Simulated judicial decision-making for African and European American adolescents with illegal sexual behavior: The impact of medical data and victim race/ethnicity

The perceived importance of victim and defendant race/ethnicity and medical evidence in child sexual abuse cases has been recognized separately in the literature. However, few studies have considered these factors simultaneously. Within a sample of 880 college students, an interaction effect was tested between the presence of medical evidence and the race/ethnicity of a juvenile defendant and victim using child sexual abuse case vignettes. The main effects of medical evidence and the race of the defendant were observed. Medical evidence and race of victim influenced victim believability such that medical evidence was more impactful for cases with African American victims. Further, there were interactions between the race of the defendant and the race of the victim in adult versus juvenile court decisions, sex offender registration and notification requirements, and length of sex offender registration and notification. Interracial sexual offending was associated with substantially higher punishment than intraracial sexual offending. Accordingly, several important implications for court-level decision-making processes are explored.     

Sea lions and equivalence: expanding classes by exclusion

Experiments have shown that human and nonhuman subjects are capable of performing new arbitrary stimulus-stimulus relations without error. When subjects that are experienced with matching-to-sample procedures are presented with a novel sample, a novel comparison, and a familiar comparison, most respond by correctly selecting the novel comparison in the presence of the new sample. This exclusion paradigm was expanded with two California sea lions that had previously formed two 10-member equivalence classes in a matching-to-sample procedure. Rather than being presented with a novel sample on a given trial, the sea lions were presented with a randomly selected familiar member of one class as the sample. One of the comparisons was a randomly selected familiar member of the alternative class, and the other was a novel stimulus. When required to choose which comparison matched the sample, the subjects reliably rejected the familiar comparison, and instead selected the unfamiliar one. Next, the sea lions were presented with transfer problems that could not be solved by exclusion; they immediately grouped the new stimuli into the appropriate classes. These findings show that exclusion procedures can rapidly generate new stimulus relations that can be used to expand stimulus classes.     

Long-term memory for concepts in a California sea lion (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Zalophus californianus</Emphasis>)

An adult California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) with extensive experience in performing discrimination learning tasks was tested to evaluate her long-term memory for two previously learned concepts. An associative concept, that of equivalence classification, was retested after a retention interval of approximately 1 year. The sea lion had originally shown emergent equivalence classification with nonsimilarity-based classes of stimuli in a simple discrimination repeated-reversal procedure as well as in a matching-to-sample procedure. The 1-year memory test revealed no decrement in classification performance in either procedure. A relational concept, that of generalized identity matching, was retested after approximately 10 years. The sea lion had originally received trial-and-error exemplar training with identity matching-to-sample problems prior to transferring the concept to novel stimulus configurations. In the 10-year memory test, the sea lion immediately and reliably applied the previously established identity concept to familiar and novel sets of matching problems. These are the first reports of long-term conceptual memory in a nonprimate species. The experimental findings are consistent with a variety of observations of sea lions in natural settings, which indicate that natal sites, feeding areas, and individuals may be remembered over long periods of time. Electronic Supplementary Material is available if you access this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10071-002-0153-8. On that page (frame on the left side), a link takes you directly to the supplementary material. Electronic Publication     

Development of upper limb proprioceptive accuracy in children and adolescents

This study was designed to determine differences in the proprioceptively guided movements of children (8-10 years) and adolescents (16-18 years). Participants were blindfolded and asked to actively match passively determined target positions of the elbow joint under three matching conditions. Overall, children were less accurate than adolescents in all matching tasks and utilized different kinematic strategies for making the matching movements. Specifically, children made larger absolute errors and utilized matching movements which, compared to adolescents, were of shorter duration and less irregular in terms of their velocity profiles. An assessment of limb asymmetry was also performed revealing a non-dominant arm matching advantage but only for children and only in the task requiring interhemispheric transfer of a memory-based model of limb position. The proprioceptive differences observed in this study are likely the result of experience-driven refinement in the utilization of somatosensory feedback throughout childhood and into adolescence.     

The Relative Contribution of Sibling Deviance and Peer Deviance in the Prediction of Substance Use Across Middle Childhood

This study investigated the quality of sibling relationships and sibling deviancy in a sample of children at-risk for substance use and antisocial behavior. Based on a history of empirical and theoretical models suggesting strong associations between children's development in the context of relationships and the emergence of delinquency and drug use, this research extends previous efforts by including sibling relationships in this developmental model, linking siblings with later substance use. Sibling relationship quality as well as peer deviance were examined using a multirater, multimethod assessment procedure. We tested 3 constructs (deviancy, warmth, and conflict) related to sibling behavior. Only sibling deviance and peer deviance directly predicted substance use. When both sibling deviance and peer deviance were examined as predictors of changes in substance use over time, only sibling deviance was significant. Implications for the development of substance use behavior in middle childhood are discussed.     

An analysis of initial acquisition and maintenance of sight words following picture matching and copy cover, and compare teaching methods

This study compared the copy, cover, and compare method to a picture-word matching method for teaching sight word recognition. Participants were 5 kindergarten students with less than preprimer sight word vocabularies who were enrolled in a public school in the Pacific Northwest. A multielement design was used to evaluate the effects of the two interventions. Outcomes suggested that sight words taught using the copy, cover, and compare method resulted in better maintenance of word recognition when compared to the picture-matching intervention. Benefits to students and the practicality of employing the word-level teaching methods are discussed.     

Client-level predictors of adherence to MST in community service settings

This study examined the association of youth and family characteristics with therapist fidelity to an evidence-based treatment provided in real world practice settings. Participants were 233 families that reported on the 66 therapists organized into 16 teams in nine organizations providing multisystemic therapy (MST). Therapist adherence ratings were lower for youths referred for both criminal offenses and substance abuse than for youths referred either for substance abuse or status offenses, and was negatively associated with pretreatment arrests and school suspensions. Adherence ratings were positively associated with educational disadvantage and caregiver-therapist ethnic match and marginally positively associated with economic disadvantage. The findings suggest directions for future research on the implementation of evidence-based treatments in community settings.     

Personal Strategies for HIV Prevention: The Development and Validation of a Strategy-Coding Instrument1

This paper describes the development of a coding instrument to classify college students' strategies for preventing HIV infection, and examines the association of distinct strategies with social cognitive and behavioral measures related to safer sexual behavior. This instrument classifies each strategy into both a content domain (e.g., using condoms, remaining abstinent, limiting sexual partners), and 3 distinct dimensions: commitment, specificity, and effectiveness. We examine the reliability and validity of this instrument by showing the discriminative associations of each dimension with social cognitive and behavioral measures, and demonstrate the differential importance of distinct dimensions in predicting behavior in different content domains. Discussion focuses on the importance of tailoring HIV prevention messages to change strategy dimensions in order to maximize behavior change.     

Variations in constrained retrieval

Mentally reinstating encoding operations at retrieval might improve access to memories; however, such constrained retrieval is an effortful process that may not always be used. The memory-for-foils procedure (Jacoby, Shimizu, Daniels, & Rhodes, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 12, 852-857, 2005) infers participant-initiated mental reinstatement of encoding operations during attempts at recognition from the differential memory that accrues to foils during a test of deeply processed items versus during a test of shallowly processed items, as indicated by performance on a final recognition memory test for the foils. Experiment 1 tested whether differential memory for foils is due to the evocation of task context during recollection of neighboring old items. Experiment 2 tested whether inducing a set to respond without much effort on a prior recognition test affects the likelihood of constrained retrieval on later tests. Experiment 3 tested whether constrained retrieval is less likely to occur when the deep versus shallow source of test items is intermixed, rather than blocked in separate tests. These experiments provide evidence that people query memory by mentally reinstating encoding operations and identify conditions that affect the probability of constrained retrieval.     

Stalking Myth-Attributions: Examining the Role of Individual and Contextual Variables on Attributions in Unwanted Pursuit Scenarios

Undergraduates from a large southeastern university in the U.S. (n?=?258) read a scenario describing an unwanted heterosexual pursuit that manipulated story perspective (pursuer’s vs. rejecter’s) and pursuer/rejecter gender. Measures of 1) external attributions for pursuer behavior, 2) negative internal attributions to rejecters, and 3) Stalking Myths endorsement followed. Individuals adopting the pursuer’s perspective showed higher rates of external attributions for pursuer behavior than those in the rejecter perspective condition. They also endorsed more negative internal attributions for rejecters than those in the rejecter perspective condition, especially when the rejecter was male. Participant gender also mattered. Men exhibited more victim blaming tendencies than women when the rejecter was female. However, stalking myth endorsement was the strongest predictor of attributions.