Open risk assessment

As criminal justice actors increasingly seek to rely on more evidence-informed practices, including risk assessment instruments, they often lack adequate information about the evidence that informed the development of the practice or the tool. Open science practices, including making scientific research and data accessible and public, have not typically been followed in the development of tools designed for law enforcement, judges, probation, and others. This is in contrast to other government agencies, which often open their processes to public notice and comment. Lack of transparency has become pressing in the area of risk assessment, as entire judicial systems have adopted some type of risk assessment scheme. While the types of information used in a risk tool may be made public, often the underlying methods, validation data, and studies are not – nor are the assumptions behind how a level of risk gets categorized as “high” or “low.” We discuss why those concerns are relevant and important to the new risk assessment tool now being used in federal prisons, as part of the First Step Act. We conclude that a number of key assumptions and policy choices made in the design of that tool are not verifiable or are inadequately supported, including the choice of risk thresholds and the validation data itself. Unfortunately, as a result, the federal risk assessment effort has not been the hoped-for model for open risk assessment.     

A Cognitive Control Perspective of Self-Control Strength and Its Depletion

Self-control strength is a central construct to theories of willpower, optimal functioning, freedom from addiction, and abilities to override problematic social motives and behaviors (e.g., aggression). Understanding the processing basis of self-control strength, and more particularly its depletion, is thus of paramount importance to both basic and applied literatures. Self-control strength, the present review suggests, can be profitably viewed in cognitive control terms, particularly so in relation to operations of a brain-based cognitive control circuit involving the anterior cingulate cortex (linked to monitoring potential or actual unwanted outcomes) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (linked to controlling potential or actual unwanted outcomes). Also, sufficient task motivation is important to operations of this circuit and depletion effects might be understood in terms of such depletion effects on task motivation. Multiple sources of evidence are marshaled in support of this cognitive control perspective of self-control strength. It is concluded that viewing self-control strength in cognitive control terms has considerable merit. Social, cognitive, personality, and clinical sources of data are integrated in the analysis.     

Artifact and Essence

An essential property is a property that an object possesses in every possible world in which that object exists. An individual essence is a property (or set of properties) that an object possesses in every world in which that object exists, and that no other object possesses in any possible world. Call the claim that some artifacts possess an individual essence ‘artifactual essentialism’. I will argue that artifactual essentialism is true. In doing so, I will be responding to two recent arguments by Penelope Mackie against artifactual essentialism (Mackie (2006), esp. ch. 3.). In “Individual Essence Properties”, I will rehearse the qualifications that any property must meet if it is to constitute an individual essence, and in “Artifacts and the Recycling Problem” and “Artifacts and the Tolerance Problem”, I will rehearse Mackie’s arguments against artifactual essentialism. In “Artifacts and Weak Unshareability?” and “Artifacts and Strong Unshareability?”, I will show why both of these arguments fail. In “Mona Lisa’s Essence”, I will defend the interesting claim that some artifacts possess an individual essence. In the final section I will entertain some objections to my proposal.     

Self-discrepancy: comparisons of the psychometric properties of three instruments

In 2 studies, the psychometric properties of 3 methods for measuring real-ideal and real-ought self-discrepancies were compared: the idiographic Self-Concept Questionnaire-Personal Constructs, the nonidiographic Self-Concept Questionnaire-Conventional Constructs, and the content-free Abstract Measures. In the 1st study, 125 students at a university clinic completed the 3 instruments and measures of anxiety and depression before individual therapy. In the 2nd study, 278 undergraduates completed the 3 instruments at 2 time points 4 weeks apart and completed multiple measures of anxiety and depression at the 2nd time point. Internal consistency alphas were consistently strong for the personal construct measures (.90 to .92) and moderate to strong for the conventional construct measures (.82 to .90). Test-retest reliability coefficients were above .70 for the personal construct and conventional construct measures, but the coefficients for the latter were inflated by the stability of their error terms. The 2 discrepancies were found to be factorially distinct even though they were highly correlated. Convergent and discriminant evidence of validity was found in both studies for all measures except the abstract real-ought discrepancy. Convergence was as strong or stronger for the personal construct measures in comparison to the other measures. Test-criterion evidence of validity, with multiple measures of anxiety and depression as criteria, was found in both studies for all measures except for the abstract real-ought discrepancy in relation to anxiety. Overall, the findings support the idiographic personal construct instrument most strongly for clinical assessment and for clinical, translational, and personality research.     

Working memory capacity and spontaneous emotion regulation: high capacity predicts self-enhancement in response to negative feedback

Although previous evidence suggests that working memory capacity (WMC) is important for success at emotion regulation, that evidence may reveal simply that people with higher WMC follow instructions better than those with lower WMC. The present study tested the hypothesis that people with higher WMC more effectively engage in spontaneous emotion regulation following negative feedback, relative to those with lower WMC. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either no feedback or negative feedback about their emotional intelligence. They then completed a disguised measure of self-enhancement and a self-report measure of affect. Experimental condition and WMC interacted such that higher WMC predicted more self-enhancement and less negative affect following negative feedback. This research provides novel insight into the consequences of individual differences in WMC and illustrates that cognitive capacity may facilitate the spontaneous self-regulation of emotion.     

Adjusting for the correspondence bias: Effects of causal uncertainty, cognitive busyness, and causal strength of situational information

This research examined the conditions under which people who have more chronic doubt about their ability to make sense of social behavior (i.e., are causally uncertain; [Weary and Edwards, 1994] and [Weary and Edwards, 1996]) are more likely to adjust their dispositional inferences for a target’s behaviors. Using a cognitive busyness manipulation within the attitude attribution paradigm, we found in Study 1 that higher causal uncertainty predicted increased correction of dispositional inferences, but only when participants had sufficient attentional resources to devote to the task. In Study 2, we found that higher-causal uncertainty predicted greater inferential correction, but only when the additional information provided a more compelling alternative explanation for the observed behavior. Results of this research are discussed in terms of their relevance to the Causal Uncertainty (Weary & Edwards, 1994) and dispositional inference models.