Pierre Rivière and Victoire Rivière: Two accounts of a definitional ceremony ‘staged’ 200 years after the events that shook their family

In the spring of 2010, at the University of Bristol, in the Graduate School of Education, we revisited the case of Pierre Rivière's parricide. More than thirty years after Foucault's (1975) publication devoted to this case, and almost two hundred years after the parricide, we took part in various research events that enabled us to re-connect with Pierre Rivière's memoir. One of these events was a fictional ‘definitional ceremony’. Definitional ceremony is a technique normally used in narrative therapy, and was used by Michael White who developed a Foucauldian analysis of the socio-cultural constitution of mental health. For the purposes of our fictional ceremony two doctoral research students (the authors of this paper) ‘borrowed’ the identities of two of the main protagonists in the Pierre Rivière story. They dressed in period costumes, and embarked on a staging that instigated a renegotiation/resignification of their relationship with each other in the present, and in conversation with a narrative therapist. Our purpose was to re-engage with a troubled family of the nineteenth century as an experiment in seeing how research modalities affect not only our research, but ourselves as researchers.     

Showups versus lineups: An evaluation using ROC analysis

Showups (a one-person identification) were compared to both simultaneous and sequential lineups that varied in lineup fairness and the position of the suspect in the lineup. We reanalyzed data from a study by Gronlund, Carlson, Dailey, and Goodsell (2009), which included simultaneous and sequential lineups, and using the same stimuli and procedures, collected new data using showup identifications. Performance was compared using ROC analysis, which is superior to traditional measures such as correct and false identification rates, and probative value measures. ROC analysis showed that simultaneous lineups consistently produced more accurate identification evidence than showups, but sequential lineups were sometimes no more accurate than showups, and were never more accurate than simultaneous lineups. These results supported prior suppositions regarding the suggestiveness of showups, revealed a misconception about the superiority of sequential lineups, and demonstrated why eyewitness identification procedures need to be evaluated using ROC analyses.     

Does the presentation of multiple facial composites improve suspect identification?

Previous research that has evaluated the accuracy of facial composites has reported low identification rates. Two studies are reported here that consider whether showing more than one composite of the same suspect might improve the rate of identification. Sixteen participant‐witnesses saw one of two staged events, each involving a different unfamiliar target. Each participant‐witness worked with a police operator to construct a composite of the target they had seen. One, four or eight composites depicting the same target were then shown to individuals familiar with the target. Overall, the results showed that presenting more than one composite increased the rate of identification. In addition, the results of Study 2 suggest that if the police must select just one composite from a number produced by witnesses, then a promising method might be to choose the one which bears most similarity to the other composites in the set. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Peer Victimization in School: Exploring the Ethnic Context

ABSTRACT— This article provides an overview of recent research on peer victimization in school that highlights the role of the ethnic context—specifically, classrooms' and schools' ethnic composition. Two important findings emerge from this research. First, greater ethnic diversity in classrooms and schools reduces students' feelings of victimization and vulnerability, because there is more balance of power among different ethnic groups. Second, in nondiverse classrooms where one ethnic group enjoys a numerical majority, victimized students who are members of the ethnic group that is in the majority may be particularly vulnerable to self-blaming attributions. The usefulness of attribution theory as a conceptual framework and ethnicity as a context variable in studies of peer victimization are discussed.     

Context effects in movement recognition

An experiment was performed in which ten subjects made comparative judgements of two objectively equally long movement lengths. Additional movements, known as anchor movements, occured before, between, or after the comparison pair in order to decide whether such anchor movements would operate proactively (i.e., producing an effect on the reception of the subsequent stimulus) or retroactively (i.e., affecting the memory trace of the preceding stimulus). The results are interpreted to mean anchor movements act retroactively.     

Visual and phonological components of working memory in children

Previous studies have shown that young children's immediate memory for a short series of drawings of objects is mediated by a visual component of working memory, whereas older children rely chiefly upon a phonological component. Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that older children rely also, but to a lesser extent, on visual working memory. Experiment 1 confirmed previous evidence that 11-year-olds' memory is disrupted by phonemic similarity of object names, but is unaffected by visual similarity of the objects themselves. However, when articulatory suppression was used to prevent phonological coding, levels of recall were sensitive to visual rather than phonemic similarity. Experiment 2 compared the effects of interpolating an auditory-verbal or a visual postlist task on memory for drawings viewed either with or without suppression. The visual task had a clear disruptive effect only in the suppression condition, where it interfered selectively with recall of the most recent item. Experiment 3 compared the effects of interpolating an auditory-verbal or a mixed-modality (visual-auditory) postlist task when subjects were not required to suppress. There was greater interference from the mixed-modality task, and this effect was confined to the last item presented. These experiments are taken as confirming the presence of a small but reliable contribution from visual memory in 11-year-old children's recall. As in younger children, visual working memory in 11-year-olds is sensitive to visual similarity and is responsible for a final-item visual recency effect. The results also show that older children's use of visual working memory is usually masked by the more pervasive phonological component of recall. Some implications for the structure of working memory and its development are discussed.