Parental Emotional Response to Children’s Traumas

To better understand how parents react to their child’s trauma exposure and evaluate whether different reactions are related to different types of traumas, 120 parents (79.2% mothers, 18.3% fathers, 2.5% other caregivers) were asked about their emotional reactions related to their child’s self-reported worst trauma. Emotional reactions were assessed with the Parental Emotional Reactions Questionnaire (PERQ). Parents reported high levels of distress and guilt. Furthermore, there was a significant relationship between type of trauma and parents’ overall emotional reactions. Parental distress was equally endorsed among the different trauma groups. Parents of children who experienced intrafamilial violence and extrafamilial sexual abuse reported the highest levels of guilt, and child exposure to intrafamilial violence was associated with higher levels of parental shame.     

Examining Sex Work from the Client's Perspective: Assessing Johns Using on-line Data

Academic research on prostitution focuses on the prostitute, rather than the clients, who are called johns. This limits our understanding of the methods and reasons individuals solicit sex. However, johns increasingly use computer mediated communications to discuss sex work. Their comments provide insight into the attitudes and methods of johns. This qualitative study utilizes a sample of posts from active Web forums for johns in 10 U.S. cities. The findings indicate the importance of on-line discussions for johns to identify and solicit sex workers, as well as manage external risks. Implications for law enforcement and deviance research are also discussed.     

Examining Risks and Protective Factors of On-Line Identity Theft

Identity-based crimes are considered to be one of the most significant and growing problems of the last 20 years due to the significant economic harm these offenses pose for victims. The increased use and availability of personal information through on-line outlets has significantly increased the risk of identity-based fraud, although few have considered the factors that affect the likelihood of this type of victimization. This study utilizes a sample of students, faculty, and staff at a southeastern university to investigate the effects that protective factors possess on fostering resiliency against on-line identity theft. The findings suggest that protective software programs increase individual resiliency to victimization. The implications of this study for both resiliency models and cybercrime victimization are considered in detail.     

An Assessment of the Current State of Cybercrime Scholarship

Computers and the Internet have become a vital part of modern life across the world, affecting communications, finance, and governance. At the same time, technology has created unparalleled opportunities for crime and deviance on- and off-line. Criminological research has expanded its focus over the last two decades to address the various forms of technology-enabled crime and the applicability of traditional theories to account for offending. There is, however, a need for careful consideration of the state of the field in order to identify issues requiring further study and analysis. This study examines the current literature on virtually all forms of cybercrime and the theoretical frameworks used to address these issues. In turn, we hope to give direction to refine our understanding of criminological theory and social policies to combat these offenses.     

When high working memory capacity is and is not beneficial for predicting nonlinear processes

Predicting the development of dynamic processes is vital in many areas of life. Previous findings are inconclusive as to whether higher working memory capacity (WMC) is always associated with using more accurate prediction strategies, or whether higher WMC can also be associated with using overly complex strategies that do not improve accuracy. In this study, participants predicted a range of systematically varied nonlinear processes based on exponential functions where prediction accuracy could or could not be enhanced using well-calibrated rules. Results indicate that higher WMC participants seem to rely more on well-calibrated strategies, leading to more accurate predictions for processes with highly nonlinear trajectories in the prediction region. Predictions of lower WMC participants, in contrast, point toward an increased use of simple exemplar-based prediction strategies, which perform just as well as more complex strategies when the prediction region is approximately linear. These results imply that with respect to predicting dynamic processes, working memory capacity limits are not generally a strength or a weakness, but that this depends on the process to be predicted.     

Exploring the Correlates of Individual Willingness to Engage in Ideologically Motivated Cyberattacks

In the last few years, there has been an increase in the use of Web defacements, where individuals post political or ideological messages on websites in place of the original content. There is generally little research on the predictors of Web defacements against either domestic or foreign targets. This study addresses this gap by examining the attitudinal and behavioral correlates of willingness to engage in defacements using a sample of university students in Taiwan and the United States. The findings demonstrate that political attitudes toward marginalized groups and support for cybercrime increase individuals’ willingness to engage in defacements.     

Word recognition reflects dimension-based statistical learning

Speech processing requires sensitivity to long-term regularities of the native language yet demands listeners to flexibly adapt to perturbations that arise from talker idiosyncrasies such as nonnative accent. The present experiments investigate whether listeners exhibit dimension-based statistical learning of correlations between acoustic dimensions defining perceptual space for a given speech segment. While engaged in a word recognition task guided by a perceptually unambiguous voice-onset time (VOT) acoustics to signal beer, pier, deer, or tear, listeners were exposed incidentally to an artificial "accent" deviating from English norms in its correlation of the pitch onset of the following vowel (F0) to VOT. Results across four experiments are indicative of rapid, dimension-based statistical learning; reliance on the F0 dimension in word recognition was rapidly down-weighted in response to the perturbation of the correlation between F0 and VOT dimensions. However, listeners did not simply mirror the short-term input statistics. Instead, response patterns were consistent with a lingering influence of sensitivity to the long-term regularities of English. This suggests that the very acoustic dimensions defining perceptual space are not fixed and, rather, are dynamically and rapidly adjusted to the idiosyncrasies of local experience, such as might arise from nonnative-accent, dialect, or dysarthria. The current findings extend demonstrations of "object-based" statistical learning across speech segments to include incidental, online statistical learning of regularities residing within a speech segment.     

Offending and Victimization in the Digital Age: Comparing Correlates of Cybercrime and Traditional Offending-Only,Victimization-Only and the Victimization-Offending Overlap

Cybercrime research suggests that, analogous to traditional crime, victims are more likely to be offenders. This overlap could be caused by shared risk factors, but it is unclear if these are comparable to traditional risk factors. Utilizing a high risk sample of computer-dependent cyber-offenders and traditional offenders (N = 535) we compare victimization, offending, and victimization-offending between cybercrime and traditional crime. Cybercrime results show a considerable victim-offender overlap and correlates like low self-control and routine activities partly explain differences in victimization, offending, and victimization-offending. Some cybercrime correlates are related to the digital context, but show similar patterns for cybercrime and traditional crime.