Implicit Bias and Policing

In a time when racial prejudice is generally taboo and decision makers, including law enforcement officials, strenuously disavow the use of group‐based stereotypes to make judgments that affect others, one might expect discriminatory outcomes to be unusual. However, research repeatedly indicates that discrimination is pervasive across many domains, and specifically in policing. A major cause of biased policing is likely the implicit biases that operate outside of conscious awareness and control but nevertheless influence our behaviors. Implicit biases (e.g., stereotypes linking Blacks with crime or with related traits like violence or hostility) influence judgments through processes of misattribution and disambiguation. Although psychological science gives us good insight into the causes of racially biased policing, there are as yet no known, straightforward, effective intervention programs. Nevertheless, there are several strands of research that represent promising avenues for further exploration, including intergroup contact, exposure to counter‐stereotypic exemplars, and stereotype negation. Meanwhile, many police departments are adjusting their policies, trainings, and procedures to try to address biased policing and community complaints. Several common themes among those changes include banning racial profiling, collecting data, training officers, reducing discretion, and adopting new technologies. These adjustments are more likely to be successful if they incorporate the understanding that biased policing occurs in the absence of explicitly “racist” thoughts because of well‐documented, pernicious stereotypes that operate largely outside of conscious awareness and control.     

Toward a Personalized Science of Emotion Regulation

The ability to successfully regulate emotion plays a key role in healthy development and the maintenance of psychological well‐being. Although great strides have been made in understanding the nature of regulatory processes and the consequences of deploying them, a comprehensive understanding of emotion regulation that can specify what strategies are most beneficial for a given person in a given situation is still a far‐off goal. In this review, we argue that moving toward this goal represents a central challenge for the future of the field. As an initial step, we propose a concrete framework that (i) explicitly considers emotion regulation as an interaction of person, situation, and strategy, (ii) assumes that regulatory effects vary according to these factors, and (iii) sets as a primary scientific goal the identification of person‐, situation‐, and strategy‐based contingencies for successful emotion regulation. Guided by this framework, we review current questions facing the field, discuss examples of contextual variation in emotion regulation success, and offer practical suggestions for continued progress in this area.     

Monsters,dreams and madness: Commentary on ‘The arms of the chimeras’

Considering Freudian and Post‐Freudian approaches to the intersubjective Beatrice Ithier puts the work of Michel de M'Uzan and Thomas Ogden in comparison. To this comparison I add a consideration of the work of Christopher Bollas. The highly creative clinical approaches these three theorists take is shown to be informed by their elaborations of the Freudian notion of unconscious communication and by new approaches to the issue of identity. Attention is paid to differentiating traumatic from fanciful chimeras; and to the experience of the analyst undergoing the sorts of transformations requisite to entering this psychic space marked by fluid exchanges of being and becoming, wherein analyst becomes patient, new subjects are created through shared dreams, and through which monsters appear.     

Adolescents’ Attachment to Parents and Peers: Links to Young Adulthood Friendship Quality

Few studies have been carried out on emerging adults’ friendships and on their developmental roots. Research suggests that in adolescence, both attachment to parents and attachment to peers play a role in future socio-emotional development. The aim of the present study was to compare attachment in these two types of relationships in adolescence according to gender and test whether they respectively predicted the perception of best friendship in early adulthood. A sample of 83 participants (49 girls) was seen in early adolescence (M?=?13.66 years, SD?=?0.64) and 7 years later (mean age?=?21.15 years, SD?=?0.83). At T1, participants completed the Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment, which measures attachment using three subscales (communication, alienation and trust) and one global security score. At T2, they completed the McGill Friendship Questionnaire. Results show that in adolescence, boys report higher security with parents compared to peers (mainly due to better communication), unlike girls who obtain higher scores with peers. Longitudinal findings reveal that alienation in the relation with parents is what best predicts friendship quality in early adulthood. These findings underline the specific internal working models at play in socio-emotional development and the way gender differences evolve from adolescence to early adulthood.

     

When and how did you go wrong? Characterizing mild functional difficulties in older adults during an everyday task

ABSTRACT

Mild functional difficulties associated with cognitive aging may be reliably measured by coding “micro-errors” during everyday tasks, like meal preparation. Micro-errors made by 25 older adult and 48 younger adults were coded on four dimensions to evaluate the influence of: 1) poor error monitoring; 2) goal decay; 3) competition for response selection when switching to a new subtask; and 4) interference from distractor objects. Micro-errors made by young adults under a dual task load also were analyzed to determine the influence of overall performance level. Older adults’ micro-errors were observed when switching to a new subtask and to unrelated distractors. Slowed error monitoring and goal decay also influenced micro-errors in older adults, but not significantly more so than younger adults under the dual task. Interventions to reduce interference from distractors and to increase attention at critical choice points during tasks may optimize everyday functioning and preclude decline in older adults.     

Reliability,Validity and Measurement Invariance of the WHO’s Quality of Life Scale among Women of Reproductive Age Living with HIV in Ethiopia - a Quasi-Experimental Study

Applied Research in Quality of Life - Despite its widespread global adoption and use, studies have not examined measurement invariance of the 31-question World Health Organization Quality of...     

Social Science as a Guide to Social Metaphysics?

If we are sympathetic to the project of naturalising metaphysics, how should we approach the metaphysics of the social world? What role can the social sciences play in metaphysical investigation? In the light of these questions, this paper examines three possible approaches to social metaphysics: inference to the best explanation from current social science, conceptual analysis, and Haslanger-inspired ameliorative projects.