Rational Thinking Promotes Suspect‐friendly Legal Decision Making

Judges, juries, and other legal decision makers are frequently obligated to find facts about an alleged crime. Does this fact finding benefit from purely rational decision making or from a more intuitive approach? In three studies, rationality was found to be related to more suspect‐lenient decision making. The data suggest that fact finding in criminal proceedings is served best with strictly rational analyses of the evidence, rather than with intuition, gut feeling, and other obscure decision processes.Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Similarity to the self influences cortical recruitment during impression formation

Prior work has shown that whether or not someone is similar to the self influences person memory—a type of self-reference effect for others. In this study, we were interested in understanding the neural regions supporting the generation of impressions and subsequent memory for targets who vary in similarity to the self. Participants underwent fMRI scanning while forming positive or negative impressions of face–behavior pairs. We tested participants’ memory for their generated impressions and then back-sorted the impression trials (encoding) into different levels of self-similarity (high, medium, low) using a self-similarity posttest that came after recognition. Extending prior behavioral work, our data confirmed our hypothesis that memory would be highest for self-similar others and lowest for self-dissimilar others. Dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) activity increased with self-similarity (high > medium > low) to targets, regardless of later memory for them. An analysis of regions supporting impression memory revealed a double dissociation within medial temporal lobe regions: for similar others, amygdala recruitment supported memory, whereas for dissimilar others, hippocampal activation supported memory. These results suggest that self-similarity influences evaluation and memory for targets but also affects the underlying neural resources engaged when thinking about others who vary in self-similarity.     

Criteria Based Content Analysis: The Less Scientific Road to Truth

Criteria Based Content Analysis (CBCA) is a forensic tool that aims atdistinguishing true from false statements made by crime victims. As such,CBCA and similar techniques are regularly employed by psychologicalexpert-witnesses in court. However, it could be argued that the diagnosticaccuracy of CBCA is moderate, and too low for application in the forensiccontext. The current article discusses problems that arise if conclusionsabout credibility of testimonies based on CBCA are presented in court. Afundamental, yet so far hardly addressed flaw is that CBCA suffers from aninherent truth bias. That is, the underlying notion that credibility isexamined by means of searching for signs supporting truthfulness isscientifically less valid than the approach in which credibility isestablished by focusing on alternative explanations and signs of deceit.     

Cognitive adaptation and its consequences: a test of cognitive continuum theory

Cognitive Continuum Theory (CCT) is an adaptive theory of human judgement and posits a continuum of cognitive modes anchored by intuition and analysis. The theory specifies surface and depth task characteristics that are likely to induce cognitive modes at different points along the cognitive continuum. The current study manipulated both the surface (information representation) and depth (task structure) characteristics of a multiple‐cue integration threat assessment task. The surface manipulation influenced cognitive mode in the predicted direction with an iconic information display inducing a more intuitive mode than a numeric information display. The depth manipulation influenced cognitive mode in a pattern not predicted by CCT. Results indicate this difference was due to a combination of task complexity and participant satisfacing. As predicted, analysis produced a more leptokurtic error distribution than intuition. Task achievement was a function of the extent to which participants demonstrated an analytic cognitive mode index, and not a function of correspondence, as predicted. This difference was likely due to the quantitative nature of the task manipulations. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Choices and opportunities: another effect of framing on decisions

Many decisions can be framed either as ‘choices’ between alternative courses of action (e.g. Should I move to New York or stay in Chicago?) or as ‘opportunities’ to pursue a particular course of action (i.e. Should I move to New York?). Although there is no logical difference between these two different decision frames, there may be important psychological differences between them. In four studies, we explore the differences between ‘choices’ and ‘opportunities’. The results of Studies 1 and 2 show that college students view many of the decisions they typically face as opportunities, rather than choices. Further, the results of Study 2 suggest that the frame students adopt is systematically related to the preferences they express. The latter finding led to Studies 3 and 4, where we show that preferences can be influenced by encouraging people to adopt one decision frame rather than another. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Attitudes and social representations: a theoretical and experimental approach

We propose here to establish the theoretical link between the concepts of ‘attitude’ and ‘social representation’. We shall base our proposal on recent conceptions of the notion of attitude, and on a structural approach to representations which account for their evaluative nature. This theoretical proposal will be followed by two experiments. The first showed that attitudes towards objects are based on the evaluative components of the representation of those objects. The second showed that a change in attitude about an object may be accompanied by changes in the evaluative dimension of its representation. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Patient-Informed Treatment Development of Behavioral Smoking Cessation for People With Schizophrenia

The objective of this study was to use qualitative methodology to tailor and refine an existing smoking cessation intervention for the population of people who use cigarettes and are diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective, or psychotic disorder. Successive cohort design methodology was used to iteratively modify the treatment in response to qualitative participant, therapist, and consultant feedback on the intervention. Qualitative methodology for participant feedback included analysis of semistructured interviews with participants, visualization of app utilization data, and stakeholder feedback from study therapists and consultants. Using the successive cohort design, a tailored multicomponent mobile health smoking cessation intervention was developed. The intervention included mobile contingency management (i.e., financial compensation for confirmed abstinence from smoking), pharmacotherapy for smoking cessation, cognitive-behavioral counseling sessions, and the Stay Quit app for relapse prevention. Two cohorts (N = 13) were completed in the study; after each cohort, the treatment protocol was revised. The intervention is described, as well as the qualitative findings from each cohort and subsequent changes made to the intervention based upon patient and provider feedback. Metrics of patient engagement included treatment adherence (40% in Cohort 1 and 63% in Cohort 2). Both participants and therapists reported that the intervention was helpful. Over one third of participants self-reported abstinence at posttreatment. Since qualitative methodology is often underutilized in mental health treatment development, this study demonstrates the utility of the successive cohort design for treatment development of behavior change interventions for at-risk, vulnerable populations.     

Mother‐Stepfather Coparenting in Stepfamilies as Predictor of Child Adjustment

Coparenting between biological parents is a strong predictor of child adjustment. To date, however, little is known about the coparenting dynamics between parent and stepparent in stepfamilies. This study aimed at exploring the links between coparenting in the mother–stepfather dyad and child behavior in stepfamilies compared with the links between mother–father coparenting and child behavior in first‐marriage families. Two modes of coparenting were assessed: overt coparenting, that is, coparental behaviors in the presence of the child, and covert coparenting, that is, the way each parent speaks of the other parent to the child. The sample (N = 80) comprised 48 stepfamilies and 32 first‐marriage families with a child between 7 and 13 years old. Overt coparenting was assessed through direct observation in the standardized situation of the PicNic Game. Covert coparenting and child behavior were assessed through mother‐reported questionnaires. Results showed (a) more covert coparenting behaviors in first‐marriage families, (b) no differences in overt coparenting, (c) more child difficulties reported in stepfamilies, (d) less optimal overt coparenting being linked with more difficulties in children in both family structures, and (e) an interaction effect between family structure and coparenting, showing that overt coparenting is linked with child behavior mainly in stepfamilies.