What We Do, What We Say, What We Don't Say: Confidentiality In The Publication Of Clinical Writing

Questions concerning analysts' publication of material from the analyses of their patients have troubled the field of psychoanalysis since its inception. Disguise inevitably distorts the clinical material and is often insufficient to protect the patient from recognition. Asking the patient's consent for publication intrudes upon and alters the analytic process. While analysts have largely reached a consensus about the need for anonymity in published material, there is still considerable debate about the necessity for obtaining patients' consent when using their material for publication. In this paper, I will trace the evolving meanings of disguise, and particularly of consent, in the analytic literature. I will place a particular emphasis upon the differing theoretical belief systems that underlie the analyst's decision to ask consent from her patient or not to do so, and I will argue that, although decisions on asking consent remain a complex matter, such coherent belief systems should play an important part in analysts' decisions regarding consent. I will illustrate my thought processes and some clinical situations with brief examples, and I will conclude with some practical recommendations, with the hope that these will stimulate further discussion in the analytic community.

Assessing the effect of facial disguises on forensic facial comparison by morphological analysis

Disguises are commonly used to mask a person's facial appearance in areas under closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance. While many studies attempted to understand the effects of disguises, such as hats and glasses, on facial recognition, limited studies have looked at disguises in forensic facial comparison. The aim of this study was to compare the outcomes of forensic facial comparison by morphological analysis (MA) in a CCTV sample with sunglasses and brimmed caps. The sample was obtained from the Wits Face Database and organized into 81 face pools of one target facial image wearing a disguise (cap or sunglasses) and 10 potential matching images. MA was conducted across face pools, and confusion matrices were used to assess the outcomes. Surprisingly, sunglasses had limited effect on MA performance both in accuracy (90.4%) and in reliability (κ = 0.798), while caps markedly decreased both accuracy (68.1%) and reliability (κ = 0.639). Error rates were associated primarily with false negatives in both samples (caps: 42.4%; sunglasses: 16.1%) despite the sample distribution favoring false-positive errors, which were very low (caps: 0.6%; sunglasses: 0%). Similarly to other studies, hats and caps were more harmful to correct identification when compared to sunglasses, which actually resulted in better accuracy than regular CCTV recordings. The effect of brimmed caps on accuracy was attributed to the overall loss of facial information caused. On training analysts, it may be helpful to instruct purposefully avoiding overreliance on easily disguised facial features, as other regions of the face also contain substantial feature information.

Seeing the Bigger Picture: Susceptibility to, and Detection of, Deception

An extended time window was used to examine susceptibility to, and detection of, deception in rugby union. High- and low-skilled rugby players judged the final running direction of an opponent "cutting" left or right, with or without a deceptive sidestep. Each trial was occluded at one of eight time points relative to the footfall after the initial (genuine or fake) reorientation. Based on response accuracy, the results were separated into deception susceptibility and deception detection windows. Signal-detection analysis was used to calculate the discriminability of genuine and deceptive actions (d') and the response bias (c). High-skilled players were less susceptible to deception and better able to detect when they had been deceived, accompanied by a reduced bias toward perceiving all actions as genuine. By establishing the time window in which players become deceived, it will now be possible to identify the kinematic sources that drive deception.