Dangerousness and disability as predictors of psychiatric patients' legal status.

In a sample of patients admitted to two state psychiatric facilities, discriminant analyses were used to predict (1) legal status at admission (voluntary versus emergency detention), and (2) the subsequent decision to commit patients initially admitted under an order of emergency detention (court commitment versus release). Measures of preadmission dangerousness, followed by variables reflecting degree of disability or impairment, accounted for most of the variance in legal status at admission. Personal resources and demographic characteristics added little to the discrimination. Measures of disability accounted for most of the variance in the later decision to commit, whereas indices of dangerousness, personal resources, and demographics added little to discrimination of discharged and court-committed patients. These findings reflect the gap between legal standards and the practice of civil commitment, and support the argument that degree of disability plays a more important role than dangerousness in decisions to extend the hospitalization of involuntary patients.     

Physical Attractiveness,Dangerousness, and the Canadian Criminal Code1

The Canadian Criminal Code contains provisions for labelling certain convicted criminal offenders as Dangerous Offenders. Sentences of indefinite duration are usually imposed on these offenders in place of the fixed sentences that would normally be imposed. The present study examined one potential source of bias in the use of the Dangerous Offender provisions, the physical attractiveness of an offender. Two hundred and eighty-four adults were given information about a hypothetical offender, including a facial photograph and a conviction record. They responded to questions about the dangerousness of the offender, including questions drawn from the Dangerous Offender criteria. Subjects perceived physically unattractive sexual offenders as significantly more likely to fulfill the Dangerous Offender criteria than average-looking and attractive sexual offenders. In particular, unattractive sexual offenders were seen as significantly less likely to restrain their behavior in the future. In light of the fact that there is currently no evidence that physical attractiveness is a valid predictor of sexual offender recidivism, this finding provides grounds to question whether the Dangerous Offender provisions of the Canadian Criminal Code, as they now stand, can be administered impartially.     

Person as scientist, person as moralist

It has often been suggested that people's ordinary capacities for understanding the world make use of much the same methods one might find in a formal scientific investigation. A series of recent experimental results offer a challenge to this widely-held view, suggesting that people's moral judgments can actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition. The present target article distinguishes two basic approaches to explaining such effects. One approach would be to say that the relevant competencies are entirely non-moral but that some additional factor (conversational pragmatics, performance error, etc.) then interferes and allows people's moral judgments to affect their intuitions. Another approach would be to say that moral considerations truly do figure in workings of the competencies themselves. I argue that the data available now favor the second of these approaches over the first.     

Making the Punishment Fit the Crime and the Criminal: Attributions of Dangerousness as a Mediator of Liability1

This research examines how individuals use information regarding characteristics of crimes (e. g., crime severity) and characteristics of the offender (e. g, prior criminal record) to form an impression of the criminal as dangerous to society, and to make liability judgments. Two studies presented college students and community members with crime scenarios and asked for ratings of crime severity, likelihood of recidivism, perceived dangerousness of the offender, and liability. Type of crime, severity. and likelihood of recidivism significantly predicted both liability and perceived dangerousness. Further more, in crimes against people only, the effects of severity and recidivism on liability were partially mediated by individuals' perceptions of the offender as criminally dangerous. The discussion examines the implications of these findings for attribution theory and sentencing in the criminal‐justice system.     

Person Recall in Field Settings1

Men and women were stopped in public places by a target, who approached them either in an open and friendly demeanor or with a closed and hesitant demeanor. Witnesses interacted with the target for either 5 s or 30 s, and were tested for cued recall 2 min after the encounter. Demeanor did not influence overall recall, but did affect recall of specific characteristics. Men were superior to women in recall of physical characteristics, but gender differences were not found in recall of clothing characteristics. Witnesses were superior with longer observation periods, especially for recall of clothing. Significant but low confidence‐accuracy correlations were found for recall of 8 of 14 person characteristics. Men were superior to women in their accuracy of duration estimations, but men and women both consistently overestimated durations.     

The Measurement of Criminal Dangerousness as a Personality Construct: Further Validation of a Research Index

The validity of an index measuring criminal dangerousness was further evaluated by determining whether it could discriminate among prisoners committing violent crimes at three levels of severity. The index score was a multiplicative product of an antisocially score and an IQ score, with high antisocially and low IQ reflecting greater dangerousness. Comparison of index scores for men committing murder (most severe); robbery and rape (intermediate severity); and assault, child molestation, and manslaughter (least severe); revealed a significant monotonic increase in dangerousness scores as increasingly severe crimes were considered. Several recommendations for the measurement of criminal dangerousness were offered.     

The Person Positivity and Principal Actor Hypotheses1

Data from election studies in Sweden, the Netherlands, and the U.S. were analyzed to test the external validity of Sears' person positivity hypothesis. Although people in Sweden and the Netherlands did not rate their preferred party less favorably than that party's leader, overall the results in those two countries tended to support the person positivity hypothesis. However, the U.S. data indicated, contrary to the person positivity hypothesis, that people rated political parties more favorably than the nominees, or the people competing for the nominations, of those parties. An alternative, the principal actor hypothesis, was offered which is compatible with the data from all three countries. This hypothesis is that positivity or leniency will be extended in judgments that do not involve the principal actors in a political system. This accords with our findings that in the strong party systems of Sweden and the Netherlands, parties are judged less favorably than party leaders, while in the weak party system of the U.S., parties are judged more favorably than the individuals nominated by the parties.     

Person perception as a function of occupation and sex

The purpose of this study was to assess perception of stimulus persons in sex-appropriate, sex-inappropriate, and neutral occupations, using the sexual dimension of the occupations, the sex of the person-in-occupation, and the sex of the perceiver as independent variables. Male and female Ss rated two stimulus persons (one female and one male) in each of 12 selected occupations (4 masculine, 4 feminine, and 4 neutral occupations) on 20 bipolar rating scales. The scales represented the following factors: Leadership, Interpersonal Adjustment and Likability, Professional and Intellectual Competence, Personal Adjustment, Social Sensitivity, Activity, Happiness in Home Life, Physical Attractiveness, and Liberalism and Individualism. Results indicated that sexual dimension of the occupation and the sex-appropriateness/inappropriateness of the occupation have strong effects on person perception.This study is based on part of a doctoral dissertation in psychology at the Ohio State University, under the direction of Samuel H. Osipow. Partial results were presented at the Western Psychological Association convention, April 1976. Thanks are extended to David Shinar for consultation and statistical analysis of the data.     

Self‐Knowledge Failures and First Person Authority1

Davidson and Burge have claimed that the conditions under which self‐knowledge is possessed are such that externalism poses no obstacle to their being met by ordinary speakers and thinkers. On their accounts, no such person could fail to possess self‐knowledge. But we do from time to time attribute to each other such failures; so we should prefer to their accounts an account that preserves first person authority while allowing us to make sense of what appear to be true attributions of such failures. While the core idea behind Davidson's and Burge's accounts appears ioadequate to this task, I argue that it can be deployed in such a way as to deliver the desired result. What makes this possible is that two attitude‐types can differ as follows: the self‐knowledge required for an utterance to be a Oing that p is different from the self‐knowledge required for it to be a Ψfing that p.     

The Conception of a Person as a Series of Mental Events

It is argued that those who accept the psychological criterion of personal identity, such as Parfit and Shoemaker, should accept what I call the 'series' view of a person, according to which a person is a unified aggregate of mental events and states. As well as defending this view against objections, I argue that it allows the psychological theorist to avoid the two lives objection which the 'animalist' theorists have raised against it, an objection which causes great difficulties for the conception of a person that most psychological theorists favour, the constitution view. It is also argued that the series view allows that people can body swap and teleport, which the constitution view–which takes a person to be a physical object (but a distinct physical object from the human being)–has great trouble with.     

State Self-Esteem as a Moderator of Negative Mood Effects on Person Impression

Participants in a negative or a neutral mood performed an impression formation task in Experiment 1, a word fragment completion task in Experiment 2, and both tasks in Experiment 3. A self-referent versus other-referent sentence completion task was used to induce a negative mood. As a result, participants exhibited fewer mood-congruent effects on impression rating in the self-referent than in the other-referent mood induction condition, even though relevant traits had been equally activated across the two conditions. It was also shown that the self-referent induction procedure was accompanied by degrading of self-esteem, whereas the other-referent one was not. Taken together, the results suggest that the state self-esteem might be relevant to moderating of the negative mood effects on person impression.     

Ant Colony Optimization and Local Weighted Structural Equation Modeling. A Tutorial on Novel Item and Person Sampling Procedures for Personality Research

Measurement in personality development faces many psychometric problems. First, theory‐based measurement models do not fit the empirical data in terms of traditional confirmatory factor analysis. Second, measurement invariance across age, which is necessary for a meaningful interpretation of age‐associated personality differences, is rarely accomplished. Finally, continuous moderator variables, such as age, are often artificially categorized. This categorization leads to bias when interpreting differences in personality across age. In this tutorial, we introduce methods to remedy these problems. We illustrate how Ant Colony Optimization can be used to sample indicators that meet prespecified demands such as model fit. Further, we use Local Structural Equation Modeling to resample and weight subjects to study differences in the measurement model across age as a continuous moderator variable. We also provide a detailed illustration for both tools with the Neuroticism scale of the openly available International Personality Item Pool – NEO inventory using data from the UK sample (N = 15 827). Combined, both tools can remedy persistent problems in research on personality and its development. In addition to a step‐by‐step illustration, we provide commented syntax for both tools. © 2019 European Association of Personality Psychology