Structural behavioural analysis as a basis for discriminating between genuine and simulated rape allegations

This paper explores the potential utility of structural behavioural analysis as a basis for discriminating between genuine and simulated accounts of rape. Structural analysis examines the coherence of the combination of behaviours in the account based against the co‐occurrence of behaviours in genuine accounts. Three analyses compared 142 genuine rape with 30 simulated statements in terms of the base rates of behaviours reported within the statements, and in terms of the behavioural coherence of each statement to an established behavioural structure. Results suggest that genuine statements tend to report a larger total number of behaviours than simulated statements; that pseudo‐intimate behaviours are significantly more often reported in genuine statements while some violent behaviours are more frequently reported in simulated statements; and that simulated statements are less behaviourally coherent than genuine statements. We concede the many limitations of the study but argue that results provide tentative evidence that false claimants, not fully appreciating the phenomenological experience of rape, overemphasise the significance of violent and demeaning behaviour whilst underplaying the significance of pseudo‐intimate behaviour. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

It's about time: revisiting temporal processing deficits in dyslexia

Temporal processing in French children with dyslexia was evaluated in three tasks: a word identification task requiring implicit temporal processing, and two explicit temporal bisection tasks, one in the auditory and one in the visual modality. Normally developing children matched on chronological age and reading level served as a control group. Children with dyslexia exhibited robust deficits in temporal tasks whether they were explicit or implicit and whether they involved the auditory or the visual modality. First, they presented larger perceptual variability when performing temporal tasks, whereas they showed no such difficulties when performing the same task on a non‐temporal dimension (intensity). This dissociation suggests that their difficulties were specific to temporal processing and could not be attributed to lapses of attention, reduced alertness, faulty anchoring, or overall noisy processing. In the framework of cognitive models of time perception, these data point to a dysfunction of the ‘internal clock’ of dyslexic children. These results are broadly compatible with the recent temporal sampling theory of dyslexia.     

Community Disadvantage and Race-Specific Rates of Violent Crime: An Investigation into the “Racial Invariance” Hypothesis in the United Kingdom

Research into how structural disadvantage affects violent crime among racial groups has produced mixed results. In the United States, however, black and white community-level disadvantage distributions only partially overlap, precluding critical tests of the “racial invariance” hypothesis. We examine the relationship between race, violent crime, and disadvantage in the United Kingdom, where disadvantage distributions for race-groups have greater comparability. Using London borough-level data, we observe racial-invariance at comparably low/high disadvantage. However, at extreme disadvantage the effect increases significantly for black communities but not white or South Asian. This conflicts with studies demonstrating either racial invariance or weaker effects among blacks.     

Evolutionary psychology and developmental dynamics: comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003)

Evolutionary psychology provides a cogent metatheory for psychological science. It has furnished compelling theories of major domains of human functioning, including mating, parenting, kinship, morality, cooperation, conflict, aggression, and aesthetics. It has produced hundreds of empirical discoveries missed entirely by prior psychologists. Developmental dynamics, properly conceived, can add to the theoretical foundation of evolutionary psychology. But it has not provided alternative theories capable of explaining the many detailed empirical discoveries made by evolutionary' psychologists. Nor has it generated a comparable bounty of new empirical discoveries. By critical scientific standards--theoretical cogency, predictive accuracy, interdisciplinary consistency, and empirical harvest--modern evolutionary psychology fares well compared with alternatives.     

Confabulation in Alzheimer's disease.

Confabulation is present when memory is disturbed, but does it occur in Alzheimer's disease (AD) where memory abnormalities are often severe? In this study, confabulation was assessed prospectively in 26 AD patients and 15 normal elderly (NE) controls using a neuropsychological battery specifically designed to assess different types of memory errors. The results indicated that the AD group made significantly more verbal intrusions than the NE group. These findings provide evidence for the feasibility of eliciting confabulatory-type behavior during clinical assessment and support previous reports which have documented verbal intrusions as a common accompaniment of the memory impairment manifested by AD patients.