Self-serving bias in the attribution of responsibility: Cognitive versus motivational explanations

The purpose of this study is to compare the cognitive and motivational explanations of differences in the responsibility assigned to the victim of a crime. It has generally been found that the victim of a crime is assigned more responsibility for that crime by similar others if its consequences are severe. The motivational explanation for this finding is that subjects are threatened by the idea that a serious crime can happen by chance. The cognitive explanation is that serious crimes are rarer and subjects attribute more of the responsibility for rarer events to those who experience them. This study tested these two explanations by independently varying the severity and the likelihood of a crime and examining attributions of responsibility to its victim. The results of the study support the cognitive explanation. Similar others were found to attribute more responsibility for a crime to the victim when that crime was presented as rare, irrespective of whether its consequences were mild or severe. In addition, when likelihood was controlled experimentally no effect of severity upon attributions of responsibility was found. These results suggest that, within the context of attributions of responsibility to victims, patterns of attribution consistent with those predicted by theories suggesting motivational influences upon attribution may actually represent the operation of cognitive processes.     

Event-related brain potentials reflect traces of echoic memory in humans

In sequences of identical auditory stimuli, infrequent deviant stimuli elicit an event-related brain potential component called mismatch negativity (MMN). MMN is presumed to reflect the existence of a memory trace of the frequent stimulus at the moment of presentation of the infrequent stimulus. This hypothesis was tested by applying the recognition-masking paradigm of cognitive psychology. In this paradigm, a masking sound presented shortly before or after a test stimulus diminishes the recognition memory of this stimulus, the more so the shorter the interval between the test and masking stimuli. This interval was varied in the present study. It was found that the MMN amplitude strongly correlated with the subject’s ability to discriminate between frequent and infrequent stimuli. This result strongly suggests that MMN providesa measure for a trace of sensory memory, and further, that with MMN, this memory can be studied without performance-related distortions.     

Group therapy with inner city hispanic acting-out adolescent males: Some theoretical observations

Group therapy with inner city Hispanic acting-out adolescent males is described as an effective psychotherapeutic modality in treating this difficult population. Topics addressed include the development of personality during adolescence, Hispanic family dynamics and gender roles, group therapy as a pseudofamily structure, stages of group development as they pertain to this population, and the group therapist's role and characteristics in the treatment situation.     

Medical ethics in Latin America: a new interest and commitment.

Recent visits to five Latin American nations indicate that some medical professionals are eager to increase the role of bioethics in their countries. Conversations with key figures there point up similarities and differences among Latin nations, and between Latin countries and the United States, in their approaches to ethics. Opportunities exist for U.S. bioethicists to help get bioethics teaching and research off the ground in Latin America.     

The society for community research and action on a path toward conocimiento: From silences and statements to solidarities in action in U.S. community psychology

A first-person narrative essay is presented through a critically reflexive auto-ethnography of a community psychologist's experiences as a member of the Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA) and (as of this writing) co-chair of the Cultural, Ethnic and Racial Affairs council. Through this methodological orientation, an analysis of some of the discourses that circulated within the SCRA listserv in relation to the murder of Mr. George Floyd, and amidst an ensuing pandemic are analyzed and discussed in relation to Anzaldúa's seven stages of conocimiento. The intentions that guide and ground this first-person account are to animate deeper reflection, accountability, and solidarity-in-action, as well as an organizational shift in the culture of the SCRA. Guided by a set of questions—What accounts for the organizational silences within the SCRA? How did the SCRA respond or engage with the murder of Mr. Floyd, anti-Blackness, Black Lives Matter, and related racial justice efforts?—the purpose is to turn a critical social analysis gaze to the SCRA in order to align its purpose, values, and mission with liberation and a decolonial feminist praxis. Anzaldúa's seven-stage framework of conocimiento is utilized to describe the possibilities for an organizational cultural shift in the SCRA that aligns with racial justice and liberatory decolonial feminist praxes.     

Spontaneous object recognition in capuchin monkeys: assessing the effects of sex,familiarization phase and retention delay

Animal Cognition - The spontaneous object recognition (SOR) task is a versatile and widely used memory test that was only recently established in nonhuman primates (marmosets). Here, we extended...     

Influence of parent,child, and contextual factors on the quality of the home environment

The purpose of this study was to examine factors related to the quality of the home environments mothers provide for their infants. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth on 602 mothers with infants between 12 and 23 months of age were used for this study. Consistent with Belsky's model of the determinants of parenting, the quality of the home environment was influenced by maternal characteristics, child characteristics, and contextual factors. A positive linear relation was found between scores on a family risk index and the probability that infants were experiencing a relatively unsupportive home environment.