Psychiatrists' judgments of dangerousness in patients on an acute care unit

Statistical analyses suggest that psychiatrists emphasize hostility, agitation, previous assaultiveness, and suspiciousness as factors predictive of violence in psychiatric inpatients. When the actual correlates of violence in these patients are evaluated, a different picture of the assaultive inpatient emerges. Examination of differences between the cues emphasized by clinicians to make their predictions and the empirical correlates of violence suggests ways of improving the accuracy of clinical judgments of inpatients' dangerousness.