Attribution of responsibility for rape: The influence of observer empathy,victim resistance,and victim attractiveness

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the influence of a rape victim's physical attractiveness and resistance to rape on subjects' attributions of responsibility for the crime, certainty of the defendant's guilt, and social perceptions of the rape victim and defendant. Subjects' pretrial empathy toward rape victims and rapists was assessed by scores on the Rape Empathy Scale (RES). In addition to significant sex differences in attributions of responsibility for the incident, subjects' pretrial empathy toward rape victims and rapists was predictive of their perceptions of the rape victim, the defendant, and the rape incident. Victim resistance and attractiveness effects were significant in that subjects responded least favorably to the unattractive rape victim, particularly when she resisted the rape by fighting with her attacker. Male subjects and subjects who exhibited low empathy toward the rape victim were more responsive to subtle manipulations of victim resistance and attractiveness than were females and high RES subjects. Several explanations for these results focus on the cognitive and affective responses of subjects. The implications of the study are discussed in relation to societal attitudes toward rape and the role of sexrole stereotyping, which fosters these attitudes.The present research was supported by National Institutes of Health Biomedical Research Support Grant #5-SO7-RRO7127-09 and National Science Foundation Grant #SES-8012316 to Sheila R. Deitz. The authors express their appreciation to Nancy Williams, Joanne Moran, Bill Willging, David Small, David Waldman, and Robert Kingsley for their assistance in data collection and analysis.Correspondence should be sent to Sheila R. Deitz, now at Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy, University of Virginia, Box 100, Blue Ridge Hospital, Charlottesville, Virginia 22901. Copies of the Rape Empathy Scale and an extended report on the reliability and validity of scale are available from this author.     

Approval versus achievement motives in seventh-grade girls

Eighty seventh graders played a computer-programmed two-choice probability game in one of four conditions: with reinforcement for choosing the more probable response, with reinforcement for choosing the less probable response, with a silent experimenter, or alone. Children receiving reinforcement for the less probable response experienced a conflict between approval and achievement since choices which increased approval in this condition decreased success in the task. Across all conditions, girls chose the more probable response significantly more often than boys, indicating that girls did not sacrifice achievement for the sake of approval. Finally, girls did not reduce their efforts to achieve when working alone even though there was no opportunity for social approval, and did not express lower success expectancies than the boys even though these were measured anonymously.The authors wish to extend their appreciation to the teachers at Emerson School, Oak Park, Illinois, and to Ms. Glada O. Vaughn, principal, and Ms. Sandra Northrup Nowak, assistant principal, for their cooperation in carrying out this research.     

Sex-role behavior and obedience to authority: A field study

Obedience by male and female subjects to male and female experimenters was investigated under various conditions of “perceived legitimacy.” The procedure involved an experimenter stopping a subject who was about to cross a street at a particular crosswalk, the subject was then instructed to cross at another designated location. The dependent variable was the level of obedience to these instructions. The four main factorial independent variables were the sex of the experimenter, the sex of the subject, and two conditions of “perceived legitimacy” (presence or absence of a “uniform,” presence or absence of an “explanation”). Significant results were obtained for the uniform and sex of subject main effects (more obedience with a uniform, more disobedience by females). Additional analyses indicated that “older” subjects disobeyed more often than “younger” ones, that “formally” dressed subjects disobeyed more often than “informally” dressed ones, and that ethnic minority group experimenters were disobeyed significantly more often than Caucasian experimenters. Significant interactions were also obtained, mainly due to the behavior of the younger men and the older women. Male and female experimenters were obeyed equally, in general. The results are discussed in relation to sex-role prejudice and discriminatory behavior.     

Young infants’ expectations about hidden objects: a reply to three challenges

In this article, I address three broad challenges that have been directed at claims that even young infants are able to represent and to reason about hidden objects. The first challenge is that such claims are static and non-developmental and as such represent an unproductive approach to the study of infant cognition. The second challenge is that claims that even young infants represent hidden objects typically go hand in hand with assertions that infants are born with a belief that objects exist continuously in time and move continuously through space, and there is no evidence to date to support such assertions. Finally, the third challenge is that reports that young infants represent hidden objects can all be explained more parsimoniously in terms of low level perceptual biases in infants’ encoding and processing of events, or in terms of transient expectations formed during habituation trials and later extended to test trials.     

Hemispheric specialization for processing of visually presented verbal and spatial stimuli

Two “same-different” reaction time experiments, analogous in task demands made on the S, were designed to test laterality differences in. perception. Ten normal right-handed Ss performed a verbal task in which they decided whether or not two three-letter words belonged to the same conceptual class. Ten different Ss performed a spatial task in which they decided whether two 16-cell matrices with 3 blackened cells were identical. Reaction times were found to be sensitive to laterality differences in perception. Verbal stimuli were processed faster when presented in the right visual field, and thus projected directly to the left cerebral hemisphere; spatial stimuli were processed faster when presented in the left visual field, and thus projected directly to the right cerebral hemisphere. These results were analyzed in terms of implications regarding hemispheric asymmetries for processing of verbal and spatial material and the nature of interhemispheric transfer of information.     

Infants' physical knowledge affects their change detection

Prior research suggests that infants attend to a variable in an event category when they have identified it as relevant for predicting outcomes in the category, and that the age at which infants identify a variable depends largely on the age at which they are exposed to appropriate observations. Thus, depending on age of exposure, infants may identify the same variable at different ages in different event categories. A good case in point is the variable height, which is identified at about 3.5 months in occlusion events, but only at about 12 months in covering events and 14 months in tube events. In the present experiments, 11-month-olds detected a change to an object's height in an occlusion but not a covering event, and 12.5-month-olds detected a similar change in a covering but not a tube event. Thus, infants succeeded in detecting a change to an object's height in an event where height had been identified as a relevant variable, but failed to detect the exact same change in another event where height had not yet been identified as a relevant variable. These findings provide evidence that infants' physical knowledge affects which changes they detect in physical events. Possible mechanisms underlying these findings are also discussed, in light of recent accounts of change detection in adults.     

When the ordinary seems unexpected: evidence for incremental physical knowledge in young infants

According to a recent account of infants' acquisition of their physical knowledge, the incremental-knowledge account, infants form distinct event categories, such as occlusion, containment, support, and collision events. In each category, infants identify one or more vectors which correspond to distinct problems that must be solved. For each vector, infants acquire a sequence of variables that enables them to predict outcomes within the vector more and more accurately over time. This account predicts that infants who have acquired only a few of the variables in a sequence should err in two ways in violation-of-expectation tasks: (1) they should view impossible events consistent with their incomplete knowledge as expected (errors of omission), and (2) they should view possible events inconsistent with their incomplete knowledge as unexpected (errors of commission). Many reports have shown that infants who have not yet identified a variable in an event category produce errors of omission: they fail to view impossible events involving the variable as unexpected. However, there has been no report revealing errors of commission in infants' responses to possible events. The present research examined whether 3- and 2.5-month-old infants, whose knowledge of occlusion events is very limited, would produce errors of commission as well as errors of omission when responding to these events. At 3 months of age, infants viewed as unexpected a possible event in which a tall cylinder became visible when passing behind a tall screen with a very large opening extending from its upper edge. At 2.5 months, infants viewed as unexpected a possible event in which a tall cylinder became visible when passing behind a tall screen with a very large opening extending from its lower edge. These findings provide a new kind of evidence for the incremental-knowledge account, and more generally for the notion that infants, like older children and adults, engage in rule-based reasoning about physical events.     

Inducing infants to detect a physical violation in a single trial

There is increasing evidence that infants' representations of physical events can be enhanced through appropriate experiences in the laboratory. Most of this research has involved administering infants multiple training trials, often with multiple objects. In the present research, 8-month-olds were induced to detect a physical violation in a single trial. The experiments built on previous evidence that for occlusion events, infants encode height information at about age 3.5 months, but for covering events, they encode height information only at about age 12 months. In two experiments, a short cover was first placed in front of a short or a tall object (occlusion event); next, the cover was lowered over the tall object until it became fully hidden (covering event). Exposure to the occlusion event (but not other events in which height information was not encoded) enabled the infants to detect the violation in the covering event, much earlier than they would have otherwise.     

Three steps to open science for qualitative research in psychology

Principles and applications of open science (also referred to as open research or open scholarship) in psychology have emerged in response to growing concerns about the replicability, transparency, reproducibility, and robustness of psychological research alongside global moves to open science in many fields. Our objective in this paper is to inform ways of collectively constructing open science practices and systems that are appropriate to, and get the best out of, the full range of qualitative and mixed-method approaches used in psychology. We achieve this by describing three areas of open research practice (contributorship, pre-registration, and open data) and explore how and why qualitative researchers might consider engaging with these in ways that are compatible with a qualitative research paradigm. We argue it is crucial that open research practices do not (even inadvertently) exclude qualitative research, and that qualitative researchers reflect on how we can meaningfully engage with open science in psychology.     

Aging and performance on an everyday-based visual search task

Research on aging and visual search often requires older people to search computer screens for target letters or numbers. The aim of this experiment was to investigate age-related differences using an everyday-based visual search task in a large participant sample (n=261) aged 20-88 years. Our results show that: (1) old-old adults have more difficulty with triple conjunction searches with one highly distinctive feature compared to young-old and younger adults; (2) age-related declines in conjunction searches emerge in middle age then progress throughout older age; (3) age-related declines are evident in feature searches on target absent trials, as older people seem to exhaustively and serially search the whole display to determine a target's absence. Together, these findings suggest that declines emerge in middle age then progress throughout older age in feature integration, guided search, perceptual grouping and/or spreading suppression processes. Discussed are implications for enhancing everyday functioning throughout adulthood.