Dimensions of Suicide: Perceptions of Lethality,Time, and Agony

Two hundred ninety-one lay persons and 10 forensic pathologists rated the lethality, time, and agony for 28 methods of suicide for 4117 cases of completed suicide in Los Angeles County in the period 1988–1991. Whereas pathologists provided consistent ratings, lay persons demonstrated extreme variability and a tendency to inflate ratings of all three dimensions. Significant gender differences emerged, with females rating frequently used suicide methods more similarly to pathologists than the males did. Males who suicided used the most lethal and quickest methods whereas females selected methods varying in lethality, duration, and agony. African Americans were overrepresented in the use of the most lethal and quickest methods.     

Children's different use of alignment cues when encoding and when producing a match-to-target

Young children are frequently inaccurate in a simultaneous alignment task in which a square has to be laid down in alignment with a spatially discontiguous square, or a diamond with a diamond. The size of the inaccuracy can be manipulated by providing congruent or incongruent contextual cues. Three new results are reported here. First, accuracy at aligning the context itself seemed to obey grossly similar rules to those governing alignment to targets within the context. Secondly, the major determinant of contextual effects seemed to operate at the level of organizing the response rather than at encoding the display. Thirdly, whilst congruent cues on the response plane aided performance, they did not when they were located in the stimulus plane. Two suggestions are made to explain these effects. Firstly, children do not distribute their available orientation-encoding resources economically when forming a mental representation of the stimulus; secondly, they attempt the simultaneous matching task by using a sequential strategy. The observed alignment error may be a product of their inefficient collation of evidence from the perceptual cues monitored during the two earlier stages of the sequential strategy.