Questionnaire measures of childhood and teenage psychopathy should not be used in clinical or forensic settings because their legitimacy has yet to be established.
That’s the message from Carla Sharp and Sarah Kine who assessed four youth psychopathy questionnaires: The Antisocial Process Screening Device, The Child Psychopathy Scale, The Psychopathy Content Scale and The Youth Psychopathic Traits Inventory.
According to geriatrician and internist David Chess M.D., a new study from the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests an unsettling prognosis for the future medical care of aging American baby boomers.The generation born after World War II will face potential jeopardy if healthcare changes are not made swiftly enough. The problem: an aging population faced with an imperfect healthcare system that does not place enough emphasis on geriatric care. Medicare is already in serious financial trouble, and new rules to financially shore up the program are likely to drive more and more doctors from participation, especially those in primary care. According to Dr. Chess, that will only exacerbate problems identified in the study, which include too few specialists in geriatric medicine, insufficient training, underpaid primary care and geriatric physicians, and a failure of Medicare to support new strategies. [continue reading…]
A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but humans may have even less to work with than previously thought. University of Missouri researchers found that the average person can keep just three or four things in their “working memory” or conscious mind at one time. This finding may lead to better ways to assess and help people with attention-deficit and focus difficulties, improve classroom performance and enhance test scores.“Most people believe the human mind is incredibly complex,” said Jeff Rouder, associate professor of psychology in the MU College of Arts and Science. “We were able to use a relatively simple experiment and look at how many objects can be in maintained in the human conscious mind at any one time. We found that every person has the capacity to hold a certain number of objects in his or her mind. Working memory is like the number of memory registers in a computer. Every object takes one register and each individual has a fixed number of registers. Limits in working memory are important because working memory is the mental process of holding information in a short-term, readily accessible, easily manipulated form where it can be combined, rearranged and stored more productively.” [continue reading…]
