Multidimensional Latent Classification of ‘Street Robbery’ Offences

In a recent study of personal robbery, commissioned by the Home Office in the UK, a qualitative typology of robbery offences was proposed based on the approach used by the offender to commit the crime, consisting of four approach types: Blitz, Confrontation, Con, and Snatch. Conceptual inspection of the typology reveals that these proposed types may be hypothetically demarcated as the product of two latent dimensions: interaction (between the offender and the victim) and violence (used to threaten/harm the victim). The current paper utilises crime scene information from 72 incarcerated male offenders convicted of ‘street’ robbery to test this hypothesis. Convergent statistical analysis was utilised to test the structure of Smith's typology first using multidimensional scaling (MDS) and then principal component analysis (PCA). MDS and PCA analyses provided convergent support for the existence of the four robbery styles and the latent dimensions of interaction and violence. Implications of Smith's typological structure and latent behavioural dimensions on the conceptualisation and classification of robbery offences are discussed within the existing literature on ‘street’ robbery. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Narrative, Memory and Social Representations: A Conversation Between History and Social Psychology

This paper explores relations between narrative, memory and social representations by examining how social representations express the ways in which communities deal with the historical past. Drawing on a case study of social representations of the Brazilian public sphere, it shows how a specific narrative of origins re-invents history as a useful mythological resource for defending identity, building inter-group solidarity and maintaining social cohesion. Produced by a time-travelling dialogue between multiple sources, this historical narrative is functional both to transform, to stabilise and give resilience to specific social representations of public life. The Brazilian case shows that historical narratives, which tend to be considered as part of the stable core of representational fields, are neither homogenous nor consensual but open polyphasic platforms for the construction of alternative, often contradictory, representations. These representations do not go away because they are ever changing and situated, recruit multiple ways of thinking and fulfil functions of identity, inter-group solidarity and social cohesion. In the disjunction between historiography and the past as social representation are the challenges and opportunities for the dialogue between historians and social psychologists.     

The impact of COVID-19 concerns on perceiving others' faces

Unlike most infectious diseases, COVID-19 is characterised by an absence of facial disease-signalling cues. Yet, it is still unclear whether it has influenced face perception. Understanding this may help clarify if and how our motivation toward social interactions is conditional on situational pathogen threats. The present study investigated if priming disease concerns about COVID-19 would change people's perception of neutral faces on perceived disease, social discomfort and arousal elicited by such faces; this condition was compared with other infectious/non-infectious diseases and a non-disease priming condition. One-hundred sixty-six participants recruited nationally performed the online task. When compared with the non-disease condition, participants primed for COVID-19 perceived faces as sicker and tended to view them as eliciting more social discomfort; no difference occurred in arousal. No other difference was found between conditions. These findings suggest that the pandemic context can shape how we perceive others' apparent sickness. Overall, these might reflect adaptations intertwined with the behavioural immune system's defence mechanisms.     

The Corruption of Culture and Education by the Nation State: The Case of Liberal Jews' Discourse on Jewish Continuity

Allow me to conclude my remarks on the state and its probable role in the future with the assertion that, while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God. 1 Nationalism is a very distinctive species of patriotism … which in fact prevails in the modern world, and nowhere else. Nationalism is a species of patriotism distinguished by a few very important features: the units which this kind of patriotism, namely nationalism, favors with its loyalty, are culturally homogeneous, based on a culture striving to be a high [literate] culture; they are large enough to sustain the hope of supporting the educational system which can keep a literate culture going; they are poorly endowed with rigid internal subgroupings; their populations are anonymous, fluid and mobile, and they are unmediated; the individual belongs to them directly, in virtue of his cultural style, and not in virtue of membership in nested sub-groups. Homogeneity, literacy, anonymity are the key traits. 2     

Toddlers' Learning From Socially Meaningful Video Characters

Toddlers' performance on a seriation sequencing task was measured after exposure to a video as a function of the social meaningfulness of the character. Forty eight 21-month-old toddlers were randomly assigned to a socially meaningful character video demonstration, a less socially meaningful character video demonstration, or a no exposure control group. Results indicated that toddlers learned the seriation sequencing task better from a video when a socially meaningful character, rather than a less socially meaningful character, demonstrated the task. Our findings demonstrate that toddlers under age two can learn cognitive, logical reasoning skills from a video presentation when the onscreen character is socially meaningful to them.     

Changes in Children's Pretend Play Over Two Decades

There is growing recognition that children have less time to engage in play, and, concurrently, recent evidence suggests a decrease in divergent thinking ability in young children. This study investigated changes in pretend play ability during a 23-year period. The same standardized measure of pretend play, the Affect in Play Scale (APS; Russ, 1993 Russ , S. W. ( 1993 ). Affect in creativity: The role of affect and play in the creative process . Hillsdale , NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates . [Google Scholar]; 2004 Russ , S. W. ( 2004 ). Play in child development and psychotherapy: Toward empirically supported practice . Mahwah , NJ : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers . [Google Scholar]), was the measure of pretend play in all studies. This puppet play task is videotaped and scored from the tapes. Fourteen studies of children from 6 to 10 years of age in school-based samples from 1985–2008 were included in the analyses. A cross-temporal meta-analysis examined correlations between weighted mean scores and year of data collection. Main findings were that imagination in play and comfort with play significantly increased over time. There was no evidence of change in organization of the story or in overall expression of affect in play. When one outlier was removed, there was a significant decrease in negative affect expression in play. Even though children have less time to play, cognitive processes that occur in play are continuing to develop. Whether these pretend abilities are being transferred to creative production is a key question for future investigation.