In recent years there has been increased attention in a clinical syndrome characterized by excessive sexual thoughts, sexual urges, and/or sexual behaviors that has many aspects in common with impulse control disorders. This study provides a preliminary examination of the impulsive aspects of this syndrome, Compulsive Sexual Behavior (CSB), as conceptualized by Coleman and colleagues. Sixteen male subjects, 8 CSB patients and 8 non-patient controls, completed psychometric measures of impulsivity and compulsive sexual behavior, a behavioral task designed to assess impulse control (go/no-go task), and underwent diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) procedures. The results indicated that CSB patients were significantly more impulsive; whether measured by psychometric testing or the go/no-go procedure than controls. The results also indicate that CSB patients showed significantly higher superior frontal region mean diffusivity (MD) than controls. A correlational analysis indicated significant associations between impulsivity measures and inferior frontal region fractional anisotrophy (FA) and MD, but no associations with superior frontal region measures. Similar analyses indicated a significant negative association between superior frontal lobe MD and the compulsive sexual behavior inventory. Thus, while CSB patients were more impulsive than controls, the DTI results were not consistent with impulse control disorders.

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Paul E. Meehl's work on the clinical versus statistical prediction controversy is reviewed. His contributions included the following: putting the controversy center stage in applied psychology; clarifying concepts underpinning the debate (especially his crucial distinction between ways of gathering data and ways of combining them) as well as establishing that the controversy was real and not concocted, analyzing clinical inference from both theoretical and probabilistic points of view, and reviewing studies that compared the accuracy of these 2 methods of data combination. Meehl's (1954/1996) conclusion that statistical prediction consistently outperforms clinical judgment has stood up extremely well for half a century. His conceptual analyses have not been significantly improved since he published them in the 1950s and 1960s. His work in this area contains several citation classics, which are part of the working knowledge of all competent applied psychologists today.

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