A combination of combat experience,early abduction,and severe traumatization fuels appetitive aggression and violence among abductees of rebel war in Northern Uganda

Individuals who perpetrate violence may likely perceive violence as appealing and infliction of violence to derive pleasure is termed as appetitive aggression. Individuals who were abducted as children into an armed group often experience a higher number of traumatic event types, that is traumatic load and are usually socialized in a violence-endorsing environment. This study aims to investigate the interaction between age at initial abduction with that of traumatic load, and their influence on appetitive aggression along with perpetration of violent acts by former members of an armed rebel group of both sexes. Semi-structured interviews were conducted among a target group of formerly abducted rebel-war survivors (including participants with and without combat experience) from Northern Uganda. Participants included 596 women and 570 men with N = 1,166 (M_age = 32.58, SD_age = 9.76, range: 18–80 years). We conducted robust linear regression models to investigate the influence of age at initial abduction, traumatic load, combat experience, and biological sex on appetitive aggression as well as their perpetrated violent acts. Our study shows, appetitive aggression and the number of perpetrated violent acts were specifically increased in individuals who were abducted young, experienced several traumatic events in their lifetime, and with previous combat experience. For perpetrated violence men showed increased levels whereas for appetitive aggression the association was independent of biological sex. Therefore, early abducted individuals with a higher traumatic load, who have combat experience, need to be given special intervention to prevent any further violence.     

The Ideological Foundations of Economic Protectionism: Authoritarianism,Social Dominance Orientation,and the Moderating Role of Political Involvement

Even though economic globalization and foreign trade are major topics in the political discourse of most societies and negative attitudes toward international trade are prevalent, there is a lack of research investigating the ideological roots of protectionist preferences from a psychological perspective. In the present research, we examined the implications of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) for trade attitudes. Using data from two nationally representative samples from the United States (Study 1) and Germany (Study 2), we found that RWA predicted protectionist attitudes above and beyond economic self-interest. Furthermore, we found that the relationship between RWA and opposition to international trade was moderated by political involvement. The association of SDO with protectionist attitudes was inconsistent across the two studies and was not moderated by political involvement. Taken together, these results emphasize the importance of basic ideological orientations and the psychological dispositions they reflect in explaining public attitudes toward international trade.     

Emergence,Reduction and the Identity and Individuation of Powers

Topoi - One recently popular way to characterise strong emergence is to say that emergent entities possess novel causal powers. However, there is little agreement concerning the nature of powers....     

Moral Values Reveal the Causality Implicit in Verb Meaning

Prior work has found that moral values that build and bind groups—that is, the binding values of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and preservation of purity—are linked to blaming people who have been harmed. The present research investigated whether people's endorsement of binding values predicts their assignment of the causal locus of harmful events to the victims of the events. We used an implicit causality task from psycholinguistics in which participants read a sentence in the form “SUBJECT verbed OBJECT because…” where male and female proper names occupy the SUBJECT and OBJECT position. The participants were asked to predict the pronoun that follows “because”—the referent to the subject or object—which indicates their intuition about the likely cause of the event. We also collected explicit judgments of causal contributions and measured participants' moral values to investigate the relationship between moral values and the causal interpretation of events. Using two verb sets and two independent replications (N = 459, 249, 788), we found that greater endorsement of binding values was associated with a higher likelihood of selecting the object as the cause for harmful events in the implicit causality task, a result consistent with, and supportive of, previous moral psychological work on victim blaming. Endorsement of binding values also predicted explicit causal attributions to victims. Overall, these findings indicate that moral values that support the group rather than the individual reliably predict that people shift the causal locus of harmful events to those affected by the harms.     

Simulated judicial decision-making for African and European American adolescents with illegal sexual behavior: The impact of medical data and victim race/ethnicity

The perceived importance of victim and defendant race/ethnicity and medical evidence in child sexual abuse cases has been recognized separately in the literature. However, few studies have considered these factors simultaneously. Within a sample of 880 college students, an interaction effect was tested between the presence of medical evidence and the race/ethnicity of a juvenile defendant and victim using child sexual abuse case vignettes. The main effects of medical evidence and the race of the defendant were observed. Medical evidence and race of victim influenced victim believability such that medical evidence was more impactful for cases with African American victims. Further, there were interactions between the race of the defendant and the race of the victim in adult versus juvenile court decisions, sex offender registration and notification requirements, and length of sex offender registration and notification. Interracial sexual offending was associated with substantially higher punishment than intraracial sexual offending. Accordingly, several important implications for court-level decision-making processes are explored.     

Risk assessment in sentencing and plea bargaining: The roles of prosecutors and defense attorneys

Research on risk assessment in sentencing has focused heavily on the role of judges. Ignoring the role of other courtroom actors in the sentencing process, however, leaves unexamined the potentially significant effects on judicial decision making of arguments made by prosecutors and defense attorneys at sentencing hearings. Unduly focusing on judges also overlooks the vast majority of sentences arrived at through negotiated guilty pleas. We explored the extent to which considerations of risk are made among prosecutors and defense attorneys when advocating for given sentences in open court or during plea negotiations. We surveyed all prosecutors and defense attorneys in 14 judicial circuits in Virginia and found that most prosecutors and defense attorneys at least “sometimes” explicitly invoked actuarial risk estimates both at sentencing hearings and during plea negotiations. However, defense attorneys were much more likely than prosecutors to be averse to the use of risk assessment in either form of case disposition.     

‘Personality in Its Natural Habitat’ Revisited: A Pooled,Multi-sample Examination of the Relationships Between the Big Five Personality Traits and Daily Behaviour and Language Use

Past research using the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), an observational ambulatory assessment method for the real-world measurement of daily behaviour, has identified several behavioural manifestations of the Big Five domains in a small college sample (N = 96). With the use of a larger and more diverse sample of pooled data from N = 462 participants from a total of four community samples who wore the EAR from 2 to 6 days, the primary purpose of the present study was to obtain more precise and generalizable effect estimates of the Big Five–behaviour relationships and to re-examine the degree to which these relationships are gender specific. In an extension of the original article, the secondary purpose of the present study was to examine if the Big Five–behaviour relationships differed across two facets of each Big Five domain. Overall, while several of the behavioural manifestations of the Big Five were generally consistent with the trait definitions (replicating some findings from the original article), we found little evidence of gender differences (not replicating a basic finding from the original article). Unique to the present study, the Big Five–behaviour relationships were not always comparable across the two facets of each Big Five domain. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Searching for an O in an array of Cs: eye movements track moment-to-moment processing in visual search

We examined how closely the underlying cognitive processing in a visual search task guides eye movements by comparing two different search tasks. In the extended search task, participants searched for an O in eight clusters of Landolt Cs with varying gap widths (four characters per cluster, arranged to look like words in text). In the single-cluster task, participants searched a single cluster (identical to the ones in the extended search). The key manipulation was gap size; although gap orientation for the distractors varied within a cluster, gap size was constant within a cluster but differed in size from cluster to cluster. The principal findings were that (1) gaze durations in the extended search were almost completely a function of the difficulty of the cluster (i.e., the gap size of the Cs) and (2) the effect of gap size on gaze durations in the extended search was very similar to its effect on response times in the single-cluster search. Thus, it appears that eye movements in the search task are determined almost exclusively by the ongoing cognitive processing on that cluster.     

A Method for Analyzing Videotaped Genetic Counseling Sessions

This study describes the development and evaluation of a multi-item scale for analyzing the genetic counseling process, the Manchester Observation Code (MOC) for genetic counseling. The instrument is specific to the field of genetic counseling and is designed for analysis of the communication between counselor and client. Coding is done directly from videotaped sessions. Because communication is the means by which genetic counseling is accomplished, the method measures four relevant components of communication: (1) grammatical form, (2) purpose, (3) subject, and (4) cue source. The instrument enables an observer to code the counselor's statements into these four components. Three videotaped sessions were used to measure interrater reliability, or the consistency of rating for each of the four communication domains using this method. Three videotaped sessions were also used to measure test-retest reliability, or the consistency of the designed method from one time to another. A total of 21 videotaped sessions were tested using the method. A statistical measure of reliability established consistency of the designed method; Cohen's kappa yielded 0.7 for interrater reliability and 0.79 for test-retest reliability. These findings suggest this instrument may be used to identify important elements of the genetic counseling process.