Bayesian journey-to-crime modelling of single and multiple crime-type series in Baltimore County,MD

This study tested different Bayesian Journey-to-Crime (JTC) models on a sample group of 850 serial offenders apprehended in Baltimore County, MD from 1993 to 1997. In this research, Bayesian JTC models were being used to predict the home locations of the offenders. The sample group data included 133 assaults, 90 burglaries, 497 larcenies, 81 robberies, and 49 vehicle thefts. The main question this research aimed to answer was whether the addition of crimes of a different type to an existing crime series of a single type would result in more accurate and/or precise Bayesian JTC models. The standard practice by law enforcement has been to consider the same-type crime series only when modelling the anchor point of the offender. Similarly, in research, geographic profiles have been constructed exclusively with the same-type crime series. The results of this study clearly indicated that the inclusion of crimes of a different type into a single crime-type series will result in significantly more accurate and more precise Bayesian JTC models. In contrast, crime series with predominantly assault and burglary showed results that were inconclusive or indicated no significant differences. These results should encourage law enforcement agencies to re-evaluate their standard practice of constructing geographic profiles with only the same-type crime series. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Differences in startle reactivity during the perception of angry and fearful faces

Emotion researchers often categorize angry and fearful face stimuli as "negative" or "threatening". Perception of fear and anger, however, appears to be mediated by dissociable neural circuitries and often elicit distinguishable behavioral responses. The authors sought to elucidate whether viewing anger and fear expressions produce dissociable psychophysiological responses (i.e., the startle reflex). The results of two experiments using different facial stimulus sets (representing anger, fear, neutral, and happy) indicated that viewing anger was associated with a significantly heightened startle response (p < .05) relative to viewing fear, happy, and neutral. This finding suggests that while anger and fear faces convey messages of "threat", their priming effect on startle circuitry differs. Thus, angry expressions, representing viewer-directed threat with an unambiguous source (i.e., the expresser), may more effectively induce a motivational propensity to withdraw or escape. The source of threat is comparatively less clear for fearful faces. The differential effects of these two facial threat signals on the defensive motivational system adds to growing literature highlighting the importance of distinguishing between emotional stimuli of similar valence, along lines of meaning and functional impact.     

Environmental Contributions to Adolescent Delinquency: A Fresh Look at the Shared Environment

Few genetically-informative studies have attempted to explicitly identify the shared environmental (i.e., those environmental influences that contribute to sibling similarity) factors now known to contribute to adolescent delinquency. The current study therefore examined whether the parent-child relationship served as one source of these shared environmental influences. Participants were 610 adoptive and biological families from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (SIBS). Parents and adolescents reported on their parent-child conflict and parental involvement with child, and adolescents reported on their own delinquent behaviors. We employed structural equation modeling and supplementary multilevel modeling, finding consistent evidence that the association between delinquency and the parent-child relationship is at least partially shared environmental in origin. Such findings provide an important extension of previous twin studies, as they suggest that passive genotype-environment correlations do not explain earlier findings of shared environmental influences on this association.     

Formal Schooling Influences Two- but Not Three-Dimensional Naming Skills

The modulatory influence of literacy on the cognitive system of the human brain has been indicated in behavioral, neuroanatomic, and functional neuroimaging studies. In this study we explored the functional consequences of formal education and the acquisition of an alphabetic written language on two- and three-dimensional visual naming. The results show that illiterate subjects perform significantly worse on immediate naming of two-dimensional representations of common everyday objects compared to literate subjects, both in terms of accuracy and reaction times. In contrast, there was no significant difference when the subjects named the corresponding real objects. The results suggest that formal education and learning to read and to write modulate the cognitive process involved in processing two- but not three-dimensional representations of common everyday objects. Both the results of the reaction time and the error pattern analyses can be interpreted as indicating that the major influence of literacy affects the visual system or the interaction between the visual and the language systems. We suggest that the visual system in a wide sense and/or the interface between the visual and the language system are differently formatted in literate and illiterate subjects. In other words, we hypothesize that the pattern of interactions in the functional-anatomical networks subserving visual naming, that is, the interactions within and between the visual and language processing networks, differ in literate and illiterate subjects.