Is Fear of Crime Mainly Social and Economic Insecurity in Disguise? A Multilevel Multinational Analysis

Using the 2006 Eurobarometer data (representative sample of the European population, N = 16 306, 27 countries), we performed a multilevel analysis aimed at predicting fear of crime. A significant proportion of the variation in fear of crime was at country level. Of the individual predictors included, being a woman, being poorly educated, being unemployed, and being an urban dweller showed positive relations with fear of crime. Fear was highest among people who considered themselves to be socially marginal, among people with negative expectations regarding themselves and their country's future, and among people who considered their nation's welfare system to be unsatisfactory. Among the ecological predictors we took into consideration, nations' degree of economic inequality and low expenditure on education and on social protection showed a positive association with fear of crime, whereas the crime, immigration, and employment rates did not. Implications and limitations of this research are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Democratic School Climate and Sense of Community in School: A Multilevel Analysis

This study examines individual- and school-level predictors of sense of community in school among adolescents. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine the relationships between individual (demographics, control and monitoring by parents, and perception of democratic school climate), class, and school characteristics (mean democratic school climate, demographics, activities, school size, public/private governance of the school, and facilities) and students' sense of community in the school. Data were analyzed using a three-level model based on 4,092 10- to 18-year-old students nested within 248 classes (across three grade levels: 6th, 8th, and 10th grade level, where the median age was 11, 13, and 15, respectively) in 134 schools in the Veneto region of northeast Italy. Individual and contextual measures of the perception of a democratic school climate, modeled at the individual, class, and school levels simultaneously, were each significant predictor of school sense of community. More parental monitoring and less parental control were also predictive at the individual level. School-level SES predicted between school variation in sense of community, controlling for individual student SES and other student and school-level predictors. School size, facilities (physical spaces resources), level of interaction of the school with the community, public, or private governance, and number of extracurricular activities offered were all nonsignificant. The study demonstrates significant variation in school sense of community at the student, class, and school levels and the important role played by democratic school practices, such as student participation in making rules and organizing events, freedom of expression, and the perceived fairness of rules and teachers, in determining this variable.     

Family Affluence, School and Neighborhood Contexts and Adolescents’ Civic Engagement: A Cross-National Study

Research on youth civic engagement focuses on individual-level predictors. We examined individual- and school-level characteristics, including family affluence, democratic school social climate and perceived neighborhood social capital, in their relation to civic engagement of 15-year-old students. Data were taken from the 2006 World Health Organization Health Behaviour in School-aged Children survey. A sample of 8,077 adolescents in 10th grade from five countries (Belgium, Canada, Italy, Romania, England) were assessed. Multilevel models were analyzed for each country and across the entire sample. Results showed that family affluence, democratic school climate and perceived neighborhood social capital positively related to participation in community organizations. These links were stronger at the aggregate contextual than individual level and varied by country. Canadian youth participated most and Romanian youth least of the five countries. Gender predicted engagement in two countries (girls participate more in Canada, boys in Italy). Findings showed significant contributions of the social environment to adolescents' engagement in their communities.     

Criminal victimisation fosters conservatism among people living in areas with high unemployment rates: A multilevel longitudinal study

Using a multilevel, longitudinal model, we tested the mugging thesis, which states that ‘a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged’, in a national sample of Italians (N = 457, nested in 54 counties) surveyed four times between October 2002 and January 2007. We predicted participants' increase in conservatism as a function of the cross‐level interactions between criminal victimisation on the one hand and the unemployment and the crime rates for their areas of residence on the other. Conservatism increased among victimised participants living in areas characterised by high unemployment rates, but not among those living in areas with low unemployment rates. The cross‐level interaction between victimisation and crime rate did not influence our dependent variable. The strengths, implications and limitations of this research are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A formalisation of violation, error recovery, and enforcement in the bit transmission problem

The design of complex multi-agent systems is increasingly having to confront the possibility that agents may not behave as they are supposed to. In addition to analysing the properties that hold if protocols are followed correctly, it is also necessary to predict, test, and verify the properties that would hold if these protocols were to be violated. We illustrate how the formal machinery of deontic interpreted systems can be applied to the analysis of such problems by considering three variations of the bit transmission problem. The first, an example in which an agent may fail to do something it is supposed to do, shows how we deal with violations of protocols and specifications generally. The second, an example in which an agent may do something it is not supposed to do, shows how it is possible to specify and analyse remedial or error-recovery procedures. The third combines both kinds of faults and introduces a new component into the system, a controller, whose role is to enforce compliance with the protocol. In each case the formal analysis is used to test whether critical properties of the system are compromised, in this example, the reliable communication of information from one agent to the other.     

Recovery of memory from infantile amnesia is developmentally constrained

Episodic memories formed during infancy are rapidly forgotten, a phenomenon associated with infantile amnesia, the inability of adults to recall early-life memories. In both rats and mice, infantile memories, although not expressed, are actually stored long term in a latent form. These latent memories can be reinstated later in life by certain behavioral reminders or by artificial reactivations of neuronal ensembles activated at training. Whether the recovery of infantile memories is limited by developmental age, maternal presence, or contingency of stimuli presentation remains to be determined. Here, we show that the return of inhibitory avoidance memory in rats following a behavioral reactivation consisting of an exposure to the context (conditioned stimuli [CS]) and footshock (unconditioned stimuli [US]) given in a temporally unpaired fashion, is evident immediately after US and is limited by the developmental age at which the reactivations are presented; however, it is not influenced by maternal presence or the time interval between training and reactivation. We conclude that one limiting factor for infantile memory reinstatement is developmental age, suggesting that a brain maturation process is necessary to allow the recovery of a “lost” infantile memory.

Hippocampus-dependent episodic memories formed early in life are rapidly forgotten. This process of forgetting is evolutionarily conserved and is associated with infantile amnesia, the inability of adults to recall early-life memories (Campbell and Spear 1972; Rovee-Collier 1999; Hayne 2004; Josselyn and Frankland 2012; Callaghan et al. 2014; Madsen and Kim 2016; Alberini and Travaglia 2017).Although they are rapidly forgotten, early-life experiences influence brain functions throughout life (Jacobs and Nadel 1985; Meaney et al. 1988; Sroufe et al. 1990; Brunson et al. 2005; Pryce et al. 2005; Mineka and Zinbarg 2006; Bale et al. 2010; Poulos et al. 2014; Perry and Sullivan 2014) and produce long-lasting biological changes in the brain. For example, aversive early-life experiences regulate the expression of hippocampal glucocorticoid receptor and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) functions in a persistent fashion (Champagne and Curley 2009). Moreover, threatening experiences in early life can predispose individuals to psychopathologies such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and mood and anxiety disorders (Heim and Nemeroff 2001). Consistent with this long-lasting influence on behavior, studies in rodent models have shown that, in contrast to what was previously believed, memories formed in infancy (at postnatal days 16–18 [PN16–PN18]) although not expressed, are not lost. Rather, they are stored over the longer term in a latent form and can reemerge at later times, up to adulthood, following behavioral reactivations or artificial stimulation of the neuronal ensembles activated at learning (Travaglia et al. 2016; Guskjolen et al. 2018; Bessières et al. 2020).In our previous studies based on rat inhibitory avoidance (IA), a paradigm in which the animal learns to avoid a context previously paired with a footshock, we confirmed that an infantile episodic learning event given at PN17 resulted in the typical rapid forgetting. We then found that, however, this memory was stored long term in a latent form, as demonstrated by the observation that it could reemerge following a behavioral reactivation consisting of exposure to the training context (conditioned stimulus [CS]) and a later time footshock of the same intensity that was used during training (unconditioned stimulus [US]) but now given in a distinct context. Reexperiencing either the context or the footshock alone failed to reinstate the infantile memory (Travaglia et al. 2016), suggesting that the return of infantile memory is limited by certain boundaries.Several questions about the conditions for the recovery of latent, infantile episodic memories remain to be addressed. First, is infantile memory reinstatement following the unpaired US presentation temporally regulated? Second, is there an age limit for memory reinstatement? Third, given that other types of learning, such as non-hippocampus-dependent cued conditioning, are regulated by the maternal presence during infancy (Moriceau and Sullivan 2006), is infantile episodic memory reinstatement limited or regulated by the presence of the mother? In this study, we set out to address these questions using IA in infant rats.     

Misprojection of landmarks onto the spatial map

It has been suggested that neglect patients misrepresent the metric spatial relations along the horizontal axis (anisometry). The "fabric" of their internal spatial medium would be distorted in such a way that physically equal distances appear relatively shorter on the contralesional side (canonical anisometry). The case of GL, a 76-year-old lady with left neglect on visual search tasks, is presented. GL showed severe relative overestimation on the left (contralesional) side on two independent tasks evaluating the metrics of her internal representation. A qualitatively similar pattern was found in two out of 10 other neglect patients who performed the second task. This behavior cannot be accounted for by the canonical anisometry hypothesis. Nevertheless, GL produced a relative left overextension (underestimation) when trying to set the endpoints of a virtual line given its midpoint (Endpoints Task). An interpretation of these results is offered in terms of a misprojection of relevant landmarks onto the internal representation without assuming distortion of its "fabric."