I was recently accepted into John Jay's Forensic Psychology Masters program!! I am eager and excited to begin classes in the fall.

Here are my main areas of interest - perhaps one or two of you out there has similar fascinations!

The indeterminate art and science of jury consulting: Unnatural Selection by Matthew Hutson. Jury selection took its first halting steps toward science in 1972, when seven Vietnam War protesters were charged with conspiracy and put on trial in conservative Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Pretrial polls indicated that 80 percent of potential jurors would vote to convict. Social scientists armed with community surveys explored which backgrounds and attitudes suggested sympathetic jurors (good: women and Democrats; bad: the religious, college educated, subscribers to Reader's Digest). In the end, the Harrisburg Seven received only one minor conviction, and a field was born.

Psychopathology of cults, especially the Aum Shinrikyo: Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche by Haruki Murakami. The sarin attack exposed Tokyo authorities' total lack of preparation to cope with such fiendish urban terrorism. More interesting, however, is the variety of reactions among the survivors, a cross-section of Japanese citizens. Their individual voices remind us of the great diversity within what is too often viewed from afar as a homogeneous society. What binds most of them is their curious lack of anger at Aum. Chilling, too, is the realization that so many Aum members were intelligent, well-educated persons who tried to fill voids in their lives by following Shoko Asahara, a mad guru who promised salvation through total subordination to his will.

Serial returners: Chronic Returners May Be 'Bulimic' Spenders. Dr. April Lane Benson, a psychologist who authored "I Shop, Therefore I Am," said serial returning is a well-kept secret because it carries so much embarrassment and shame. It's "something people don't tend to talk about because the person who is the compulsive returner is often very perfectionistic and feels that they should be more in control," said Benson, a psychologist who specializes in treating compulsive shoppers.