Steps to strengthen ethics in organizations: research findings, ethics placebos, and what works.

Research shows that many organizations overlook needs and opportunities to strengthen ethics. Barriers can make it hard to see the need for stronger ethics and even harder to take effective action. These barriers include the organization's misleading use of language, misuse of an ethics code, culture of silence, strategies of justification, institutional betrayal, and ethical fallacies. Ethics placebos tend to take the place of steps to see, solve, and prevent problems. This article reviews relevant research and specific steps that create change.

Psychological assessment of torture survivors: essential steps, avoidable errors, and helpful resources.

This article provides ideas, information, and resources that may be helpful in conducting psychological evaluations of people who have been tortured. The first section discusses essential steps, including achieving competence; clarifying the purpose; selecting methods appropriate to the individual, the purpose, and the situation; addressing issues of culture and language; maintaining awareness of ways in which the presence of third parties and recording can affect the assessment; attending carefully to similarities, echoes, and triggers; and actively searching for ways to transcend our own limited experiences and misleading expectations. The second section discusses avoiding five common errors that undermine these evaluations: mismatched validity; confirmation bias; confusing retrospective and prospective accuracy (switching conditional probabilities); ignoring the effects of low base rates; and misinterpreting dual high base rates. The third section identifies resources on the web (e.g., major centers, legal services, online courses, information about asylum and refuge, networks of torture survivors, human rights organizations providing information and services, guides to assessment) that people working with torture survivors, refugees, and asylum-seekers may find helpful.

Are the American Psychological Association's Detainee Interrogation Policies Ethical and Effective?: Key Claims, Documents, and Results.

After 9-11, the United States began interrogating detainees at settings such as Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo. The American Psychological Association (APA) supported psychologists' involvement in interrogations, adopted formal policies, and made an array of public assurances. This article's purpose is to highlight key APA decisions, policies, procedures, documents, and public statements in urgent need of rethinking and to suggest questions that may be useful in a serious assessment, such as, "However well intended, were APA's interrogation policies ethically sound?"; "Were they valid, realistic, and able to achieve their purpose?"; "Were other approaches available that would address interrogation issues more directly, comprehensively, and actively, that were more ethically and scientifically based, and that would have had a greater likelihood of success?"; and "Should APA continue to endorse its post-9-11 detainee interrogation policies?"

Psychologists and detainee interrogations: key decisions, opportunities lost, and lessons learned.

After the 9-11 terrorist attacks, U.S. psychologists faced hard choices about what roles, if any, were appropriate for psychologists in the detainee interrogations conducted in settings such as the Bagram Airbase, the Abu Ghraib Prison, and the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camps. The American Psychological Association (APA) sparked intense controversy with its policies and public statements. This article reviews APA decisions, documents, and public statements in this area, in the context of major criticisms and responses to those criticisms. The review focuses on key issues: how the APA created and reported policies in the areas of ethics and national security; transparency; psychologists' professional identities; psychologists' qualifications; ethical-legal conflicts; policies opposing torture; interpretations of avoiding harm; and effective interrogations. It suggests lessons learned, missed opportunities, and questions in need of a fresh approach.

Psychologists abandon the Nuremberg ethic: concerns for detainee interrogations.

In the aftermath of 9-11, the American Psychological Association, one of the largest U.S. health professions, changed its ethics code so that it now runs counter to the Nuremberg Ethic. This historic post-9-11 change allows psychologists to set aside their ethical responsibilities whenever they are in irreconcilable conflict with military orders, governmental regulations, national and local laws, and other forms of governing legal authority. This article discusses the history, wording, rationale, and implications of the ethical standard that U.S. psychologists adopted 7 years ago, particularly in light of concerns over health care professionals' involvement in detainee interrogations and the controversy over psychologists' prominent involvement in settings like the Guantánamo Bay Detainment Camp and the Abu Ghraib prison. It discusses possible approaches to the complex dilemmas arising when ethical responsibilities conflict with laws, regulations, or other governing legal authority.

A practical approach to boundaries in psychotherapy: making decisions, bypassing blunders, and mending fences.

Nonsexual boundary crossings can enrich psychotherapy, serve the treatment plan, and strengthen the therapist-client working relationship. They also can undermine the therapy, disrupt the therapist-patient alliance, and cause harm to clients. Building on T. G. Gutheil and G. O. Gabbard's (1993) conceptualization of boundary crossings and boundary violations, this article discusses and illustrates grounding boundary decisions in a sound approach to ethics. We provides nine useful steps in deciding whether to cross a boundary, describe common cognitive errors in boundary decision making, and offer nine helpful steps to take when a boundary crossing has negative effects.

Dual relationships in psychotherapy.

A dual relationship in psychotherapy occurs when the therapist engages in another, significantly different relationship with the patient. The two relationships may be concurrent or sequential. For both sexual and nonsexual dual relationships, men are typically the perpetrators and women are typically the victims. This article presents examples of dual relationships, notes the attention that licensing boards and other agencies devote to this topic, reviews the meager research concerning nonsexual dual relationships, and discusses common strategies that promote both sexual and nonsexual dual relationships.