The impact of parental attachment and supervision on fear of crime among adolescent males

This paper examines the effect of parental attachment and supervision on fear of crime among adolescent males. Earlier work has suggested that feelings of powerlessness and association with deviant peers have a significant impact on adolescent fear of crime. As the nature of the parent-adolescent relationship is also a key predictor of adolescent self-concept and quality of peer relationships, we felt that parental attachment and supervision should also impact fear of crime. Using self-report surveys from 318 incarcerated adolescent males, we examine the effect of parental attachment and supervision, along with other demographic and contextual variables, on fear of criminal victimization, perceived safety, and perceptions of risk. The results indicate that those boys who are most attached to their parents are less fearful of criminal victimization and feel safer in their environment than do their counterparts with weaker parental attachments. Additionally, those boys whose parents supervise them closely are more fearful of criminal victimization, but have lower levels of perceived risk of victimization. Implications and ramifications for social policies and future research are also discussed.     

Path integration while ignoring irrelevant movement

Participants attempted to return to the origin of travel after following an outbound path by locomotion on foot (Experiments 1-3) or in a virtual visual environment (Experiment 4). Critical conditions interrupted the outbound path with verbal distraction or irrelevant, to-be-ignored movements. Irrelevant movement, real or virtual, had greater effects than verbal or cognitive distraction, indicating inability to ignore displacement during path integration. Effects of the irrelevant movement's direction (backward vs. rightward) and location (1st vs. 2nd leg of path) indicated that participants encoded a configural representation of the pathway and then cognitively compensated for the movement, producing errors directly related to the demands of compensation. An encoding-error model fit to the data indicated that backward movement produced downward rescaling, whereas movement that led to implied rotation (rightward on 2nd leg) produced distortions of shape and scale.     

Utility of the trauma symptom inventory's atypical response scale in detecting malingered post-traumatic stress disorder

The authors examined the Trauma Symptom Inventory's (TSI) ability to discriminate 88 student post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) simulators screened for genuine PTSD from 48 clinical PTSD-diagnosed outpatients. Results demonstrated between-group differences on several TSI clinical scales and the Atypical Response (ATR) validity scale. Discriminant function analysis using ATR revealed 75% correct patient classification but only 48% correct simulator classification, with an overall correct classification rate of 59% (positive predictive power [PPP] = .71; negative predictive power [NPP] = .51). Individual ATR cutoff scores did not yield impressive classification results, with the optimal cutoff (T score = 61) correctly classifying only 61% of simulators and patients (PPP = .66, NPP = .54). Although ATR was not developed as a malingered PTSD screen, instead serving as a general validity screen, caution is recommended in its current clinical use for detecting malingered PTSD.     

Extending neuropsychological assessments into the primary mental ability space

A battery of 17 neuropsychological tests (including the CERAD battery) and 17 psychometric ability tests were administered to a sample of 499 participants of the Seattle Longitudinal study who had been given the psychometric ability tests seven and 14 years earlier. The neuropsychological tests were projected into a 5-factor psychometric ability space by means of extension analysis. The concurrent regressions of the neuropsychology tests on the psychometric ability tests were then used to estimate neuropsychology test scores from the psychometric ability tests administered in 1984, 1991 and 1998. Neuropsychologists then rated the study participants as either normal, suspect or cognitively impaired in 1998. Changes in estimated test scores were computed over seven and fourteen years. Significant odds ratios between normal and cognitively impaired groups were found for all neuropsychological tests over the proximal period and for most tests over the 14-year period. Similar findings occurred for the odds ratios between the normal and suspect groups for the most proximal 7-year changes.     

Rapid processing of cast and attached shadows

We used a visual-search method to investigate the role of shadows in the rapid discrimination of scene properties. Targets and distractors were light or dark 2-D crescents of identical shape and size, on a mid-grey background. From the dark stimuli, illusory 3-D shapes can be created by blurring one arc of the crescent. If the inner arc is blurred, the stimulus is perceived as a curved surface with attached shadow. If the outer arc is blurred, the stimulus is perceived as a flat surface casting a shadow. In a series of five experiments, we used this simple stimulus to map out the shadow properties that the human visual system can rapidly detect and discriminate. To subtract out 2-D image factors, we compared search performance for dark-shadow stimuli with performance for light-shadow stimuli which generally do not elicit strong 3-D percepts. We found that the human visual system is capable of rapid discrimination based upon a number of different shadow properties, including the type of the shadow (cast or attached), the direction of the shadow, and the displacement of the shadow. While it is clear that shadows are not simply discounted in rapid search, it is unclear at this stage whether rapid discrimination is acting upon shadows per se or upon representations of 3-D object shape and position elicited by perceived shadows.     

The Seattle longitudinal study: relationship between personality and cognition

This article reviews the history, measures and principal findings of the Seattle Longitudinal Study. This study began in 1956 focusing upon age differences and age changes in cognitive abilities. Its sampling frame is a large HMO in the Pacific Northwest. The study has been expanded to investigate various influences on cognitive aging including, cognitive styles, personality traits, life styles, and family environment. Current interest is also in the early detection of risk for dementia. In addition, this article reports original analyses of the relation of personality dimensions to cognitive abilities (both concurrent and longitudinal). While personality remains relatively stable over the adult life span, modest proportions of variance are shared between various personality traits and the cognitive abilities.