Competent and incompetent criminal defendants: a quantitative review of comparative research

Thirty studies comparing competent and incompetent criminal defendants (N = 8,170) were quantitatively reviewed to identify variables associated with judgments about defendants' competency to stand trial. Effect sizes reflecting the magnitude of the relationship between competency status and defendant characteristics were derived and averaged across studies. The characteristics most strongly related to incompetency were (a) poor performance on psychological tests or interviews specifically designed to assess defendants' legally relevant functional abilities, (b) a psychotic diagnosis, and (c) psychiatric symptoms reflective of severe psychopathology. To a lesser degree, traditional psychological tests, previous psychiatric hospitalization, previous legal involvement, marital resources, and demographic characteristics were also related to competency status. Although these results are generally consistent with the legal standard for competency to stand trial, some of the correlates of competency may reflect potential biases in the decision-making process. Limitations of existing research and directions for future inquiry are discussed.     

Spacing judgments as an index of integration from context-induced relational processing: Implications for the free recall of ambiguous prose passages

The effect of information integration on the recall of ambiguous prose passages was investigated. In Experiment 1, subjects read ambiguous passages that were difficult to comprehend without titles. In judging the relative positions in the passages of pairs of test sentences, subjects performed better when they read passages headed by a suitable title than when they read untitled passages or received a title at the time of testing. In Experiment 2, subjects provided with a title at encoding also better discriminated complete old sentences from foils composed of fragments of two different old sentences than did subjects provided with no titles or with titles at the time of testing. These two tests index the degree of inter- and intrasentence information integration, respectively. Two findings indicated that integration affected free recall of an ambiguous passage. First, when the degree of integration of the passage's propositions was controlled, free recall of the passage was no different for subjects who did or did not know the passage's title at encoding. Second, inducing subjects to comprehend the passage's sentences individually, without relating them to one another, reduced free recall of the passage.     

The development of children's action memory: When do actions speak louder than words?

Summary Although acting consistently has been found to improve memory, the reasons for this are unclear. In this investigation, we tested whether acting improves recall by integrating separate elements within an action into an organized whole and whether this process may be strategic. First graders, fourth graders, and college-aged adults listened to, acted out, or watched the performance of action-object phrases and then verbally reported or enacted the phrases. Phrases composed of transitive verbs were expected to be integrated more by action than phrases composed of intransitive verbs, and consequently recalled better, especially by the younger children. Recall increased between first and fourth grades, suggesting that some aspects of action memory may be strategic; however, there was no evidence that acting improves recall by means of integration. The pattern of results suggested that the nature of an action's outcome may contribute to the enactment effect.     

What does naming a picture do? Effects of prior picture naming on recognition of identical and same-name alternatives

Three experiments investigated the effects of naming pictures of objects during study on the subsequent recognition of physically identical, name-match, and new objects. Prior naming improved correct classification of all three item types at recognition. For line drawings and for photographs of functionally distinct objects, prior naming reduced the tendency to confuse identical and same-name alternatives. In Experiment 2, prior naming eliminated the right visual field/left hemisphere advantage for speeded recognition of name-match pictures, suggesting that prior naming reduces the likelihood that pictures are named at recognition. The implications of these results for dual-encoding (Paivio, 1971) and sensory-semantic (Nelson, Reed, & McEvoy, 1977) models of picture and word processing are discussed. The results suggest that the semantic representations of objects that are perceptually distinct but share a common name are not identical, and that the effect of naming such objects is to insure that a distinct semantic representation becomes a part of the resulting memory code.     

Parent and child causal attributions during clinical interviews

Attributions made by children and their parents for the cause of the child's clinical problem were monitored during assessment interviews. Results support previously observed differences obtained through questionnaires, with parents making more attributions than their children to characteristics of the child. This pattern was affected by variations in interview format. Parents and children differed in the locus of their attributions when interviewed individually, but these differences were not present when families were interviewed with both parents and children present. Implications for the methodology of attribution research with child-clinical populations are highlighted.     

Self-reflection,mood, and helpful behavior

Two pilot studies and two experiments were conducted to test for relationships between mood states, self-reflection, and helpfulness. It was hypothesized that both negative and positive feelings would increase helpful reactions. In the case of negative moods, however, helpfulness would be inhibited if the induced affect engenders self-reflection by associating the bad mood with the person's self-image in a self-referencing process. To test these predictions, female undergraduates read mood-inducing statements that were either (a) negative in content and containing the personal pronoun “I”, (b) negative but not self-referencing, (c) emotionally positive in content, (d) emotionally neutral, or (e) no statements. Afterward, they were asked to complete a questionnaire and to volunteer to participate in a future study. Findings in the first experiment confirmed the hypothesis. Women who had read negative, self-referencing statements were the least likely to comply with a helpful request. The most helpful participants were those who had previously recited the negative, but not self-referencing, and the positive statements. Neutral and control subjects displayed intermediate amounts of compliance with the helping request. Questionnaire results showed that self-reflection was responsible for decreasing the helpfulness of women when negative mood was associated with some aspect of the self. A second experiment successfully replicated the major findings of the pilot studies and the first experiment.     

Strategies in the recall of clusterable lists

The present study assessed the effectiveness of a multi-session training aproach intended to teach mildly retarded adolescents to discover and utilize categorical list structure. The performance of a group of trained retarded individuals was compared with that of another group of retarded individuals who had simply received practice with the training materials. The performance of both retarded groups was evaluated relative to that of a group of equivalent-CA normal adolescents. Recall transfer with a new word list was indicated by the finding that trained retarded subjects achieved a criterion of perfect recall in fewer trials than untrained retarded subjects. Differences in the use of categorization strategies by normal and retarded subjects were interpreted in the light of the automatic-controlled processing distinction of Schneider and Shiffrin (1977).     

A factor analytic study of teachers' ratings of the personality of school children

Teachers' rating on 70 adjectives that described the personality of school children were factor analysed. Four main factors emerged, and the adjectives loading most highly on each were selected to form four subscales of a New Teachers Rating Scale (NTRS). The subscales were named Good Pupil, Extraversion, Psychoticism and Neuroticism. Normative data for the scale were reported. Correlations with self-rated personality inventories such as the JEPQ, JEPI and CPQ indicated that: the Extraversion subscale correlated with JEPI-E and CPQ-Exvia, the Psychoticism subscale correlated with EPQ-P, CPQ-Exvia and CPQ-Anxiety, while the Good Pupil subscale correlated positively with JEPI-E, and negatively with JEPQ-P and CPQ-Anxiety. The Neuroticism subscale did not correspond to Eysenck's measures of Neuroticism but correlated with CPQ-Anxiety. Test-retest reliability of the subscales ranged between 0.75 and 0.92. The usefulness of the NTRS in complementing self-rated personality measures and the need to explore the nature of self-rated and teacher-rated neuroticism were discussed.     

Manipulating the word frequency effect in free recall

A recall advantage for common words was not evidenced when subjects generated or rated the list words on the basis of commonness and on a semantic, phonological, or orthographic basis prior to recall. Recall of the same set of words following only structural judgments of the words resulted in the usual recall advantage for common words. Results were not consistent with interpretations based only on the associative strengths of the recalled items. A process based on categorization of the words to be recalled was suggested as an alternative explanation.