Feeding the Beast: Nourishing Nativist Appeals in Sweden and in Denmark

Sweden and Denmark share a similar socio-political structure, yet these two countries demonstrate two distinct discourses on immigration. This article focuses on the tone of the debate in Denmark and Sweden concerning immigration and national identity. If the tone of debate is shaped by a language of fear, we argue, this predisposes people to vote for anti-immigration parties. Our analysis highlights the position of anti-immigration parties; hence, the Sweden Democrats (SD) in Sweden and the Danish People’s Party (DPP) in Denmark. We use frame analysis to detect recurrent frames in the media debate concerning the SD and the DPP in the political competition over votes. Our material concentrates on the run-up to the European Parliamentary (EP) elections of 2004 and 2009, in total 573 articles in ten major Danish and Swedish newspapers. We show that the harsh tone of the debate and the negative dialogue risks leading to the construction of beasts that are impossible to negotiate with. In the Swedish political debate, the SD is highly stigmatized as the beast (the extreme other) in Swedish politics and this stigma is used by the SD in the mobilization of votes. In Denmark the religion of Islam as such plays a similar role and provides the DPP with an identity. We conclude that we are confronted with a two-faced beast that feeds on perceptions of the people as ultimately afraid of what are not recognized as native goods.     

Eliciting Intelligence Using the Scharff‐Technique: Closing in on the Confirmation/Disconfirmation‐Tactic

The current study examined interview techniques aimed at eliciting intelligence from human sources. We compared two versions of the Scharff‐technique to the Direct Approach (a combination of open and direct questions). The Scharff conditions, conceptualised into four tactics, differed only with respect to the ‘confirmation/disconfirmation‐tactic’. The participants (N = 90) received background information and took the role as a source in a phone interview. They were instructed to strike a balance between not revealing too little and too much information. As predicted, the Scharff‐technique resulted in more new information than the Direct Approach. Importantly, the sources interviewed by the Scharff‐technique perceived that they had revealed less new information than they objectively did, whereas the sources interviewed by the Direct Approach perceived that they had revealed more new information than they objectively did. Furthermore, the interviewer's information objectives were better masked with the confirmation‐tactic than with the disconfirmation‐tactic. The results highlight the Scharff‐technique as a promising human intelligence gathering technique. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Testing attention: Comparing the ANT with TVA-based assessment

Posner’s attention network model and Bundesen’s theory of visual attention (TVA) are two influential accounts of attention. Each model has led to the development of a test method: the attention network test (ANT) and TVA-based assessment, respectively. Both tests have been widely used to investigate attentional function in normal and clinical populations. Here we report on the first direct comparison of the ANT to TVA-based assessment. A group of 68 young healthy participants were tested in three consecutive sessions that each contained standard versions of the two tests. The parameters derived from TVA-based assessment had better internal reliability and retest reliability than did those of the standard version of the ANT, where only the executive network score reached comparable levels. However, when corrected for differences in test length, the retest reliability of the orienting network score equaled the least reliable TVA parameters. Both tests were susceptible to practice effects, which improved performance for some parameters while leaving others constant. All pairwise correlations between the eight attention parameters measured by the two tests were small and nonsignificant, with one exception: A strong correlation (r?=?0.72) was found between two parameters of TVA-based assessment, visual processing speed and the capacity of visual short-term memory. We conclude that TVA-based assessment and the ANT measure complementary aspects of attention, but the scores derived from TVA-based assessment are more reliable.     

Mental health in Swedish children living in joint physical custody and their parents' life satisfaction: A cross‐sectional study

This study compared the psychological symptoms of 129 children in joint physical custody with children in single care and nuclear families, using a nationally representative 2011 survey of 1,297 Swedish children aged between four and 18 years. The outcome measure was the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and its association with three dimensions of parental life satisfaction was investigated. Linear regression analyses showed higher SDQ‐scores for children in joint physical custody (B = 1.4, p < 0.001) and single care (B = 2.2, p < 0.001) than in nuclear families, after adjustment for socio‐demographic variables. The estimates decreased to 1.1 and 1.3, respectively, after being adjusted for parental life satisfaction ( p < 0.01). Our findings confirm previous research that showed lower symptom scores for children in nuclear families than children in single care and joint physical custody. Parental life satisfaction should be investigated further as a possible explanation of differences in symptom load between children in different living arrangements.     

The aim of Russell’s early logicism: a reinterpretation

I argue that three main interpretations of the aim of Russell’s early logicism in The Principles of Mathematics (1903) are mistaken, and propose a new interpretation. According to this new interpretation, the aim of Russell’s logicism is to show, in opposition to Kant, that mathematical propositions have a certain sort of complete generality which entails that their truth is independent of space and time. I argue that on this interpretation two often-heard objections to Russell’s logicism, deriving from Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and from the non-logical character of some of the axioms of Principia Mathematica respectively, can be seen to be inconclusive. I then proceed to identify two challenges that Russell’s logicism, as presently construed, faces, but argue that these challenges do not appear unanswerable.     

Drawing what lies ahead: False intentions are more abstractly depicted than true intentions

The aim of this study was to examine how people mentally represent and depict true and false statements about claimed future actions—so‐called true and false intentions. On the basis of construal level theory, which proposes that subjectively unlikely events are more abstractly represented than likely ones, we hypothesized that false intentions should be represented at a more abstract level than true intentions. Fifty‐six hand drawings, produced by participants to describe mental images accompanying either true or false intentions, were rated on level of abstractness by a second set of participants (N = 117) blind to the veracity of the intentions. As predicted, drawings of false intentions were rated as more abstract than drawings of true intentions. This result advances the use of drawing‐based deception detection techniques to the field of true and false intentions and highlights the potential for abstractness as a novel cue to deceit.     

Facilitating memory‐based lie detection in immediate and delayed interviewing: The role of mnemonics

We experimentally investigated how different mnemonic techniques employed in an interview conducted immediately after an event affected truth tellers' and liars' responses when they were interviewed again after a 2‐week delay. We also compared how verbal accounts changed over time within truth tellers and liars, and how consistent both groups were. Participants (n = 143) were shown a mock intelligence operation video and instructed either to tell the truth or lie about its contents in two interviews, one of which was immediately after watching the video and the other after a 2‐week delay. In the immediate interview, they were asked to provide a free recall and then asked to provide further information via one of three mnemonics: context reinstatement, sketch, or event‐line. In the delayed interview, they were asked to provide only a free recall. Truth tellers reported more visual, spatial, temporal, and action details than did liars both immediately and after a delay. Truth tellers experienced more of a decline in reporting details after a delay than did liars, and this decline was affected by the mnemonic used. Truth tellers thus showed, more than liars, patterns of reporting indicative of genuine memory decay. Liars produced patterns of a “stability bias” instead. Truth tellers and liars were equally consistent between their immediate and delayed statements.     

Virtually overcoming grammar learning with 3D application of Loci mnemonics?

The importance of contextual information for memory organization has been advocated by memory research and ancient mnemonic techniques (e.g., method of loci), yet it remains overlooked in most current study environments. Here, German noun gender was presented to 48 participants without prior knowledge of German, either without or within a provided spatial context consisting of a simulated virtual environment that could be explored freely. The three main findings were: in addition to reduced forgetting rate, memory was significantly enhanced when acquisition had occurred with a spatial context than without, in immediate, and delayed cued recall, as well as in delayed free recall. Second, visualization ability predicted spatial context efficiency as a memory aid for cued recall. Lastly, performance of the method of loci‐based method correlated with its perceived efficiency. This is the first study to experimentally demonstrate the potential effectiveness of computer‐induced spatial context on grammar learning.     

Increased realism in eyewitness confidence judgements: the effect of dyadic collaboration

This study investigated to what extent, and under what circumstances, pair collaboration influences the realism in eyewitness confidence in event memory. The participants first saw a short film clip and then confidence rated their answers to questions on its content. A condition (the Individual–Pair condition) where individual effort preceded pair collaboration showed better calibration compared with a condition (the Simple Pair condition) where no individual effort took place. Furthermore, within the Individual–Pair condition, better calibration, and lower overconfidence, were found in the pair phase compared with the individual phase. The eyewitnesses in the Individual–Pair condition made more realistic judgements of the total number of questions answered correctly. In a control experiment no effect on realism in confidence was found when individuals performed the same task twice. The improved realism in the Individual–Pair condition may partly be explained in terms of the increased accuracy and lowered confidence found for such items where the pair members' had given different answers in the individual phase, and by a risky shift effect for such items where they had given the same answer. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.