Forensic psychology and Islamic jurisprudence

Islamic jurisprudence is the most widely used system of religious law in the world today. However, how forensic psychology may operate within this system has been largely unexplored. The current review sets out to explore the relationship between Islamic jurisprudence and forensic psychology by examining the Islamic legal concepts of evidence, competence, insanity, psychological disorder and intellectual disability and their implications for forensic practice. Also discussed are the potential barriers to forensic psychological practice in countries using a system of Islamic law.     

Neural and behavioral measures of error-related cognitive control predict daily coping with stress

This study tested the hypothesis that individual differences in cognitive control can predict individual differences in emotion regulation. Participants completed color-word and emotional Stroop tasks while an electroencephalogram was recorded, and then they reported daily stressful events, affect, and coping for 14 days. Greater posterror slowing in the emotional Stroop task predicted greater negative affect in response to stressors and less use of task-focused coping as daily stressors increased. Participants whose neural activity best distinguished errors from correct responses tended to show less stress reactivity in daily self-reports. Finally, depression levels predicted daily affect and coping independent of cognitive control variables. The results offer qualified support for an integrated conception of cognitive and emotional self-regulation.     

Affect influences false memories at encoding: evidence from recognition data

Memory is susceptible to illusions in the form of false memories. Prior research found, however, that sad moods reduce false memories. The current experiment had two goals: (1) to determine whether affect influences retrieval processes, and (2) to determine whether affect influences the strength and the persistence of false memories. Happy or sad moods were induced either before or after learning word lists designed to produce false memories. Control groups did not experience a mood induction. We found that sad moods reduced false memories only when induced before learning. Signal detection analyses confirmed that sad moods induced prior to learning reduced activation of nonpresented critical lures suggesting that they came to mind less often. Affective states, however, did not influence retrieval effects. We conclude that negative affective states promote item-specific processing, which reduces false memories in a similar way as using an explicitly guided cognitive control strategy.     

Anisomycin infused into the hippocampus fails to block "reconsolidation" but impairs extinction: the role of re-exposure duration

Recent studies have reported new evidence consistent with the hypothesis that reactivating a memory by re-exposure to a training context destabilizes the memory and induces "reconsolidation." In the present experiments, rats' memory for inhibitory avoidance (IA) training was tested 6 h (Test 1), 2 d (Test 2), and 6 d (Test 3) after training. On Test 1 the rats were either removed from the shock compartment immediately after entry or retained in the shock context for 200 sec, and intrahippocampal infusions of the protein synthesis inhibitor anisomycin (75 microg/side) were administered immediately after the test. Anisomycin infusions administered after Test 1 impaired IA performance on Test 2 in animals given the brief re-exposure, but impaired extinction in animals exposed to the context for 200 sec. Rats with anisomycin-induced retention impairment on Test 2 demonstrated spontaneous recovery of retention performance on Test 3, whereas rats showing extinction on Test 2 showed further extinction on Test 3. The findings indicate that post-retrieval administration of anisomycin impairs subsequent retention performance only in the absence of extinction and that this impairment is temporary.     

Infants chunk object arrays into sets of individuals

Research suggests that, using representations from object-based attention, infants can represent only 3 individuals at a time. For example, infants successfully represent 1, 2, or 3 hidden objects, but fail with 4 (Developmental Science 6 (2003) 568), and a similar limit is seen in adults' tracking of multiple objects (see Cognitive Psychology 38 (1999) 259). In the present experiments we used a manual search procedure to ask whether infants can overcome this limit of 3 by chunking individuals into sets. Experiments 1 and 2 replicate infants' failure to represent a total of 4 objects. We then show that infants can exceed this limit when items are spatiotemporally grouped into two sets of 2 prior to hiding, leading infants to successfully represent a total of 4 objects. Experiment 3 demonstrates that infants tracked the 4 objects as two sets of 2, searching for each set in its correct hiding location. That infants represented the number of individuals in each set is demonstrated by their reaching for the correct number of objects in each location. These results suggest that by binding individuals into sets, infants can increase their representational capacity. This is the first evidence for chunking abilities in infants.     

Counterfactual thinking and the first instinct fallacy

Most people believe that they should avoid changing their answer when taking multiple-choice tests. Virtually all research on this topic, however, has suggested that this strategy is ill-founded: Most answer changes are from incorrect to correct, and people who change their answers usually improve their test scores. Why do people believe in this strategy if the data so strongly refute it? The authors argue that the belief is in part a product of counterfactual thinking. Changing an answer when one should have stuck with one's original answer leads to more "if only . . ." self-recriminations than does sticking with one's first instinct when one should have switched. As a consequence, instances of the former are more memorable than instances of the latter. This differential availability provides individuals with compelling (albeit illusory) personal evidence for the wisdom of always following their 1st instinct, with suboptimal test scores the result.