Casinos and banking: Organized crime in the Bahamas

The symbiotic relationships among gambling casinos, offshore banks and professional criminals are complex. In numerous contemporary cases, professional criminals from the United States and elsewhere are known to utilize both casinos and financial institutions to launder money and to hide large amounts of illicitly acquired money. Long before recent revelations of such activities became known in the Caribbean and the U. S., developers in the Bahamas had started the process of bringing casinos and banks together to serve underworld interests. This paper traces the developments of that process and shows how American organized crime interests penetrated the Bahamas by using gambling and banking to gain a firm foothold.     

Predicting intolerance: The impact of parents’ own tolerance vs. social class and religious fundamentalism

The impact of parental intolerance, social class, and religious fundamentalism on the level of tolerance of post‐adolescent children is assessed on a sample of 205 mother‐father‐child triads. Social class plays an indirect role, and religious fundamentalism is shown to be the primary mechanism for the intergenerational transmission of intolerance. The concept of intolerance is extended so as to focus on reactions to deviant behavior. There is little evidence of specific sex linkage contrasts.     

“We Told You that's How They Are”: Responses To White Women in Abusive Intimate Relationships with Men of Color

The urging by interracial couples to be accepted as “normal” couples may present as challenging if problems arise in the relationship; especially if those “problems” are of an abusive or violent nature. Drawing on semi-structured, in-depth interviews we analyze the experiences of White women in abusive intimate relationships with men of color. We query the struggles of the women negotiating these relationships and explore the responses the women receive by family, friends, the general public, and workers in the criminal justice system and social and medical services. We argue that White women abused by men of color face additional challenges because of outsiders' disapproving views of the interracial nature of the relationships.     

Fixation-dependent memory for natural scenes: an experimental test of scanpath theory

Many modern theories propose that perceptual information is represented by the sensorimotor activity elicited by the original stimulus. Scanpath theory (Noton & Stark, 1971) predicts that reinstating a sequence of eye fixations will help an observer recognize a previously seen image. However, the only studies to investigate this are correlational ones based on calculating scanpath similarity. We therefore describe a series of 5 experiments that constrain the fixations during encoding or recognition of images in order to manipulate scanpath similarity. Participants encoded a set of images and later had to recognize those that they had seen. They spontaneously selected regions that they had fixated during encoding (Experiment 1), and this was a predictor of recognition accuracy. Yoking the parts of the image available at recognition to the encoded scanpath led to better memory performance than randomly selected image regions (Experiment 2), and this could not be explained by the spatial distribution of locations (Experiment 3). However, there was no recognition advantage for re-viewing one's own fixations versus someone else's (Experiment 4) or for retaining their serial order (Experiment 5). Therefore, although it is beneficial to look at encoded regions, there is no evidence that scanpaths are stored or that scanpath recapitulation is functional in scene memory. This paradigm provides a controlled way of studying the integration of scene content, spatial structure, and oculomotor signals, with consequences for the perception, representation, and retrieval of visual information.     

Effects of Music on Physiological Arousal: Explorations into Tempo and Genre

Two experiments explore the validity of conceptualizing musical beats as auditory structural features and the potential for increases in tempo to lead to greater sympathetic arousal, measured using skin conductance. In the first experiment, fast- and slow-paced rock and classical music excerpts were compared to silence. As expected, skin conductance response (SCR) frequency was greater during music processing than during silence. Skin conductance level (SCL) data showed that fast-paced music elicits greater activation than slow-paced music. Genre significantly interacted with tempo in SCR frequency, with faster tempo increasing activation for classical music and decreasing it for rock music. A second experiment was conducted to explore the possibility that the presumed familiarity of the genre led to this interaction. Although further evidence was found for conceptualizing musical beat onsets as auditory structure, the familiarity explanation was not supported.     

Development of Recognition of Face Parts from Unfamiliar Faces

The present study examined developmental changes in the ability to recognize face parts. In Experiment 1, participants were familiarized with whole faces and given a recognition test with old and new eyes, noses, mouths, inner faces, outer faces, or whole faces. Adults were above chance in their recognition of the eye and mouth regions. However, children did not naturally encode and recognize face parts independently of the entire face. In addition, all age groups showed comparable inner and outer face recognition, except for 8‐ to 9‐year‐olds who showed a recognition advantage for outer faces. In Experiment 2, when participants were familiarized with eyes, noses, or mouths and tested with eyes, noses, or mouths, respectively, all ages showed above‐chance recognition of eyes and mouths. Thirteen‐ to 14‐year‐olds were adult‐like in their recognition of the eye region, but mouth recognition continued to develop beyond 14 years of age. Nose recognition was above chance among 13‐ to 14‐year‐olds, but recognition scores remained low even in adulthood. The present findings reveal unique developmental trajectories in the use of isolated facial regions in face recognition and suggest that featural cues (as a class) have a different ontogenetic course relative to holistic and configural cues. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Collected Stories: Play in Four Acts

This article evolved from a group process where members of a psychoanalytic institute were faced with planning workshops for a professional weekend around the theme of “play.” The workshop that evolved consisted of four vignettes of play taking place in the therapeutic sessions of a child, an adolescent, an adult, and an elderly woman. The discussion of these vignettes that began at the conference and then was developed for this article focuses on tracing the development of play from childhood into adulthood (Mayes & Cohen, 1996; Russ, 2004) and on the relationship between play and the development of reflective functioning (Fonagy & Target, 1996). One area of particular interest that was focused upon was the use of play with adults who are described as “concrete,” people who function, at times, at a level of differentiation more typical of a young child. Play is described as being particularly helpful in facilitating a more differentiated and, thus, more reflective mode of psychic functioning for this group of individuals as well as for people at all levels of development.     

The Ecological Revolution: The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, 50 Years Later - Part 2

ABSTRACT

This editorial presents the second of a 2-part special issue honoring the publication of James J. Gibson's 1966 book, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. As was pointed out by several reviews of this book written just after its publication (i.e., between 1967 and 1969), Gibson's 1966 book represents a revolution not only for the psychological science but also for domains beyond that of psychology. This second part of the special issue is composed of 5 theoretical contributions that represent, in addition to the 4 pieces previously published in the first part, the far-reaching influence of Gibson's ecological revolution.     

Encouraging Bystanders to Promote Positive Parenting and Prevent Child Maltreatment in Retail Settings: Results of an Exploratory Qualitative Study

Community-level bystander approaches with media campaigns have successfully reduced sexual violence, but these programs have not been developed for child maltreatment prevention. This study informs the development of such programs in retail settings. Data were collected using focus groups with parents (n = 29) and surveys with child abuse experts (n = 10). Participants were asked how retail environments and employees could support parents during shopping excursions and what employees should do if they witnessed a concerning interaction. Participants highlighted (a) the need for in-depth training of employees to engage with parents and children to promote positive interactions and intervene in concerning situations; (b) the importance of the built environment (i.e., physical design and layout) to reduce stress and establish positive social norms through store-wide messaging; and (c) the role of parents in establishing expectations and actively including children in shopping. Future research should test approaches to training and engaging retail employees as supportive bystanders.