Characterising the Personality of the Public Safety Offender and Non‐offender using Decision Trees: The Case of Colombia

The aim of this paper was to create a decision tree (DT) to identify personality profiles of offenders against public safety. A technique meeting this requirement was proposed that uses the C4.5 algorithm to derive decision rules for personality profiling of public safety offenders. The Mini‐Mult test was used to measure the personality profiles of 238 individuals. With the test results as our database, a C4.5 DT was applied to construct rules that classify each profile into one of two groups, those without and those with records of offences against public safety. The model correctly classified 80% of the personality profiles and delivered a set of decision rules for distinguishing the profiles by group, and the principal personality profiles were interpreted. We conclude that DTs are a promising technique for analysing personality profiles by their offender or non‐offender status. Finally, we believe that the development of a classifying model using DT may have practical applications in the Colombian prison system. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Tell me sweet little lies: An event-related potentials study on the processing of social lies

In reading tasks, words that convey a false statement elicit an enhanced N400 brainwave response, relative to words that convey a true statement. N400 amplitude reductions are generally linked to the online expectancy of upcoming words in discourse. White lies, contrary to false statements, may not be unexpected in social scenarios. We used the event-related potential (ERP) technique to determine whether there is an impact of social context on sentence processing. We measured ERP responses to target words that either conveyed a social “white” lie or a socially impolite blunt truth, relative to semantic violations. Word expectancy was controlled for by equating the cloze probabilities of white lying and blunt true targets, as measured in previous paper-and-pencil tests. We obtained a classic semantic violation effect (a larger N400 for semantic incongruities relative to sense making statements). White lies, in contrast to false statements, did not enhance the amplitude of the N400 component. Interestingly, blunt true statements yielded both a late frontal positivity and an N400 response in those scenarios particularly biased to white lying. Thus, white lies do not interfere with online semantic processing, and they do not engage further reanalysis processes, which are typically indexed by subsequent late positivity ERP effects. Instead, an N400 and a late frontal positivity obtained in response to blunt true statements indicate that they were treated as unexpected events. In conclusion, unwritten rules of social communicative behavior influence the electrical brain response to locally coherent but socially inappropriate statements.     

Math anxiety: A review of its cognitive consequences,psychophysiological correlates,and brain bases

A decade has passed since the last published review of math anxiety, which was carried out by Ashcraft and Ridley (2005). Given the considerable interest aroused by this topic in recent years and the growing number of publications related to it, the present article aims to provide a full and updated review of the field, ranging from the initial studies of the impact of math anxiety on numerical cognition, to the latest research exploring its electrophysiological correlates and brain bases from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Finally, this review describes the factors and mechanisms that have been claimed to play a role in the origins and/or maintenance of math anxiety, and it examines in detail the main explanations proposed to account for the negative effects of math anxiety on performance: competition for working memory resources, a deficit in a low-level numerical representation, and inhibition/attentional control deficit.     

Review of the Book Child Street Life. An Inside View of Hazards and Expectations of Street Children in Peru (SpringerBriefs in Well-Being and Quality of Life Research)

Applied Research in Quality of Life -     

Symbolic representation of the number three: a study with three-year-old children from contrasting socioeconomic environments

The goal of the present study was to compare a range of aspects in children’s symbolic knowledge about the number three among two groups of three-year-olds from contrasting socioeconomic backgrounds. Every child was presented with five tasks that focused on the number three and that had cognitive demands of different complexity: expressing their age, reciting the conventional number series up to three, quantifying a collection of three, and two tasks requiring the use of visually presented quantitative information.The results showed the same order of difficulty of the tasks in both socioeconomic groups and a clear performance difference depending on socioeconomic background. These findings show that symbolic knowledge about the number three does not come in an all or none fashion. Rather, different aspects of this symbolic competence become apparent in response to different tasks, and seem to depend largely on the socioeconomic environment in which children develop.     

Joan as Jesus: A Feminist Theological Analysis of Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc

The aim of this article is to explore Carl Theodor Dreyer's portrayal of Joan of Arc in his film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) as a female Christ‐figure. At the same time I argue that the film can serve as an important dialogue partner in ongoing christological discourse. The conclusion is that Dreyer's Joan provides a vivid image of Jesus Christ that challenges our fixation on Jesus’ maleness, and helps us to understand better what we really mean when we claim that God, dressed in flesh, became human, like us, female or male.     

The "Efficiency" Effect of Conceptual Referents on the Generation of Happiness: A Cross-National Analysis

Journal of Happiness Studies - This paper analyses how different definitions of happiness affect the individual assessment of subjective wellbeing. Bearing in mind the production theory, we study...     

Mental time travel,language evolution,and human self-domestication

Cognitive Processing - Human self-domestication might have contributed to the evolutionary changes in the hippocampus accounting for our enhanced mental travel abilities, and ultimately for our...