A preliminary inquiry into the effect of potentially biasing information on judges and jurors in civil litigation

The American system of civil procedure presumes that judges and jurors will respond quite differently to potentially biasing material introduced into adjudicatory proceedings. Judges are assumed to possess a special capacity to control their subjective reactions to such material while jurors are perceived as incapable of such control. This article first reviews these presumptions and the differential treatment accorded judges and jurors by the system. An experiment in which judges and jurors were exposed to potentially biasing material in a civil trial is then described. The results suggest that judges and jurors may be similarly influenced by such exposure, regardless whether the biasing material is ruled admissible or inadmissible. The implications of these preliminary data—that judges may not possess the presumed special capacity to remain immune to bias—are briefly discussed.     

Of witches,madmen, and products liability: An historical survey of the use of expert testimony

The United States Supreme Court's recent decision in Daubert v. Mewell Dour Pharmaceutical Inc. has focused attention on judicial treatment of expert testimony. A survey of the development of the forensic use of such testimony helps to explain the salient characteristics of modem American practice. The survey, in the context of medical experts, discloses a several centuries long trend toward an adversarial approach that places selection, preparation, and presentation of expert witness testimony ever more completely in the hands of the litigants. This trend has been challenged since at least the 1800s by those desiring an inquisitorial alternative featuring court's witnesses or neutral panels of experts. These proposals have generally been rejected. Daubert represents a modest step in the direction of greater judicial control of the presentation of expert evidence but raises questions about the evenhandedness of heightened judicial scrutiny of proffered expert testimony.     

Using the Internet to assist family therapy

Possible uses of the internet to assist family therapy, especially in the treatment of families where members are geographically separated, are explored. The potential value of using e-mail and other Internet functions to facilitate family therapy is explained. The possible negative aspects of this new and experimental approach are evaluated. A case example is presented of a family that benefited from exposure to Internet resources. Ethical considerations in working with the new information and communication media are discussed. Analysis of a report on the use of the telephone to assist family therapy reveals many of the pros and cons that similar use of the Internet is likely to encounter. An evaluation of the use of the written word in recently developed family therapies lends support to the use of the Internet as a means of facilitating therapeutic family communications between remote members.     

Religion and the Survival of 1010 Hospitalized Veterans

Objective: To examine the effects of religious affiliation and religious coping on survival of acutely-hospitalized medically-ill male veterans following discharge. Sample and Methods: Between 1987 and 1989, comprehensive psychosocial and physical-health evaluations were performed on a consecutive sample of 1010 patients ages 20–39 and 65–102 years admitted to the general medicine and neurology services of the Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. Religious affiliation and religious coping (the degree to which a patient relied on his religious faith for comfort and strength) were among the variables assessed. Subjects or surviving family members were contacted by telephone in 1996–97 to determine vital status; dates of death were confirmed by the Veterans Administration's Beneficiary Identification and Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS), death certificate, or the National Death Index. Cox proportional-hazards regression was used to model the effects of religious variables on time to death, controlling for demographic, social, psychiatric, and physical-health covariates. Results: Follow-up was obtained on all 1010 patients. During the observation period, 673 patients died. While a higher proportion of conservative Protestants than members of other religious groups died during this time (70.5% vs. 64.3%, p = .04), the association disappeared once covariates were controlled. Religious coping was unrelated to survival in both bivariate and multivariate analyses (hazard ratio 1.00, 95% CI 0.99–1.01). Conclusions: Neither religious affiliation nor dependence on religion as a coping behavior predicted survival in this sample of medically-ill male veterans. Several reasons for the absence of an effect are explored, notably the fact that the mortality force exerted by age, medical diagnosis, and severity of physical-health problems overwhelmed the weaker effects of psychosocial variables.     

Perception of clusters in statistical maps

Two experiments observed performance on a cluster identification task across a variety of common statistical maps. Stimulus maps displayed mortality rates for several diseases and subjects had to identify regions of the map that were perceived to form a cluster of particularly high (or low) mortality. Subjects marked the perceived centroid of each cluster, and analyses focused on the dispersion of centroid location across subjects. Under these circumstances, monochrome classed choropleth maps were found to minimize dispersion, compared to a two opposing colours scheme, a dot density map, a pie map, and a categorical (hue-based) colour scheme. Maps using a familiar geographical unit (i. e. a U. S. state) supported better recall of the information than maps using less familiar and smaller geographical units. The results were found to be interpretable within current cognitive theory.     

Children's temperament in the US and China: similarities and differences

We report the results of research investigating temperamental characteristics of children in the People's Republic of China and the US using a parent-report instrument, the Children's Behavior Questionnaire (CBQ), defining temperament as individual differences in emotional, motoric, and attentional reactivity and self-regulation. Subjects were 624 6- to 7-year-old children, from Shanghai and the north-western region of the US. The 15 CBQ scales were factored for both samples, employing a principal axis factor analysis with an oblique rotation. Our findings indicated considerable similarity of factor structure in the two cultures, obtaining three factors labelled Surgency, Negative Affect, and Attentional Self-Regulation or Effortful Control. Differences across cultures were also found, with Surgency and Effortful Control scores being relatively higher than Negative Affect in the US sample and Negative Affect being relatively higher than Surgency and Effortful Control in the Chinese sample. Gender differences were also found to vary across cultures. Our findings are congruent with a view of underlying cultural similarities in temperamental variability across these cultures, influenced over time by the children's culturally varied experience.     

Context effects in repetition priming are sense effects

This articlereports three experiments that investigate the role ofcontext in repetition priming using a lexical decision task. The experiments show that repetition priming is either eliminated or significantly reduced if a change in context also alters the perceived sense of a nonhomographic target word. If perceived sense is not altered, a change in context is inconsequential. This points to the important role played by perceived sense in repetition priming. An explanation within a sense-specific activation framework is proposed in preference to a modified processing view.     

Displaying proportions and percentages

Pie and bar charts are commonly used to display percentage or proportional data, but professional data analysts have frowned on the use of the pie chart on the grounds that judgements of area are less accurate than judgements of lenth. Thus the bar chart has been favoured. When the amount of data to be communicated is small, some authorities have advocated the use of properly constructed tables, as another option. The series of experiments reported here suggests that there is little to choose between the pie and the bar chart, with the former enjoying a slight advantage if the required judgement is a complicated one, but that both forms of chart are superior to the table. Thus our results do not support the commonly expressed opinion that pie charts are inferior. An analysis of the nature of the task and a review of the psychophysical literature suggest that the traditional prejudice against the pie chart is misguided.     

Redintegration and Response Suppression in Serial Recall: A Dynamic Network Model

This article presents a dynamic network model of redintegration and response suppression. Redintegration is the process that disambiguates partially retrieved memorial information into an overt response, and response suppression renders retrieved items temporarily unavailable for further report. Most models of serial recall assume the presence of both processes, but few explain how they are performed. Exploration of the network revealed that it can predict recency in serial recall of lists of varying lengths, the pattern of the associated transposition, omission, intrusion, and repetition errors, and the temporal dynamics of retrieval. The network thus augments any existing model of serial recall that assumes a distributed vector representation but does not specify the processes underlying redintegration and response suppression.