Do Prosecutors Use Interview Instructions or Build Rapport with Child Witnesses?

This study examined the quality of interview instructions and rapport-building provided by prosecutors to 168 children aged 5–12 years testifying in child sexual abuse cases, preceding explicit questions about abuse allegations. Prosecutors failed to effectively administer key interview instructions, build rapport, or rely on open-ended narrative producing prompts during this early stage of questioning. Moreover, prosecutors often directed children's attention to the defendant early in the testimony. The productivity of different types of wh- questions varied, with what/how questions focusing on actions being particularly productive. The lack of instructions, poor quality rapport-building, and closed-ended questioning suggest that children may not be adequately prepared during trial to provide lengthy and reliable reports to their full ability. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perceived physical and social causality in animated motions: spontaneous reports and ratings

Michotte argued that we perceive cause-and-effect, without contributions from reasoning or learning, even in displays of two-dimensional moving shapes. Two studies extend this line of work from perception of mechanical to social causality. We compared verbal reports with structured ratings of causality to gain a better understanding of the extent to which perceptual causality occurs spontaneously or depends on instruction or context. A total of 120 adult observers (72 in the main experiment, 48 in an initial experiment) saw 12 (or 8) different computer animations of shape A moving up to B, which in turn moved away. Animations factorially varied the temporal and spatial relations of the shapes, and whether they moved rigidly or in a non-rigid, animal-like manner. Impressions of social as well as physical causality appeared in both free reports and ratings. Perception of physical causality was stronger than perception of social causality, particularly in free reports. No differences of this nature appear in infants and children, so the asymmetry may reflect learnt knowledge. Physical causality was relatively unspecific initially, but discrimination of causal and delayed control events improved with exposure to multiple events. Experience seems to affect the causal illusion even over a short timeframe; the idea of 'one-trial causality' may be somewhat misleading. Regardless of such effects on the absolute level of responses, the different measures showed similar patterns of variation with the spatio-temporal configuration and type of motion. The good fit of ratings and reports validates much recent work in this area.     

The impact of manipulating personal standards on eating attitudes and behaviour

The relationship between perfectionism and eating disorders is well established and is of theoretical interest. This study used an experimental design to test the hypothesis that manipulating personal standards, a central feature of perfectionism, would influence eating attitudes and behaviour. Forty-one healthy women were randomly assigned either to a high personal standards condition (n = 18) or to a low personal standards condition for 24 h (n = 23). Measures of personal standards, perfectionism, and eating attitudes and behaviour were taken before and after the experimental manipulation. The manipulation was successful. After the manipulation, participants in the high personal standards condition ate fewer high calorie foods, made more attempts to restrict the overall amount of food eaten, and had significantly more regret after eating than those in the low personal standards condition. Other variables remained unchanged. It is concluded that experimental analyses can be of value in elucidating causal connections between perfectionism and eating attitudes and behaviour.     

Preschool children master the logic of number word meanings

Although children take over a year to learn the meanings of the first three number words, they eventually master the logic of counting and the meanings of all the words in their count list. Here, we ask whether children's knowledge applies to number words beyond those they have mastered: Does a child who can only count to 20 infer that number words above 'twenty' refer to exact cardinal values? Three experiments provide evidence for this understanding in preschool children. Before beginning formal education or gaining counting skill, children possess a productive symbolic system for representing number.     

Non-symbolic arithmetic in adults and young children

Five experiments investigated whether adults and preschool children can perform simple arithmetic calculations on non-symbolic numerosities. Previous research has demonstrated that human adults, human infants, and non-human animals can process numerical quantities through approximate representations of their magnitudes. Here we consider whether these non-symbolic numerical representations might serve as a building block of uniquely human, learned mathematics. Both adults and children with no training in arithmetic successfully performed approximate arithmetic on large sets of elements. Success at these tasks did not depend on non-numerical continuous quantities, modality-specific quantity information, the adoption of alternative non-arithmetic strategies, or learned symbolic arithmetic knowledge. Abstract numerical quantity representations therefore are computationally functional and may provide a foundation for formal mathematics.     

Attributional style in psychosis--the role of affect and belief type

People holding persecutory beliefs have been hypothesised to show a self-serving attributional style, which functions to protect self-esteem Bentall, Corcoran, Howard, Blackwood, and Kinderman (2001). Experimental support for this has been mixed. Freeman et al. (1998) suggested depressed and grandiose subgroups of those with persecutory beliefs might explain events differently. In this study, 71 participants completed measures of delusional beliefs, depression and attributional style. We hypothesised that those with persecutory beliefs would form grandiose and depressed subgroups, and that a self-serving attributional style would characterise only the grandiose subgroup. Hypotheses were partially confirmed. Clear subgroups were evident and only those with both persecutory and grandiose beliefs showed an externalising attributional style for negative events. Depression, irrespective of co-occurring persecutory beliefs, was related to a reduced self-serving bias and an externalising attributional style for positive events. On their own, persecutory beliefs were not related to any particular attributional style. Depressed and grandiose subgroups of those with persecutory beliefs might account for some of the inconsistencies in the attribution literature. Even within a single symptom group, care should be taken in both research and therapy to consider individual symptom patterns.     

Cognitive engagement and story comprehension in typically developing children and children with ADHD from preschool through elementary school

The present study examined children's cognitive engagement with television as a function of the continuity of central or incidental content and whether this varied with age and clinical status. In Experiment 1, 9- to 11-year-old children's response times on a secondary task were slower the later a probe occurred in a sequence of central events, and response times predicted recall. Experiment 2 extended these results to 6- to 8-year-old children. Experiment 3 revealed that children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) failed to show the pattern consistently observed for comparison children. The results support the hypothesis that typically developing children build a representation during viewing that reflects the causal structure of the televised story but that this skill is deficient in 4- to 9-year-old children with ADHD.     

Mentorship behaviors and mentorship quality associated with formal mentoring programs: closing the gap between research and practice

Formal mentoring programs continue to gain popularity within organizations despite limited empirical research regarding how these programs should be designed to achieve maximum effectiveness. The present study examined perceived design features of formal mentoring programs and outcomes from both mentor and protégé perspectives. The outcomes examined were career and psychosocial mentoring, role modeling, and mentorship quality. In general, the results indicated that perceived input into the mentoring process and training perceived as high in quality were consistently related to the outcome variables. Implications for the design of formal mentoring programs and future theory development are discussed.     

Tactile spatial acuity differs between fingers: a study comparing two testing paradigms

Tactile spatial acuity (TSA) is a reliable and reproducible measure of somatosensory system function that has been used to study abroad range of subject populations. Although TSA is most often assessed at the fingertip, published studies employing identical stimuli disagree on whether TSA differs between the fingers of neurologically normal subjects. Using a validated grating orientation discrimination task, we determined TSA bilaterally at the index and ring fingers of 16 healthy young adults. Motivated by earlier work, we utilized two stimulus presentation paradigms, the method of constant stimuli (MCS) and a staircase (SC) method. We found that TSA was significantly higher (the discrimination threshold was lower) at the index than at the ring finger, which was consistent with a prior study. Although mean thresholds at both fingers were higher when measured with the SC than with the MCS paradigm, this difference did not reach statistical significance (p = .14). These findings should facilitate both design and interpretation of future studies investigating TSA.     

The effects of root frequency, word frequency, and length on the processing of prefixed English words during reading

Two experiments were performed to investigate the roles of root morpheme frequency and word frequency in the encoding of prefixed words in sentence context. Two alternative words, which were equated on other indices but differed with respect to either root morpheme frequency or word frequency, were embedded in the same sentence frame. In Experiment 1, there was a significant root morpheme frequency effect on gaze duration but only a marginal word frequency effect. Post hoc analyses indicated that word length influenced both effects, with word frequency effects predominating for shorter words and root morpheme effects predominating for longer words. In Experiment 2, word length was also manipulated. There was a significant root frequency effect for longer prefixed words and a significant word frequency effect for shorter prefixed words. The results were best explained by a dual-route model (with competing whole-word access and compositional routes), in which increasing word length inhibited the whole-word process, relative to the compositional route.