Elaborating the police perspective: The role of perceptions and experience in the explanation of crowd conflict

Classical theories of crowd behaviour view crowd conflict as deriving from the pathology of the crowd itself. Recent developments in crowd psychology as the elaborated social identity model (ESIM) conceptualize crowd behaviour as a dynamic intergroup process between demonstrators and police. The present study assessed exposure to crowd conflict, adherence to classical views of crowd behaviour, public order policing methods and attributions of responsibility for crowd conflict among 352 Italian police officers. Results showed that exposure to crowd conflict was related to adherence to classical views of crowd, which, in turn, was related to ‘bad practices’ of public order policing and to system‐justificatory attributions. Overall, these results offer support and extend the police perspective within the ESIM model. Practical implications for public order policing strategies and training are also discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sex differences in verbal fluency: a short note

Adult male and female subjects performed two fluency tasks from the 'Kit of Reference Tests for Cognitive Factors'. Although both word fluency and ideational fluency are said to show female superiority, a significant difference in favour of females could be found only in the task which primarily requires lexical access and not in the task requiring mental access to colour and form of objects.     

The effect of type of practice on motor learning in children

The present investigation was concerned with the variability-of-practice hypothesis of Schmidt's schema theory of motor learning; i. e. it was sought to determine if there is an optimal way to structure the variable practice session with regard to schema formation. Furthermore, children's motor recognition (movement evaluation) was examined, in addition to recall (movement production), since apparently no such studies had been done within the context of schema theory before. Eighty-eight girls and boys with a mean age of 11.3 years were tested on a throwing task. Three groups of subjects practised under variable conditions (different target distances and weights) that differed with regard to contextual interference and sequential organization of task variations; another group received constant throwing practice. Following practice trials with knowledge of results, the four treatment groups and a control group without prior practice were required to produce and evaluate a novel response (novel target distance and weight) without vision and knowledge of results. The results supported the variability-of-practice hypothesis, in that variable practice in general facilitated recall and recognition on the novel task. Furthermore, variable practice with the highest level of contextual interference (random order of tasks) produced most effective transfer performance, suggesting that the structure of the variable-practice session in fact plays a role with regard to the effectiveness of motor schema development. Contrary to the ‘organization hypothesis’ (Gentile and Nacson, 1976) a hierarchical organization of movement variations was not more beneficial to schema formation than random practice.     

Some aspects of phonological impairment in aphasia

The relationships between expressive and receptive phonemic disorders and between disturbances of phoneme processing and general disorders of auditory comprehension were studied in 69 aphasic patients, by means of a phoneme discrimination test and of a standard aphasia battery. A significant but incomplete correlation between disorders of phonemic output and of phoneme analysis was found. The view is put forth that in some patients only phoneme encoding or decoding is disturbed, whereas in others a central level of phoneme processing is impaired. A significant but partial correlation was also found between disorders of phonological analysis and general disorders of auditory comprehension. This supports the view that, besides sequential phonological analysis, other processes operate in auditory comprehension.     

Memory for object location and route direction in virtual large-scale space

In everyday life people have to deal with tasks such as finding a novel path to a certain goal location, finding one's way back, finding a short cut, or making a detour. In all of these tasks people acquire route knowledge. For finding the same way back they have to remember locations of objects like buildings and additionally direction changes. In three experiments using recognition tasks as well as conscious and unconscious spatial priming paradigms memory processes underlying wayfinding behaviour were investigated. Participants learned a route through a virtual environment with objects either placed at intersections (i.e., decision points) where another route could be chosen or placed along the route (non-decision points). Analyses indicate first that objects placed at decision points are recognized faster than other objects. Second, they indicate that the direction in which a route is travelled is represented only at locations that are relevant for wayfinding (e.g., decision points). The results point out the efficient way in which memory for object location and memory for route direction interact.     

Pessimism and behavioural signs of depression in East versus West Berlin

Quantified behavioural signs of depression in relation to pessimism across cultures. First, by observing workmen in 1985 East and West Berlin bars, we found more behaviour consistent with depression in East Berliners than in West Berliners. We then measured pessimism in both cultures by assessing explanatory style in newspaper reports of the 1984 Winter Olympic Games. Despite having more Olympic victories to report, East Berlin newspaper accounts were more pessimistic than West Berlin reports. We suggest that, with proper controls, convergent measurements of explanatory style and behavioural signs consistent with depression allow to quantify pessimism and depression across culture and time.