption of CRM strategies more in line with stakeholders’ values.     

A Weighted Composite Dose – Response Model For Human Salmonellosis

This article describes the development of a weighted composite dose – response model for human salmonellosis. Data from previously reported human challenge studies were categorized into two different groups representing low and moderately virulent/pathogenic Salmonella strains based on a disease end point. Because epidemiological data indicate that some Salmonella strains are particularly pathogenic, and in the absence of human feeding study data for such strains, Shigella dysenteriae was used as a proxy for highly virulent strains. Three single-hit dose – response models were applied to the human feeding study data and evaluated for best fit using maximum likelihood estimation: (1) the exponential (E-1pop), (2) the two-subpopulation exponential (E-2pop), and (3) the Beta-Poisson (BP). Based on the goodness-of-fit test, the E-1pop and BP were the best-fit models for low and moderately virulent/pathogenic Salmonella strains, and the E-2pop and BP models were better for highly virulent/pathogenic strains. Epistemic analysis was conducted by determining the degree of confidence associated with the selected models, which was found to be 50%/50% (E-1pop/BP) for low and moderately pathogenic Salmonella strains, and 9.8%/90.2% (E-2pop/BP) for highly virulent strains. The degree of confidence for each component model and variations in the proportion of strains within each virulence/pathogenicity category were incorporated into the overall composite model. This study describes the influence of variation in strain virulence and host susceptibility on the shape of the population dose – response relationship.     

Unconstrained parametrizations for variance-covariance matrices

The estimation of variance-covariance matrices through optimization of an objective function, such as a log-likelihood function, is usually a difficult numerical problem. Since the estimates should be positive semi-definite matrices, we must use constrained optimization, or employ a parametrization that enforces this condition. We describe here five different parametrizations for variance-covariance matrices that ensure positive definiteness, thus leaving the estimation problem unconstrained. We compare the parametrizations based on their computational efficiency and statistical interpretability. The results described here are particularly useful in maximum likelihood and restricted maximum likelihood estimation in linear and non-linear mixed-effects models, but are also applicable to other areas of statistics.     

Personal heroes,religion, and transcendental metanarratives

With the increased sociological interest in popular culture, many studies have examined the hero types lauded by the media from situation comedies to movies, books, and magazines. Few studies, however, have examined who, if anybody, actual individuals identify as personal heroes. To the extent that the hero identification of individuals has been examined at all, it has generally been the hero identification of children and adolescents that has been studied. The study of heroes is important because heroes are one indicator of who we are and what we stand for. That is partly what motivates the recent attention to the media's identification of heroes. Yet while the media represent a very visible aspect of culture, who individuals privately cite as their heroes is, although less visible, just as much a part of who we are as a culture. Accordingly, this paper reports on findings from two telephone surveys conducted in Philadelphia that, among other questions pertaining to the meaning of life, asked adults over 18 whether they had any heroes and if so who those heroes were. The tendency to identify with heroes was found to be related to transcendental concerns with the meaning of life and to religiosity. Overall, the pattern of findings discloses an unstudied dimension of cultural disenchantment.     

The Criminalization of Drug Use

Sociological Forum -