CAT — Psychology RC
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How can we know what someone else is thinking or feeling, let alone prove it in court? In his 1863 book, A General View of the Criminal Law of England, James Fitzjames Stephen, among the most celebrated legal thinkers of his generation, was of the opinion that the assessment of a person's mental state was an inference made with "little consciousness." In a criminal case, jurors, doctors, and lawyers could watch defendants—scrutinizing clothing, mannerisms, tone of voice—but the best they could hope for were clues. . . . Rounding these clues up to a judgment about a defendant's guilt, or a defendant's life, was an act of empathy and imagination. . . . The closer the resemblance between defendants and their judges, the easier it was to overlook the gap that inference filled. Conversely, when a defendant struck officials as unlike themselves, whether by dint of disease, gender, confession, or race, the precariousness of judgments about mental state was exposed.
In the nineteenth century, physicians who specialized in the study of madness and the care of the insane held themselves out as experts in the new field of mental science. Often called alienists or mad doctors, they were the predecessors of modern psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychologists. . . . The opinions of family and neighbors had once been sufficient to sift the sane from the insane, but a growing belief that insanity was a subtle condition that required expert, medical diagnosis pushed physicians into the witness box. . . . Lawyers for both prosecution and defense began to recruit alienists to assess defendants' sanity and to testify to it in court.
Irresponsibility and insanity were not identical, however. Criminal responsibility was a legal concept and not, fundamentally, a medical one. Stephen explained: "The question 'What are the mental elements of responsibility?' is, and must be, a legal question. It cannot be anything else, for the meaning of responsibility is liability to punishment." . . . Nonetheless, medical and legal accounts of what it meant to be mentally sound became entangled and mutually referential throughout the nineteenth century. Lawyers relied on medical knowledge to inform their opinions and arguments about the sanity of their clients. Doctors commented on the legal responsibility of their patients. Ultimately, the fields of criminal law and mental science were both invested in constructing an image of the broken and damaged psyche that could be contrasted with the whole and healthy one. This shared interest, and the shared space of the criminal courtroom, made it nearly impossible to consider responsibility without medicine, or insanity without law. . . .
Physicians and lawyers shared more than just concern for the mind. Class, race, and gender bound these middle-class, white, professional men together, as did family ties, patriotism, Protestantism, business ventures, the alumni networks of elite schools and universities, and structures of political patronage. But for all their affinities, men of medicine and law were divided by contests over the borders of criminal responsibility, as much within each profession as between them. Alienists steadily pushed the boundaries of their field, developing increasingly complex and capacious definitions of insanity. Eccentricity and aggression came to be classified as symptoms of mental disease, at least by some.
The last paragraph of the passage refers to "middle-class, white, professional men". Which one of the following qualities best describes the connection among them?
The borders of criminal responsibility.
The opinions of family and neighbours.
Eccentricity and aggression.
Empathy and imagination.
The borders of criminal responsibility.
The passage uses the example of displaced sports bettors entering the financial market as one possible factor in the COVID-19 market dynamics, framed as "some of these dynamics are potentially attributable" to them. This is explicitly tentative and partial, not a singular, overriding explanation for the market's behaviour. The last paragraph explicitly states that despite all the shared class, race, professional, and personal ties among these men, they were divided by contests over the borders of criminal responsibility, both within and between the professions of medicine and law. The passage focuses on this contest as the key tension defining their relationship despite their many affinities.
Why Option B is
Incorrect: The opinions of family and neighbours are mentioned earlier in the passage as what was once sufficient to assess sanity, not as a quality connecting the professional men described in the last paragraph.
Why Option C is
Incorrect: Eccentricity and aggression are mentioned as symptoms that alienists began classifying as mental disease, a specific development within the field, not the central bond or division among these professional men.
Why Option D is
Incorrect: Empathy and imagination are mentioned in the first paragraph as the qualities used by jurors to assess mental state, not as something connecting the professional men discussed in the last paragraph.
Why Option A is Correct: The passage explicitly states that despite all their shared qualities, these men were divided by contests over the borders of criminal responsibility, making this the most precise description of what connected and defined their relationship.
Key Takeaway: When a paragraph lists many shared qualities but then identifies one key dividing issue, that dividing issue is usually what the question about connections among the group is pointing toward.
According to the passage, who or what was an "alienist"?
Professionals who pushed the boundaries of their fields till they became unrecognisable in the nineteenth century.
Physicians who specialised in the study of madness and the care of the insane in the nineteenth century.
Physicians and lawyers who were responsible for the condition of immigrants or 'aliens' in the nineteenth century.
Physicians and lawyers who were responsible for examining accounts of extraterrestrials or 'aliens' in the nineteenth century.
Professionals who pushed the boundaries of their fields till they became unrecognisable in the nineteenth century.
The passage defines alienists directly in the second paragraph as physicians who specialised in the study of madness and the care of the insane, noting they were the predecessors of modern psychiatrists, neurologists and psychologists.
Why Option A is
Incorrect: While alienists did push the boundaries of their field over time, this is a later development described separately, not the definition of what an alienist was.
Why Option C is
Incorrect: The passage makes no connection between alienists and immigrants or "aliens" in the sense of foreign nationals, this interpretation confuses the word "alienist" with its superficially similar term.
Why Option D is
Incorrect: Extraterrestrials are entirely absent from the passage, this is a fanciful misreading of the term.
Why Option B is Correct: This matches the passage's explicit definition, physicians specialising in madness and care of the insane in the nineteenth century.
Key Takeaway: For definition questions, locate the passage's explicit definitional statement rather than inferring a meaning from the word's sound or etymology.
Study the following sets of concepts and identify the set that is conceptually closest to the concerns and arguments of the passage.
Empathy, Prosecution, Knowledge, Business.
Judgement, Belief, Accounts, Patronage.
Assessment, Empathy, Prosecution, Patriotism.
Judgement, Insanity, Punishment, Responsibility.
Judgement, Insanity, Punishment, Responsibility.
The passage is centrally about how judgments about mental state are made in legal contexts, how insanity as a concept relates to legal responsibility, how punishment is tied to the definition of responsibility, and how these concepts became entangled between medicine and law throughout the nineteenth century.
Why Option A is
Incorrect: While empathy and prosecution appear in the passage, knowledge and business are peripheral and do not represent the conceptual core of the argument.
Why Option B is
Incorrect: Judgment and belief appear in the passage, but accounts and patronage are mentioned only as background contextual details about the shared social world of these professionals, not as central concerns of the argument.
Why Option C is
Incorrect: Assessment, empathy and prosecution appear in the passage but patriotism is a social background detail, not a conceptual concern of the passage's core argument.
Why Option D is Correct: Judgment, insanity, punishment and responsibility are the four concepts that the passage explicitly develops and interconnects, through Stephen's definition of responsibility as liability to punishment, the legal versus medical concept of insanity, and the difficulty of judging mental state in court.
Key Takeaway: When asked for conceptual closeness, identify the terms that the passage explicitly defines, argues about, and interconnects, rather than terms that merely appear incidentally.
"Conversely, when a defendant struck officials as unlike themselves, whether by dint of disease, gender, confession, or race, the precariousness of judgments about mental state was exposed." Which one of the following best describes the use of the word "confession" in this sentence?
Referring to the practice of 'confession' in some faiths, here it is a metaphor for the religion of the defendant.
Referring to the gender, race or disease claimed as a defence by the defendant, here it is a synonym for 'professing' a gender, race, or disease.
Referring to the defendant's confession of his or her crime as false, because 'dint' is an archaic form of 'didn't' or 'did not'.
The defendants struck out at the officials and then confessed to the act.
Referring to the practice of 'confession' in some faiths, here it is a metaphor for the religion of the defendant.
The sentence lists disease, gender, confession, and race as qualities that could make a defendant seem unlike the officials judging them. In this list, "confession" functions most naturally as referring to religious confession, meaning the defendant's religious affiliation, which, like race or gender, could mark them as different from the predominantly Protestant professional judges described elsewhere in the passage.
Why Option B is
Incorrect: While this option offers a grammatically creative reading, "professing" a gender or race is not a natural reading of "confession" in this context, and the option creates an awkward construction to make the word fit.
Why Option C is
Incorrect: "Dint" is not an archaic form of "didn't," it is an archaic word meaning "by means of" or "by force of," so this interpretation is based on a factual error about the word's meaning.
Why Option D is
Incorrect: This completely misreads the sentence, which is not about defendants physically striking officials but about how defendants appeared to officials, and "confession" here is not about admitting to a crime.
Why Option A is Correct: In the context of a society where the judges and officials were predominantly Protestant, a defendant's religious affiliation, like race or gender, could mark them as unlike the officials, exposing the precariousness of the judgment, making "confession" as a metaphor for religious faith the most coherent reading.
Key Takeaway: When a word appears in a list alongside other demographic or social categories, interpret it as a social marker consistent with the others in the list rather than in its most literal or common sense.
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