Accused for Involvement in Collective Violence: The Discursive Reconstruction of Agency and Identity by Perpetrators of International Crimes

This study explores discourses about involvement in violent intergroup conflict and international crimes from the perspective of perpetrators. Through a critical discourse analysis of 12 personal interviews carried out with individuals accused by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for crimes committed during the Yugoslav conflicts, we uncover how their discourse reveals conceptions of lacking agency and powerlessness during the conflict, how it reconstructs power relationships within and between ethnic groups, and how it reflects identity management strategies destined to elude blame and responsibility. Our findings demonstrate how discourses are tainted by the legitimizing framework in which the conflict unfolded but also how they are shaped by the particular context of the communicative situation. Findings are discussed in terms of their significance for international criminal justice and its stated objectives.     

Narratives of Choice amongst white Australians who undertake Surrogacy Arrangements in India

This paper reports on a rhetorical analysis of interviews with fifteen white Australian citizens who had undertaken offshore commercial surrogacy in India. Extending previous research, the findings suggest that genetic relatedness was valorized, and surrogacy constructed as a less tenuous route to family formation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the need for further research on 1) how the contentious nature of offshore commercial surrogacy may prevent full consideration of its ethical implications, 2) the differing belief systems between India and Australia in terms of children as alienable objects, and 3) ongoing consideration of how and when genetic-relatedness is made to matter.     

What Am I Looking at? Interpreting Dynamic and Static Gaze Displays

Displays of eye movements may convey information about cognitive processes but require interpretation. We investigated whether participants were able to interpret displays of their own or others' eye movements. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants observed an image under three different viewing instructions. Then they were shown static or dynamic gaze displays and had to judge whether it was their own or someone else's eye movements and what instruction was reflected. Participants were capable of recognizing the instruction reflected in their own and someone else's gaze display. Instruction recognition was better for dynamic displays, and only this condition yielded above chance performance in recognizing the display as one's own or another person's (Experiments 1 and 2). Experiment 3 revealed that order information in the gaze displays facilitated instruction recognition when transitions between fixated regions distinguish one viewing instruction from another. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Structure factorielle et qualités psychométriques du questionnaire d’auto-évaluation pour adolescents (Youth Self-Report) d’Achenbach et Rescorla

IntroductionRecent research on the prognostic significance of subthreshold comorbid disorders highlighted the need for instruments allowing for the comprehensive exploration of symptomatology of adolescents.ObjectiveTo verify the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Achenbach and Rescorla's Youth Self-Report French translation, which allows this investigation.MethodWe had 1450 adolescents 11–17- year old (747 girls) complete the YSR in secondary schools in the Paris metropolitan area.ResultsConfirmatory Factor Analyses and Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling supported the 8-syndrome structure. However, since ESEM allows cross-loadings, the number of indicators for each factor in the ESEM models is much higher than in the CFA models. Internal consistency and test-retest reliability were satisfactory, and multigroup analyses confirmed the metric and scalar invariance across age and gender of most of the items examined (70 out of 89). We can therefore affirm that girls score lower on Social problems than boys, 15–17-year-old adolescent score higher on Thought problems, Attention problems, and Rule-Breaking Behavior than the younger, and these differences are substantive and independent of differential item functioning.ConclusionThese results are likely to encourage the use of YSR in research and clinical practice with French-speaking adolescents.     

Liquid zinc embrittlement of a high-manganese-content TWIP steel

The cracking resistance of a twinning induced plasticity (TWIP) steel with high-manganese content has been studied in relation to the liquid metal embrittlement phenomenon. This phenomenon was investigated by hot tensile tests carried out on electrogalvanised specimens using a Gleeble® simulator at temperatures ranging from 600°C to 1000°C. The results show that this steel can be embrittled by liquid zinc within a limited range of temperature depending on strain rate.     

Mentoring: Processes and Perceptions of Sport and Exercise Psychology Graduate Students

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP) conference programs address cultural diversity. A content analysis was conducted by analyzing 5214 AASP conference program abstracts from 1986 to 2007. Only 10.5% of all abstracts included discussion of a cultural diversity issue and 31.9% included a diverse sample. Of those abstracts that addressed cultural diversity issues, the majority addressed gender, with almost no attention to race and ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, social class, disability, or older adults. These results highlight the continuing neglect, but compelling need to address cultural diversity in sport and exercise psychology, and specifically within AASP programming.     

Exploring the Relations between Cattell–Horn–Carroll (CHC) Cognitive Abilities and Mathematics Achievement

As standardized measures of cognitive abilities and academic achievement continue to evolve, so do the relations between the constructs represented in these measures. A large, nationally representative sample of school‐aged children and youth between 6 and 19 years of age (N = 4,194) was used to systematically evaluate the relations between cognitive abilities and components of academic achievement in mathematics. The cognitive abilities of interest were those identified from the Cattell–Horn–Carroll model of intelligence. Specific areas of mathematics achievement included math calculation skills and math problem solving. Results suggest that fluid reasoning (Gf), comprehension‐knowledge (Gc), and processing speed (Gs) have the strongest and most consistent relations with mathematics achievement throughout the school years.Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Anticipatory versus reactive spatial attentional bias to threat

Dot‐probe or visual probe tasks (VPTs) are used extensively to measure attentional biases. A novel variant termed the cued VPT (cVPT) was developed to focus on the anticipatory component of attentional bias. This study aimed to establish an anticipatory attentional bias to threat using the cVPT and compare its split‐half reliability with a typical dot‐probe task. A total of 120 students performed the cVPT task and dot‐probe tasks. Essentially, the cVPT uses cues that predict the location of pictorial threatening stimuli, but on trials on which probe stimuli are presented the pictures do not appear. Hence, actual presentation of emotional stimuli did not affect responses. The reliability of the cVPT was higher at most cue–stimulus intervals and was .56 overall. A clear anticipatory attentional bias was found. In conclusion, the cVPT may be of methodological and theoretical interest. Using visually neutral predictive cues may remove sources of noise that negatively impact reliability. Predictive cues are able to bias response selection, suggesting a role of predicted outcomes in automatic processes.