Developmental changes in the recognition of faces and facial features

The view that, as children get older, there is a decline in the use of feature‐based forms of face processing to more configurational forms of processing was examined by asking 6‐year‐old and 9‐year‐old children to judge which of two photographs matches an identical probe photograph. The probe and test stimuli were either photographs of whole faces or photographs of isolated facial features. Within this standard method, the stimuli also systematically varied in terms of the familiarity of the faces shown and in the orientation of presentation, both factors that have been interpreted as effecting configurational encoding. A number of age‐related effects are observed: (a) older children are better at recognizing whole faces than younger children, (b) older children exhibit a clear face inversion effect with whole faces while the younger children are equally adept at identifying upright and inverted whole faces, and (c) analysis of the recognition rates associated with the individual features reveals that younger children are better than older children when asked to recognize eye regions. It is argued that the data support the view that as children get older there is a change in the forms of piecemeal encoding employed and an increase in configurational processing. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic decision making: a comparison of approaches

This paper is concerned with a specific type of problem, namely dynamic decisions, for which most techniques fail to provide adequate solutions. Here, we present two of the most promising optimization techniques, partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) and dynamic decision networks (DDN), while arguing which is the most suitable for this problem domain. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Recidivism base rates,predictions of sex offender recidivism,and the “sexual predator” commitment laws

Predictions of future sexual offending have been mandated by various “Sexual Predator” commitment laws, despite historical arguments that clinicians are frequently inaccurate and over-predict violence. The basis for those arguments has been the perspective that sexual recidivism is a relatively rare event. Research is reviewed, however, with the finding that sexual recidivism for certain offenders is a rather common occurrence when the definition of recidivism is in keeping with the sex offender commitment laws. This finding is used to demonstrate that under-, rather than over-prediction of the designated violence is necessarily today's practice. Practical and ethical implications are discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Attitude Toward Christianity and Psychological Type: A Survey Among Religious Studies Students

A sample of 367 students studying religion at A-level completed the Keirsey Temperament Sorter together with the Francis Scale of Attitude Toward Christianity. The data demonstrated that sensing types hold a more positive attitude toward Christianity than intuitive types and that judging types hold a more positive attitude toward Christianity than perceiving types. No significant differences in attitude toward Christianity were found either between extroverts and introverts, or between thinking types and feeling types.     

At what age are children most likely to be bullied at school?

Cross‐sectional questionnaire surveys of school bullying reliably find that the frequency of incidents falls with age. However, it is not clear how much of this decline is due to a real change in behaviour, and how much to children’s changing definitions of what bullying is. This paper presents the results of two retrospective studies in an attempt to assess at what ages bullying is really most likely to occur. Male and female adults aged 18–55 years (n¹ = 205 and n² = 200) completed questionnaires about their memories of being bullied at school. Results showed that bullying was most frequently remembered from around 11–13 years of age, with incidents from earlier and later childhood being reported comparatively rarely. There were no differences between the reports of younger (18–21 years) and older (22–55 years) participants or between those of males and females. Bullying memories were also compared with memories for other aspects of childhood to assess the accuracy of these memories. It is concluded that the most memorable (and therefore perhaps the most severe) bullying is that which occurs in middle childhood. Aggr. Behav. 27:419–429, 2001. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Understanding of literal truth, ironic criticism, and deceptive praise following childhood head injury.

Children with closed head injury (CHI) have semantic-pragmatic language problems that include difficulty in understanding and producing both literal and nonliteral statements. For example, they are relatively insensitive to some of the social messages in nonstandard communication as well as to words that code distinctions among mental states. This suggests that they may have difficulty with comprehension tasks involving first- and second-order intentionality, such as those involved in understanding irony and deception. We studied how 6- to 15-year-old children, typically developing or with CHI, interpret scenarios involving literal truth, ironic criticism, and deceptive praise. Children with severe CHI had overall poorer mastery of the task. Even mild CHI impaired the ability to understand the intentionality underlying deceptive praise. CHI, especially biologically significant CHI, appears to place children at risk for failure to understand language as externalized thought.     

Matching the faces of robbers captured on video

Recent research has shown that unfamiliar face matching from both high‐ and low‐quality closed circuit television video images to photographs is highly prone to error, even when viewpoint and expression are matched as closely as possible. The current experiments made use of a filmed, staged reconstruction of a bank raid that was captured on CCTV and on high‐quality broadcasting video. Experiment 1 tested the ability of members of the public to match actors captured on CCTV to photo‐spreads containing similar‐looking distractors. Further experiments, each testing different groups of subjects, investigated matching ability using both high‐quality photographs (Experiment 2) and broadcast‐quality video material (Experiment 3). Experiment 3 also investigated the effect of disguising hairstyle, and varied whether or not the target was present in the photo line‐up. The results of these experiments confirm those of previous work, that matching the identity of unfamiliar faces is highly fallible, even when high‐quality footage is used. Experiments 4 and 5 tested matching ability using two‐alternative forced‐choice and single‐item verification tasks. Performance remained highly error‐prone even with the simplest question asked. The legal implications of the results are discussed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Law Says Corporations are Persons,but Psychology Knows Better

Psychologists interested in law and public policy have begun to examine the nature of corporations in American society and the serious consequences of corporate irresponsibility. The dominant trend identifies areas where corporate behavior falls short of ethical standards or leads to unacceptably risky decisions and suggests ways to reform corporations or the laws that regulate them. This well-intentioned approach is consistent with psychology's liberal reformist tendency. Unfortunately, it neither challenges the flawed psychological underpinnings of the legal fiction that corporations are legal persons nor compensates sufficiently for the dynamics of individual behavior in corporate settings. Instead, psychologists should advocate fundamental restructuring of our corporate society.     

A role for action knowledge in visual object identification

We evaluated the impact of visual similarity and action similarity on visual object identification. We taught participants to associate novel objects with nonword labels and verified that in memory visually similar objects were confused more often than visually dissimilar objects. We then taught participants to associate novel actions with nonword labels and verified that similar actions were confused moreoften th an dissimilaractions. We then paired specific objects with specific actions. Visually similar objects paired with similar actions were confused more often in memory than when these same objects were paired with dissimilar actions. Hence the actions associated with objects served to increase or decrease their separation in memory space, and influenced the ease with which these objects could be identified. These experiments ultimately demonstrated that when identifying stationary objects, the memory of how these object were used dramatically influenced the ability to identify these objects.     

Validity of the Five Minute Speech Sample in families with infants from low-income backgrounds

Caregivers of 169 infants from low-income and multi-ethnic backgrounds completed the Five Minute Speech Sample (FMSS). Validity of the FMSS was supported by demonstrating significant associations among positive and negative affect dimensions of the FMSS and other indices of the caregiving environment.