APA and Psychologists’ Involvement with Torture

Posted on June 23rd, 2009 in Uncategorized by Melody Royster

You might have heard that psychologists were involved in the torture or “enhanced interrogations” conducted by the Bush administration. Psychologists suggested that their involvement developing methods hastened responses from prisoners and lessened the need for physical torture. To me this just means that the psychological torture was probably more painful than physical torture might have been.

The American Psychological Association has been criticized by its own members for not responding more quickly to the actions of these psychologists. A timeline linking to APA’s responses during the entire discussion is here. They just released a letter to its members stating that participation in torture is unethical for psychologists. Some people are still disappointed that APA isn’t suggesting or imposing sanctions against the psychologists who participated.

Andrew Sullivan The Daily Dish: The Latest from the APA On Torture. The Atlantic June 18, 2009

(Thanks to Monica Bigler for apprising me of the above article and letter.)

Social Theory: Trial Database

Posted on June 10th, 2009 in Databases by Melody Royster

Social Theory is a new trial database that will be available to us to play with and evaluate until August 4, 2009 from Alexander Street . It’s been around for a few years, but recently quite a bit of new content has been added.

http://soth.alexanderstreet.com

Alexander Street Press says that

“The latest release features 32,500 pages of new material, bringing the collection to more than 122,000 pages from 346 works by 100 authors.

Highlights include 33 volumes of the Complete Works of Marx & Engels and nearly 26,000 pages of German language content. Other featured authors in this release include Lewis Coser, Dorothy Smith, Theodor Adorno, Niklas Luhmann, and Jurgen Habermas.

socialtheory

Social Theory brings together an extensive range of influential writings representing the most important trends of sociological thought from the eighteenth century to the present day.  Each document is carefully indexed to promote highly targeted full-text searching that can stimulate fresh insights into even the most familiar texts.  When complete, the database will grow to more than 150,000 pages of full-text material.”

Because of funding issues, I’m not sure how likely it is that we could purchase or subscribe to Social Theory, but I’d definitely like to know your views on the database. If you love it, there’s hope.

I’m also hoping that this database can help translate some of the more difficult theorists and make all of their works easily available to our community.