The Asia Pacific Journal presents a link to an extraordinary 12-minute video by Matthew Carney of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation discussing the death penalty and the problem of wrongful convictions in Japanese criminal justice. This video explains what went wrong in three cases involving men who were victimized in the worst kind of way by Japan's criminal justice system, and it raises the possibility that these cases could stimulate reform in Japan's system of capital punishment and in the criminal justice system more generally.

Growing evidence highlights the critical role of patient choice of treatment, with significant benefits for outcomes found in some studies. While four meta-analyses have previously examined the association between treatment choice and outcomes in mental health, robust conclusions have been limited by the inclusion of studies with biased preference trial designs. The current systematic review included 30 studies across three common and frequently comorbid mental health disorders (depression N = 23; anxiety, N = 5; eating disorders, N = 2) including 7055 participants (Mage 42.5 years, SD 11.7; 69.5% female). Treatment choice most often occurred between psychotherapy and antidepressant medication (43.3%), followed by choice between two different forms of psychotherapy, or elements within psychotherapy (36.7%). There were insufficient studies with stringent designs to conduct meta-analyses for anxiety or eating disorders as outcomes, or for treatment uptake. Treatment choice significantly improved outcomes for depression (d = 0.17, n = 18) and decreased therapy dropout, both in a combined sample targeting depression (n = 12), anxiety (n = 4) and eating disorders (n = 1; OR = 1.46, 95% CI: 1.17, 1.83), and in a smaller sample of the depression studies alone (OR = 1.65, 95% CI: 1.05, 2.59). All studies evaluated the impact of adults making treatment choices with none examining the effect of choice in adolescents. Clear directions in future research are indicated, in terms of designing studies that can adequately test the treatment choice and outcome association in anxiety and eating disorder treatment, and in youth.

Unlike their monotone counterparts, nonparametric unfolding response models, which assume the item response function is unimodal, have seen little attention in the psychometric literature. This paper studies the nonparametric behavior of unfolding models by building on the work of Post (1992). The paper provides rigorous justification for a class of nonparametric estimators of respondents’ latent attitudes by proving that the estimators consistently rank order the respondents. The paper also suggests an algorithm for the rank ordering of items along the attitudes scale. Finally, the methods are evaluated using simulated data.

In educational and psychological measurement when short test forms are used, the asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimator of the person parameter of item response models does not hold. As a result, hypothesis tests or confidence intervals of the person parameter based on the normal distribution are likely to be problematic. Inferences based on the exact distribution, on the other hand, do not suffer from this limitation. However, the computation involved for the exact distribution approach is often prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we propose a general framework for constructing hypothesis tests and confidence intervals for IRT models within the exponential family based on exact distribution. In addition, an efficient branch and bound algorithm for calculating the exact p value is introduced. The type-I error rate and statistical power of the proposed exact test as well as the coverage rate and the lengths of the associated confidence interval are examined through a simulation. We also demonstrate its practical use by analyzing three real data sets.

There has been limited focus placed on exploring food insecurity within the UK-ex-Armed Forces population. The present study aims to build on initial work by investigating the prevalence and associated factors of food insecurity within UK veterans and their families and their current health status. 881 veterans (or a family member) who previously served in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, Army and the Royal Air Force completed an online survey to explore health status, food insecurity and receipt of benefits. In total, 16.9% of survey respondents were part of food-insecure households, with 12% of these also experiencing some element of hunger. Working age, non-officer rank at the time of service discharge, not being married, living in rented accommodation, having at least one medical condition and in receipt of other benefits were significant risk factors associated with food insecurity. Understanding the specific risk factors associated with food insecurity is vital to develop personalised interventions and policies, such as income support programmes and affordable housing initiatives. However, more work is needed to further explore the factors associated with food insecurity, particularly in the long term.

This study aimed (1) to identify distinct family trajectory profiles of destructive interparental conflict and parent-child emotional warmth reported by one parent, and (2) to examine whether these codevelopmental profiles were associated with the longitudinal development of children and adolescents’ self-reported internalizing and externalizing problems. Six longitudinal data waves from the German Family Panel (pairfam) study (Waves 2–7) from 722 parent-child dyads were used (age of children and adolescents in years: M = 10.03, SD = 1.90, range = 8–15; 48.3% girls; 73.3% of parents were native Germans). Data were analyzed using growth mixture and latent growth curve modeling. Two classes, harmonious and conflictual-warm families, were found based on codevelopmental trajectories of interparental conflict and emotional warmth. These family profiles were linked with the development of externalizing problems in children and adolescents but not their internalizing problems. Family dynamics are entangled in complex ways and constantly changing, which appears relevant to children’s behavior problems.

Modons, or dipolar vortices, are common and long-lived features of the upper ocean, consisting of a pair of counter-rotating monopolar vortices moving through self-advection. Such structures remain stable over long times and may be important for fluid transport over large distances. Here, we present a semi-analytical method for finding fully nonlinear modon solutions in a multi-layer quasi-geostrophic model with arbitrarily many layers. Our approach is to reduce the problem to a multi-parameter linear eigenvalue problem which can be solved using numerical techniques from linear algebra. The method is shown to replicate previous results for one- and two-layer models and is applied to a three-layer model to find a solution describing a mid-depth propagating, topographic vortex.