Three hypotheses were derived from research on vicarious revenge and tested in the context of the assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011. In line with the notion that revenge aims at delivering a message (the "message hypothesis"), Study 1 shows that Americans' vengeful desires in the aftermath of 9/11 predicted a sense of justice achieved after bin Laden's death, and that this effect was med...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW This article is an investigation of the possibility that compassion is not a discrete feature but an emergent and contingent process that is at its base enactive. Compassion must be primed through the cultivation of various factors. This article endeavors to identify interdependent components of compassion. This is particularly relevant for those in the end-of-life care profes...

In 1982, Dr. Alan Stone raised a central dilemma in ethics for forensic psychiatry that has prompted significant and important discussion of the concerns about twisting justice, prostituting the profession, and operating without adequate ethics guidelines in the course of our work. In presidential addresses to the membership of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law (AAPL), Dr. Paul App...

Secondary trauma is defined as indirect exposure to trauma through a firsthand account or narrative of a traumatic event. The vivid recounting of trauma by the survivor and the clinician's subsequent cognitive or emotional representation of that event may result in a set of symptoms and reactions that parallel PTSD (e.g., re-experiencing, avoidance and hyperarousal). Secondary traumatization is...

Charitable giving in 2013 exceeded $300 billion, but why do we respond to some life-saving causes while ignoring others? In our first two studies, we demonstrated that valuation of lives is associated with affective feelings (self-reported and psychophysiological) and that a decline in compassion may begin with the second endangered life. In Study 3, this fading of compassion was reversed by de...

This longitudinal research examined the directions of the relationships between job burnout and secondary traumatic stress (STS) among human services workers. In particular, using cross-lagged panel design, we investigated whether job burnout predicts STS at 6-month follow up or whether the level of STS symptoms explains job burnout at 6-month follow-up. Participants in Study 1 were behavioral ...

The bioethical debate on euthanasia (good death) has been classically polarized between the principles of sacredness of life--the argumentation against--and the quality of life, represented by the vicarious principle of respect for autonomy--the argumentation in favor. In both cases the question is built around the pertinence and moral legitimacy--or not--of the individual possibility to decide...