Suchergebnisse

It is widely observed that child sexual offenders typically exhibit considerable reluctance to self-disclose at a level that reflects the full reality of their offending. Their successful engagement in relapse prevention-based programs is therefore problematic. This paper describes a study involving men undertaking a prototypical group treatment program, facing the challenge of revealing to others the details of their offense process. A procedure was developed to access their covert responses at the time of this encounter. From a grounded theory analysis, participants were found to employ various strategies to manage situations where self-disclosure was required. Four distinct disclosure management styles emerged: exploratory, oppositional, evasive, and placatory; the latter three of which appear unfavorable to effective engagement in treatment. As well as suggesting ways of influencing disclosure management style, analysis indicated that it might be possible to predict these different orientations during routine assessment.

The engagement process of sexual offenders in group-based cognitive-behavioral treatment is an important area of study. Disclosure management style (DMS), a model developed from grounded-theory research of men undertaking a prototypical program, provides a framework to assess engagement in treatment. Our goal was to develop a quantitative measure of DMS, to test its reliability and validity, and to evaluate its utility as a measure of treatment progress by examining relationships between DMS and established measures of treatment change. We studied a sample of men ( N = 93) who undertook an intensive prison-based treatment program in New Zealand. Variables included DMS measures, psychometric measures of dynamic risk and treatment change, static risk, clinician rating of treatment progress, and recidivism outcomes. We found that (a) DMS shows an acceptable level of agreement between independent raters, (b) DMS-based ratings of engagement changed over the course of treatment and were correlated with measures of change based on offender self-reports, and (c) offenders showed heterogeneity in terms of their trajectories of change as assessed by DMS ratings.

Wind gusts represent one of the main natural hazards due to their increasing socioeconomic and environmental impacts on, as examples: human safety; maritime-terrestrial-aviation activities; engineering and insurance applications; and energy production. However, the existing scientific studies focused on observed wind gusts are relatively few compared to those on mean wind speed. In Australia, previous studies found a slowdown of near-surface mean wind speed, termed "stilling", but a lack of knowledge on the multi-decadal variability and trends in the magnitude (wind speed maxima) and frequency (exceeding the 90th percentile) of wind gusts exists. A new homogenized daily peak wind gusts (DPWG) dataset containing 548 time series across Australia for the period 1941-2016 is analyzed to determine long-term trends in wind gusts. Here we show that both the magnitude and frequency of DPWG declined across much of the continent, with a distinct seasonality: negative trends in summer-spring-autumn and weak negative or non-trending (even positive) trends in winter. We demonstrate that ocean-atmosphere oscillations such as the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annular Mode partly modulate decadal-scale variations of DPWG. The long-term declining trend of DPWG is consistent with the "stilling" phenomenon, suggesting that global warming may have reduced Australian wind gusts. ; C.A.M. was supported by Ramon y Cajal fellowship (RYC-2017-22830) and the grants no. VR-2017-03780 and RTI2018-095749-A-I00 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE). G.F.Z was supported by the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (No. 2019QZKK0606) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41621061). S.W.S was partly supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MSIT) (NRF2018R1A5A1024958).