THE EFFICACY OF WOMEN'S RESISTANCE STRATEGIES IN RAPE SITUATIONS

The effectiveness of women's resistance strategies for reducing the severity of sexual abuse and physical injury during sexual assaults was analyzed in a variety of assault circumstances. Data were obtained from police reports and court testimonies of 274 women (96% White, 4% Black) who either were raped or avoided rape by subsequently incarcerated violent stranger rapists. Statistical analyses showed that particular resistance strategies were effective in specific situations. Women who fought back forcefully were more likely to avoid rape than women who did not fight back, regardles of whether a waepon was present. Forceful fighting resistance was related to increased physical injury when a weapon was present, but most physical injury was caused by nonlethal weapons. Women who screamed or fled when confronted with weapons experienced less severe sexual abuse. Increased physical injury was associated with pleading, crying, or reasoning indoors. Women who used drugs or alcohol experienced more severe sexual abuse and physical injury.     

‘Please sort these voice recordings into 2 identities’: Effects of task instructions on performance in voice sorting studies

We investigated the effects of two types of task instructions on performance on a voice sorting task by listeners who were either familiar or unfamiliar with the voices. Listeners were asked to sort 15 naturally varying stimuli from two voice identities into perceived identities. Half of the listeners sorted the recordings freely into as many identities as they perceived; the other half were forced to sort stimuli into two identities only. As reported in previous studies, unfamiliar listeners formed more clusters than familiar listeners. Listeners therefore perceived different naturally varying stimuli from the same identity as coming from different identities, while being highly accurate at telling apart the stimuli from different voices. We further show that a change in task instructions – forcing listeners to sort stimuli into two identities only – helped unfamiliar listeners to overcome this selective failure at ‘telling people together’. This improvement, however, came at the cost of an increase in errors in telling people apart. For familiar listeners, similar non-significant trends were apparent. Therefore, even when informed about correct number of identities, listeners may fail to accurately perceive identity further highlighting that voice identity perception in the context of natural within-person variability is a challenging task. We discuss our results in terms of similarities and differences to findings in the face perception literature and their importance in applied settings, such as forensic voice identification.     

Prospective Memory: A New Focus for Research

Prospective memory is required for many aspects of everyday cognition, its breakdown may be as debilitating as impairments in retrospective memory, and yet, the former has received relatively little attention by memory researchers. This article outlines a strategy for changing the fortunes of prospective memory, for guiding new research to shore up the claim that prospective memory is a distinct aspect of cognition, and to obtain evidence for clear performance dissociations between prospective memory and other memory functions. We begin by identifying the unique requirements of prospective memory tasks and by dividing memory's prospective functions into subdomains that are analogous to divisions in retrospective memory (e.g., short- versus long-term memory). We focus on one prospective function, called prospective memory proper; we define this function in the spirit of James (1890) as requiring that we are aware of a plan, of which meanwhile we have not been thinking, with the additional consciousness that we made the plan earlier. We give an operational definition of prospective memory proper and specify how it differs from explicit and implicit retrospective memory and how it might be empirically assessed.