Police officers ability to detect deception in high stakes situations and in repeated lie detection tests

Thirty‐seven police officers, not identified in previous research as belonging to groups that are superior in lie detection, attempted to detect truths and lies told by suspects during their videotaped police interviews. In order to measure consistency in their ability, the officers each participated in four different tests, each of which was on a different day. They were asked to indicate their confidence in being able to distinguish between truths and lies prior to the first test and after completing all four tests. We predicted that accuracy rates would be higher than those typically found in research with police officers; that good or poor performances on an individual test would be partly caused by luck, and, consequently, participants' accuracy scores were likely to progress towards the mean if their performance on all four tests was to be combined; and that officers would underestimate their own performance. These hypotheses were supported. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Finding evidence of dispositional coping

Data from college students and their parents were used in this longitudinal investigation, the primary goal of which was to examine the conditions under which coping style and coping behaviors are related. Participants completed a dispositional coping measure and reported on their coping with the most stressful event of the week for six weeks. Reports about the participants’ dispositional coping were also collected from the participants’ parents. Findings were consistent with the expectation that style would be a fairly weak predictor of coping in a given encounter but would predict more strongly aggregated coping responses across encounters. Additionally, parents tended to agree with each other about their child’s coping style, but the correlations between child and parental reports were generally small and nonsignificant.     

Gang involvement: psychological and behavioral characteristics of gang members,peripheral youth,and nongang Youth

Research has noted the existence of a loose and dynamic gang structure. However, the psychological processes that underpin gang membership have only begun to be addressed. This study examined gang members, peripheral youth, and nongang youth across measures of criminal activity, the importance they attach to status, their levels of moral disengagement, their perceptions of out‐group threat, and their attitudes toward authority. Of the 798 high school students who participated in this study, 59 were identified as gang members, 75 as peripheral youth, and 664 as nongang youth. Gang members and peripheral youth were more delinquent than nongang youth overall; however, gang members committed more minor offenses than nongang youth and peripheral youth committed more violent offenses than nongang youth. Gang members were more anti‐authority than nongang youth, and both gang and peripheral youth valued social status more than nongang youth. Gang members were also more likely to blame their victims for their actions and use euphemisms to sanitize their behavior than nongang youth, whereas peripheral youth were more likely than nongang youth to displace responsibility onto their superiors. These findings are discussed as they highlight the importance of examining individual differences in the cognitive processes that relate to gang involvement. Aggr. Behav. 36:423–436, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

The microgeographies of learning bodies and emotions in the ‘classroom-salon’

The role of the body and emotions in the workplace has become a fruitful area for sociological and, increasingly, geographical research over the past decade. This has been given particular emphasis and credence due to the growth of the service sector and its perceived ‘feminisation’, and the proliferation of work that focuses on the ‘improvement’ of bodies, most especially female bodies. This literature, though, has focused, as it suggests, on the processes of working and the geographies of the workplace, with those of training largely overlooked. Yet, given the emphasis on training for work and up-skilling in neoliberal economies, the sites and spaces of training warrant further attention. Here we focus on mothers engaged in training for massage and reflexology in the West London area, and draw together notions of body work and emotional labour to examine how bodies and emotions are learned and experienced through the microgeographies of the ‘classroom-salon’. In particular, the paper explores how the transformative space of the ‘classroom-salon’ is used to teach skills perceived simultaneously as natural and technical and how these link to perceived gender and maternal identities that extend beyond the classroom.     

Observational learning of tool use in children: Investigating cultural spread through diffusion chains and learning mechanisms through ghost displays

In the first of two experiments, we demonstrate the spread of a novel form of tool use across 20 “cultural generations” of child-to-child transmission. An experimentally seeded technique spread with 100% fidelity along twice as many “generations” as has been investigated in recent exploratory “diffusion” experiments of this type. This contrasted with only a single child discovering the technique spontaneously in a comparable group tested individually without any model. This study accordingly documents children’s social learning of tool use on a new, population-level scale that characterizes real-world cultural phenomena. In a second experiment, underlying social learning processes were investigated with a focus on the contrast between imitation (defined as copying actions) and emulation (defined as learning from the results of actions only). In two different “ghost” conditions, children were presented with the task used in the first experiment but now operated without sight of an agent performing the task, thereby presenting only the information used in emulation. Children in ghost conditions were less successful than those who had watched a model in action and showed variable matching to what they had seen. These findings suggest the importance of observational learning of complex tool use through imitation rather than only through emulation. Results of the two experiments are compared with those of similar experiments conducted previously with chimpanzees and are discussed in relation to the wider perspective of human culture and the influence of task complexity on social learning.     

‘We despair’: Examining the role of political despair for collective action and well-being

Anecdotally, people often report feeling despair about the political status quo. We conceptualise these feelings as political despair. But what is political despair, and what are its effects? We adapt intergroup emotion theory to analyse political despair in the context of racial inequality (Studies 1 and 2) and climate change (Study 3). Three cross-sectional studies (total N = 866) tested the measurement of political despair (relative to anger and hope), its pattern of appraisals and outcomes for conventional and radical actions along with well-being (stress, burnout and optimism). Structural equation modelling differentiated political despair from anger and hope and found that despair is associated with evaluations that the situation is both illegitimate and intractable (unchangeable). Moreover, political despair consistently had a negative relationship with well-being and positive relationships with conventional and radical collective action. The results suggest political despair is negatively associated with well-being and impact people's engagement in action for social change.     

The Association of Cognitive Ability with Right‐wing Ideological Attitudes and Prejudice: A Meta‐analytic Review

The cognitive functioning of individuals with stronger endorsement of right‐wing and prejudiced attitudes has elicited much scholarly interest. Whereas many studies investigated cognitive styles, less attention has been directed towards cognitive ability. Studies investigating the latter topic generally reveal lower cognitive ability to be associated with stronger endorsement of right‐wing ideological attitudes and greater prejudice. However, this relationship has remained widely unrecognized in literature. The present meta‐analyses revealed an average effect size of r = ?.20 [95% confidence interval (95% CI) [?0.23, ?0.17]; based on 67 studies, N = 84 017] for the relationship between cognitive ability and right‐wing ideological attitudes and an average effect size of r = ?.19 (95% CI [?0.23, ?0.16]; based on 23 studies, N = 27 011) for the relationship between cognitive ability and prejudice. Effect sizes did not vary significantly across different cognitive abilities and sample characteristics. The effect strongly depended on the measure used for ideological attitudes and prejudice, with the strongest effect sizes for authoritarianism and ethnocentrism. We conclude that cognitive ability is an important factor in the genesis of ideological attitudes and prejudice and thus should become more central in theorizing and model building. Copyright © 2015 European Association of Personality Psychology