College students appear to be increasingly engaging in casual, non-committed sexual relationships, which may represent potential situations in which sexual assaults occur. The current study sought to assess if college students regard rape as a potential outcome of hooking up through examination of students' rape and hook-up scripts. A multi-ethnic sample of 109 US college women (54% European American, 19% Latina, 21% African American) described a typical rape and bad hook-up. Hook-up scripts generally did not include the possibility of sexual assault and instead focused on psychological consequences (e.g., shame). Participants' rape scripts generally did not occur in the context of casual sexual encounters. Implications of the results for understanding students' sexual behavior and developing rape prevention programs are discussed.

The purpose of the study was to assess sexual assault survivors' nondisclosure motivations, including stigma threat, and their impact on revictimization risk. The authors describe data from a prospective study of 144 female, undergraduate sexual assault survivors, most of whom had been assaulted by acquaintances and only one of whom had officially reported her experience to police. As part of a large-scale investigation, participants described during individual interviews why they had not reported their experiences to law enforcement authorities. Open-ended responses were coded into five reliable content themes, one of which was stigma-motivated nondisclosure, or stigma threat. Results indicated that stigma threat prospectively predicted sexual revictimization during a 4.2-month follow-up period. Moreover, results of mediation analyses suggested that decreased posttraumatic growth during the course of the study accounted for the relationship between stigma threat and survivors' revictimizations. Discussion focuses on advances to the sexual revictimization research (e.g., the importance of assessing subjective/perceptual in addition to objective/factual characteristics of assaults and their social repercussions) and to posttraumatic growth research, with data highlighting for the first time an important health correlate (i.e., sexual revictimization) of sexual assault survivors' perceived (lack of) posttraumatic growth. In addition, recommendations are provided for primary (social-level) prevention as well as for secondary prevention, that is, formal and informal support provided to sexual assault survivors.

Given the changing demographics in the United States, most forensic evaluators will likely be asked to evaluate someone of Hispanic background, including those who are limited English-proficient (LEP). Little is known about forensic practice with these evaluees, including evaluations of competency to stand trial (CST) and criminal responsibility (CR). The authors recruited psychologists from 3 professional organizations via email and surveyed them about their experience with Hispanic and LEP-Hispanic forensic evaluees. Of the 79 respondents, about 90% reported assessing at least 1 English-speaking Hispanic evaluee, whereas about 55% reported assessing at least 1 LEP-Hispanic evaluee. Forty respondents reported willingness to evaluate LEP-Hispanic individuals, but only 8 indicated they are able to conduct forensic interviews in Spanish themselves. A subset reported using ad hoc interpreters (e.g., bilingual staff member, client family member, correctional officer), using interpreters to administer psychological testing or translating English-language tests in Spanish on their own. In addition, respondents reported lower test usage with LEP-Hispanic than with Caucasian/European American or English-speaking Hispanic evaluees in CST or CR evaluations. Finally, most respondents reported they consider the evaluee’s acculturative status, but only 2 reported using acculturation measures. Results suggest that although some common practices are consistent with guidelines (e.g., taking acculturation into account), other practices (e.g., using ad hoc interpreters) are not. The authors offer suggestions for future research as well as clinical practice and training.

Although several experts have raised concerns about using correctional officers as informants for adaptive behavior assessments, no studies have compared ratings from correctional officers to those from other informants. We compared Adaptive Behavior Assessment System-Second Edition (ABAS-II; Harrison & Oakland, 2003) scores assigned by correctional staff to those assigned by probationers (N = 56) residing in a community corrections facility. Correctional staff assigned markedly lower scores than did probationers on many ABAS-II scales (d = .59 to 1.41 for ABAS-II composite scores). Although none of the probationers qualified for a diagnosis of intellectual disability, 29% received a staff-report ABAS-II composite score that was more than 2 SDs below the normative sample mean, suggesting significant impairment. Correlations between ABAS-II and intelligence measure scores were lower than expected for both types of informants, although they were somewhat stronger for self-report. Lower staff-report scores were associated with higher levels of probationer-reported psychopathology and need for treatment. Overall, these findings highlight limitations of using correctional staff as informants for adaptive behavior assessments. (PsycINFO Database Record

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