No evidence of racial discrimination in criminal justice processing: Results from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health

One of the most consistent findings in the criminological literature is that African American males are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated at rates that far exceed those of any other racial or ethnic group. This racial disparity is frequently interpreted as evidence that the criminal justice system is racist and biased against African American males. Much of the existing literature purportedly supporting this interpretation, however, fails to estimate properly specified statistical models that control for a range of individual-level factors. The current study was designed to address this shortcoming by analyzing a sample of African American and White males drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Analysis of these data revealed that African American males are significantly more likely to be arrested and incarcerated when compared to White males. This racial disparity, however, was completely accounted for after including covariates for self-reported lifetime violence and IQ. Implications of this study are discussed and avenues for future research are offered.     

Premarital counseling: Appraisal and status

Abstract

Premarital counseling programs have been proliferating in the United States since their appearance in the 1930s. In order to evaluate the success such programs have had in preparing couples to build successful marriages, reduce the incidence of divorce and prevent unsuccessful marriages from occurring, the authors reviewed those programs which outlined standardized intervention procedures and utilized dependent measures to assess the program's effectiveness. Thirteen programs met these criteria. In general, premarital counseling programs were found to be atheoretical in their approach to intervention, loosely designed and nonspecific as to their goals.     

Coalition Preference as a Function of Expected Values in a Tetradic Weighted-Majority Game

Eighty male subjects participated in a tetradic weighted-majority game in which a coalition was required to control the division of the payoff. The amount of the payoff and/of the probability of receiving the payoff were varied. The data strongly supported the hypothesis that subjects would prefer the coalition with the largest expected value (size of payoff x probability of success = expected value) rather than the coalition with the largest payoff or the coalition with the highest probability of success. However, contrary to expectations, the 'division of rewards was found to be a function of the relative assigned resources of the coalition members, despite the lack of a logical connection between the assigned resources and the rules governing obtaining the payoff.     

Performance and Perceptions of Brainstormers in an Organizational Setting

Employees of a corporation who had undergone considerable training for effective teamwork were asked to brainstorm about a job-relevant issue in groups of four or alone. One half of the groups brainstormed alone first, and the other half brainstormed as a group before brainstorming alone. Participants were also asked to rate their performance and indicate whether they would perform better in groups or alone on a brainstorming task. Consistent with past laboratory research, groups generated only about half as many ideas as a similar number of individuals (nominal group), and group brainstorming led to more favorable perceptions of individual performance. Participants also believed that they would brainstorm more effectively in a group than alone. These results indicate that productivity losses in brainstorming groups are not restricted to laboratory groups. Such losses occur even in groups who work together on a daily basis, have considerable training in group dynamics, and are dealing with a job-relevant issue. The sequence of alone to group brainstorming did not influence overall productivity. The relation of this research to that of facilitated and electronic brainstorming is discussed.     

Seeing the Whole Picture

Much of what we need to plan for our survival is already known, but what we know, how we know, and who knows is divided up between disciplines. Thus much of the problem of ensuring our survival is a matter of learning across the disciplines. We identify four modes through which we bring disciplinary knowledge together: the unity of science, integrated assessment, heuristic models, and distributed learning networks. Although none of them are perfect, we can learn how to put our knowledge together across the disciplines much better than we do.     

Human dignity and Marcuse's Erotopia

Three aspects of electronic communications technology are described: convergence of modes, communities of interest, and impacts on culture. Nine recurring aspects of technology and its use, which are particularly pertinent to our time, are discussed.     

Invited Essay: A New System Of Politics: Government,Governance, And Political Decision Making In The Twenty-First Century

The present system of politics is based on the centrality of economics. This system is not capable of coming to grips with the problems confronting humanity. A culture-based system of politics is required to do this and prevent ecological disaster. This system would make it possible to reduce the demands human beings are making on the natural environment and situate human welfare, environmental well-being, and the public interest at the core of the political process. The risks of such a system could be reduced through cultural education and improved cultural understanding.     

Haloperidol-induced Mood and Retrieval of Happy and Unhappy Memories

The present study investigated the effect of haloperidol-induced mood in normal healthy male volunteers on the retrieval of memories of real-life personal experiences using a between-subjects double-blind design. Forty subjects were required to retrieve past real life experiences associated with a series of stimulus words following administration of a single oral dose of 5mg haloperidol or placebo. The experiences were subsequently rated by subjects for their happiness felt at the time of the original experience. A significant decline in self-reported hedonic tone was observed in subjects given haloperidol. In addition, subjects on placebo recalled a significantly greater percentage of happy memories than subjects who were on haloperidol; a trend for a reverse pattern was observed for unhappy memories. The effects of the drug on the retrieval of memories were only in part mediated by the decline in hedonic tone scores. The effects of haloperidol are interpreted in terms of drug-induced dysphoria.     

The effect of very brief exposure on experienced fear after in vivo exposure

Two experiments tested the effect of exposure to masked phobic stimuli at a very brief stimulus onset asynchrony on reducing the subjective experience of fear caused by in vivo exposure to a feared object. In the main experiment, 35 spider-fearful and 35 non-fearful participants were identified with a questionnaire and a Behavioural Avoidance Test (BAT) with a live tarantula. One week later, they were individually administered one of two continuous series of masked images: spiders or flowers. They engaged in the BAT again immediately thereafter. They provided ratings of subjective fear at the end of each BAT (pre- and post-manipulation). Very brief exposure to images of spiders reduced the fearful group's and not the non-fearful group's experience of fear at the end of the BAT. This effect was replicated with another sample of 26 spider-fearful participants from the same population. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Biases in use of positive and negative words across twenty natural languages

Positive events are more common (more tokens), but negative events are more differentiated (more types). These observations and asymmetries about the world are consistent with a number of features or biases favouring positive adjectives that have been shown for English. Compared to their opposites, positive adjectives in English are more likely to be unmarked, negated into their opposite, define the entire negative to positive dimension, and occur first in conjunctions with their negative opposite. In this paper we document that these biases have considerable generality, appearing in all or almost all of 20 natural languages. The greater differentiation of negative states is illustrated here by the demonstration that five common nouns describing negative states in English (disgust, risk, sympathy, accident, murderer) have equivalents in most or all of the 20 languages surveyed, but the opposite of these nouns is not lexicalised in most of the 20 languages.