How Prevalent is Contract Cheating and to What Extent are Students Repeat Offenders?

Contract cheating, or plagiarism via paid ghostwriting, is a significant academic ethical issue, especially as reliable methods for its prevention and detection in students’ assignments remain elusive. Contract cheating in academic assessment has been the subject of much recent debate and concern. Although some scandals have attracted substantial media attention, little is known about the likely prevalence of contract cheating by students for their university assignments. Although rates of contract cheating tend to be low, criminological theories suggest that people who employ ghostwriters for their assignments are likely to re-offend, and little is known about re-offence rates in this form of academic misconduct. We combined previously-collected datasets (N = 1378) and conducted additional, and previously-unreported, analyses on self-report measures of contract cheating prevalence. We found that few students (3.5%), on aggregate, ever engaged in contract cheating but this varied substantially among samples (from 0.3% to 7.9%). Of those who ever engaged in contract cheating, 62.5% did so more than once. The data also suggested that engagement in contract cheating is influenced by opportunity. These figures may help policy makers, and researchers who are creating contract cheating detection methods, to estimate base rates of contract cheating and the likelihood of re-offence.     

Focusing on fear: Attentional disengagement from emotional faces

Evidence suggests that anxiety is associated with a shift of visual attention toward threatening stimuli in the environment, such as facial expressions (Mogg & Bradley, 1999). More recent evidence, however, indicates that anxiety may be better characterized by a failure to rapidly disengage the visual attention system away from threat-related facial expressions (Fox, Russo, Bowles, & Dutton, 2001). The present study further investigates this delayed disengagement hypothesis. Results show that high trait-anxious individuals, in contrast to low trait-anxious individuals, take longer to classify peripheral target letters when fearful facial expressions were presented at fixation relative to sad, happy, or neutral expressions. These findings demonstrate a specific tendency to dwell on fear-relevant stimuli, as opposed to negative information in general. These findings are considered from an evolutionary perspective and the possible role of delayed disengagement from threat in the maintenance of anxiety states is also discussed.     

Discrimination between hopes and expectancies for nonvolitional outcomes: psychological phenomenon or artifact?

Despite the large literature concerning the impact of hope and expectancy on various outcomes (e.g., nonvolitional), less is known about the constructs of hope and expectancy themselves. In a recent study, Montgomery et al. (2003) demonstrated that hopes and expectancies are separate but related constructs; however, because both hopes and expectancies were measured within the same context, it is possible that these findings were simply a methodological artifact. Furthermore, it is unknown whether these data would generalize to other populations. Taking into account the importance of this distinction for both the expectancy and hope literatures, the present study sought to: (1) Determine if the distinction between hope and expectancy is a general and reliable phenomenon by using a culturally different sample (i.e., Romanian sample); and (2) Examine the robustness of this distinction by controlling for the context effect. One hundred-twenty five volunteers completed items in regard to 10 nonvolitional outcome scenarios in one of five measurement contexts. The results revealed that hope and expectancy were distinct constructs (p<0.0001), and that this distinction is both general and robust across contexts. Implications for theory and research are discussed.     

The therapeutic alliance in adolescent substance abuse treatment: a one-with-many analysis

Studies of the therapeutic alliance typically use a one-with-many (OWM) design in which each therapist (the one) treats multiple clients (the many). This study used Kenny, Kashy, and Cook's (2006) OWM method to examine the composition of the therapeutic alliance and to analyze the association between alliance and outcome in a sample of 398 adolescents treated for substance abuse by 14 therapists. Both the client and therapist alliance ratings yielded large relationship variances, with limited consensus among clients treated by the same therapist about the quality of the alliance. If a client reported an especially strong alliance with his or her therapist, the therapist was likely to also report an especially strong alliance with that client (dyadic reciprocity). The association between the components of the alliance and treatment outcome was complicated, with different levels of measurement and different components of the alliance (perceiver, partner, or relationship) derived from different informants (therapist or client) relating to different outcomes.     

The role of psychopathic personality disorder in violence risk assessments using the HCR-20

Antisocial and psychopathic traits are essential to evaluate when assessing risk for violence using the HCR-20. The role of the PCL-R on the HCR-20 was investigated using a series of meta-analytic tests. Across 34 samples in which both tools were rated, AUCs for violence were similar (～.69), and exclusion of the psychopathy item (H7) did not reduce the HCR-20's accuracy. Quantitative synthesis of results from multivariate analyses conducted in 7 raw datasets that used both tools demonstrated that the average probability of observing violence for every point increase on the HCR-20 (without H7), while controlling for the PCL-R, was 23%, whereas for the PCL-R it was -1%. The HCR-20 (without H7) added incremental validity to the PCL-R, whereas the converse was not true, and only the HCR-20 (without H7) possessed unique predictive validity. Results suggest the HCR-20's predictive validity was not negatively impacted by excluding the PCL-R. Areas for future study are discussed, including research on various ways to assess and incorporate into risk assessment personality traits related to violence.     

Paranormal Encounters as Eyewitness Phenomena: Psychological Determinants of Atypical Perceptual Interpretations

Many people who report paranormal sightings (e.g., Bigfoot and UFO aliens) are apparently sincere. This places many such sightings in the category of eyewitness errors, rather than of deliberate deception. Recent research has supported this idea; in an earlier paper, we demonstrated that paranormal beliefs are facilitated by tendencies toward attention deficit hyperactive disorder, dissociation, and depression. These characteristics predicted specific patterns of beliefs in several paranormal phenomena. The present research addressed the question of whether such psychological tendencies would tend to create bias in perception and interpretation as well as in belief- in whether a person’s identification of a given stimulus as paranormal in nature would be influenced by the same factors previously demonstrated to influence paranormal beliefs. This hypothesis was supported. Specifically, those with dissociative tendencies were significantly more likely to identify given stimulus items as paranormal in nature than were those with lower dissociation scores. Dissociation was further shown to be related to paranormal beliefs, consistent with earlier findings. Results are discussed in terms of the reconfigurative dynamics known to operate in areas of human cognition such as eyewitness identification, and in terms of the generality of those effects to the realm of paranormal sightings.