Simulated judicial decision-making for African and European American adolescents with illegal sexual behavior: The impact of medical data and victim race/ethnicity

The perceived importance of victim and defendant race/ethnicity and medical evidence in child sexual abuse cases has been recognized separately in the literature. However, few studies have considered these factors simultaneously. Within a sample of 880 college students, an interaction effect was tested between the presence of medical evidence and the race/ethnicity of a juvenile defendant and victim using child sexual abuse case vignettes. The main effects of medical evidence and the race of the defendant were observed. Medical evidence and race of victim influenced victim believability such that medical evidence was more impactful for cases with African American victims. Further, there were interactions between the race of the defendant and the race of the victim in adult versus juvenile court decisions, sex offender registration and notification requirements, and length of sex offender registration and notification. Interracial sexual offending was associated with substantially higher punishment than intraracial sexual offending. Accordingly, several important implications for court-level decision-making processes are explored.     

The Past Guides the Future: Implementing the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies

The authors describe the ways in which the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC; Ratts, Singh, Nassar-McMillan, Butler, & McCullough, 2015) can be viewed from a human rights framework and as the latest iteration in the long history of the multicultural and social justice counseling competency movement. MSJCC implementation and integration are explored, and recommendations for innovating the MSJCC are described.     

Demonstrating detail in investigative interviews—An examination of the DeMo technique

Attaining an uninterrupted free report (FR) is at the heart of best practice investigative interviewing guidance. However, witnesses/victims do not naturally provide detailed accounts. Techniques have been developed to counter-act this, such as a report everything (RE) instruction. This research examined the relative effectiveness of an addition to the RE component, a demonstration of the level of detail, using a behavioural exemplar, by describing an innocuous object; the Demonstration for More detail (DeMo) technique. Participants (N = 61) watched a mock crime video and asked to recall it using one of three instructions: (a) basic FR as the control, (b) RE instruction and (c) RE instruction plus DeMo technique. Participants who were given the DeMo technique recalled more details than both the control and RE groups. Accuracy rates were similarly high across all conditions. The implications of using the DeMo technique within an investigative interview are discussed.     

Does interference between self and other perspectives in theory of mind tasks reflect a common underlying process? Evidence from individual differences in theory of mind and inhibitory control

Theory of mind (ToM), the ability to understand that other agents have different beliefs, desires, and knowledge than oneself, has been extensively researched. Theory of mind tasks involve participants dealing with interference between their self-perspective and another agent’s perspective, and this interference has been related to executive function, particularly to inhibitory control. This study assessed whether there are individual differences in self–other interference, and whether these effects are due to individual differences in executive function. A total of 142 participants completed two ToM (the director task and a Level 1 visual perspective-taking task), which both involve self–other interference, and a battery of inhibitory control tasks. The relationships between the tasks were examined using path analysis. Results showed that the self–other interference effects of the two ToM tasks were dissociable, with individual differences in performance on the ToM tasks being unrelated and performance in each predicted by different inhibitory control tasks. We suggest that self–other differences are part of the nature of ToM tasks, but self–other interference is not a unitary construct. Instead, self–other differences result in interference effects in various ways and at different stages of processing, and these effects may not be a major limiting step for adults’ performance on typical ToM tasks. Further work is needed to assess other factors that may limit adults’ ToM performance and hence explain individual differences in social ability.

     

Academic competence and affect self-concepts in elementary school students: Social and dimensional comparisons

Social Psychology of Education - Academic self-concepts are important correlates and predictors of successful scholastic learning. According to the internal/external frame of reference (I/E)...     

Performance Self-Predictions: The Impact of Expectancy Strength and Incentives1

Performance self-predictions represent an individual's anticipated level performance on an upcoming task. This study focused on the accuracy of these predictions, as well as subjective reactions to making them under varying expectancy and incentive conditions. Results indicate that performance-contingent incentives had a positive effect on task performance, but a negative effect on preferences for making performance predictions. Expectancy strength also influenced these predictions, their subjective interpretations, and task performance. Additional results address the role of other task-relevant judgments (e.g., self-assessed ability and intended effort) when predicting one's performance on a task. Implications of these findings for work motivation and judgment accuracy are discussed.     

Positive aspects of caregiving as a moderator of treatment outcome over 12 months

The authors examined the influence of positive aspects of caregiving (PAC) as a moderator of treatment outcome across 12 months in 1 of the original sites of the Resources for Enhancing Alzheimer's Caregiver Health I project. They used multilevel random coefficients regression analysis to predict time-varying PAC, depression, behavioral bother, and daily care burden in Alzheimer's caregivers (N = 243; mean age = 60.89, SD = 14.19). They found that time-varying PAC was predicted by time-varying daily care burden. They also found significant effects of time-varying PAC for depression, behavioral bother, and daily care burden. Notably, a PAC x Phase x Treatment effect was found for daily care burden, such that individuals who endorsed less PAC benefited most from the intervention across 12 months. The tendency to positively appraise the caregiving experience (i.e., PAC) in response to chronic stressors such as Alzheimer's caregiving may affect individuals' responsiveness to, and benefit from, interventions, whereas only daily care burden affected the tendency to find enjoyment in caregiving across 12 months. Future intervention research should assess individual PAC in order to better tailor interventions to caregiving needs.     

Eye Movements and Lexical Access in Spoken-Language Comprehension: Evaluating a Linking Hypothesis between Fixations and Linguistic Processing

A growing number of researchers in the sentence processing community are using eye movements to address issues in spoken language comprehension. Experiments using this paradigm have shown that visually presented referential information, including properties of referents relevant to specific actions, influences even the earliest moments of syntactic processing. Methodological concerns about task-specific strategies and the linking hypothesis between eye movements and linguistic processing are identified and discussed. These concerns are addressed in a review of recent studies of spoken word recognition which introduce and evaluate a detailed linking hypothesis between eye movements and lexical access. The results provide evidence about the time course of lexical activation that resolves some important theoretical issues in spoken-word recognition. They also demonstrate that fixations are sensitive to properties of the normal language-processing system that cannot be attributed to task-specific strategies.     

The Relation of Perceived Neighborhood Danger to Childhood Aggression: A Test of Mediating Mechanisms

In the current study, two mediational mechanisms, parenting practices and children's beliefs about aggression, were hypothesized to account for the relationship between perceived neighborhood danger and childhood aggression. Using structural equation modeling, data were analyzed from an inner-city school-based sample of 732 predominantly African American 5th graders. Results suggested that perceived neighborhood danger was associated with strong positive beliefs about aggression, which in turn was associated with high levels of aggression. The hypothesized mediating role of parenting practices (restrictive discipline, parental monitoring, and parental involvement) on the relation between perceived neighborhood danger and child aggression was not supported. However, the current findings suggest that children's positive beliefs about aggression mediated the relationship between restrictive discipline and aggression. Directions for future research are discussed.     

The role of cognitive factors in the pathogenesis of obsessive-compulsive symptoms: a prospective study

Cognitive models of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) posit that specific kinds of dysfunctional beliefs (e.g., pertaining to responsibility and the significance of intrusive thoughts) underlie the development of this disorder. The present study was designed to prospectively evaluate whether dysfunctional beliefs thought to underlie OCD act as a specific vulnerability factor in the pathogenesis of obsessive-compulsive symptomatology. Eighty-five individuals were prospectively followed over a period of time thought to be associated with an increased onset of OCD symptoms -- childbirth and the postpartum. The majority of these new mothers and fathers experienced intrusive infant-related thoughts and performed neutralizing behaviors similar to, but less severe than, those observed in OCD. Scores on a measure of dysfunctional beliefs thought to underlie OCD predicted the development of obsessive-compulsive symptoms after controlling for pre-existing OCD symptoms, anxiety, and depression. Dysfunctional beliefs also predicted the severity of checking, washing, and obsessional OCD symptom dimensions, but not neutralizing, ordering, or hoarding symptom dimensions. These data provide evidence for specific dysfunctional beliefs as risk factors in the development of some types of OCD symptoms.