Increased intraindividual variability is a marker of ADHD but also of dyslexia: a study on handwriting

It has been suggested that intraindividual variability (IIV) in neuropsychological tasks may be a specific characteristic of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), but previous research has not thoroughly examined whether IIV also concerns academic performance or other types of developmental disabilities. The present study investigates the role of IIV in 15 children with ADHD without reading difficulties, 15 children with dyslexia without associated symptoms of ADHD, and 15 typically developing children (TDC) in a simple response time (SRT) task and in a skill more directly related with school learning—handwriting. Results show that children with ADHD and those with dyslexia have a greater IIV than the TDC in both tasks. However, the pattern of the relationship between IIV in SRT and handwriting was different in children with ADHD and dyslexia: the IIV in the handwriting task was found to depend on IIV in the SRT task only in children with dyslexia. These findings support the crucial role of IIV not only in ADHD but also in other developmental disabilities, but suggest that in children with ADHD it may present specific aspects related with motor control.     

Sleep quality in healthy and mood-disordered persons predicts daily life emotional reactivity

Disordered sleep has been linked to impaired emotional functioning in healthy and depressed individuals. Little is known, however, about how chronic sleep problems influence emotional reactivity in everyday life. Participants with major or minor unipolar depressive disorder (n?=?60) and healthy controls (n?=?35) reported on sleep and emotional responses to daily life events using a computerised Experience Sampling Method. We examined whether impaired sleep quality influenced emotional reactivity to daily events, and if this relationship was altered by unipolar mood disorders. Among healthy individuals, sleep difficulties were associated with enhanced negative affect (NA) to unpleasant events and a dulled response to neutral events. However, among mood-disordered persons, sleep difficulties were associated with higher NA across all types of everyday life events. Impaired sleep quality differentially affects daily life emotional reactions as a function of depression.     

Men’s Gendered Constructions of Intimate Partner Violence as Predictors of Court-Mandated Batterer Treatment Drop Out

The purpose of this study was to explore the meaning men make of their violence toward intimate partners and to examine if and how these meanings and constructions of violence predicted who drops out of batterer treatment prior to program completion. We used both qualitative and quantitative data collected from 154 men court-mandated to participate in a batterer intervention program. The qualitative findings indicated that the men in this sample minimized and denied responsibility for the violence they used towards their intimate partners while simultaneously rationalizing and justifying their violent behavior. Such findings provide insight into how denial and minimization and, more broadly, men’s constructions of masculinity might predict their tendency to drop out of batterer treatment. Furthermore, building upon our qualitative findings, logistic regression analysis revealed that men who were lower income, no longer intimately involved with the women they abused, and who reported lower levels of physical violence and higher levels of hostility were more likely to drop out of the batterer treatment program.     

Help-Seeking and Internal Obstacles to Receiving Support in the Wake of Community Violence Exposure: The Case of Arab and Jewish Adolescents in Israel

We examined help-seeking and internal obstacles to receiving psychosocial support in the wake of community violence exposure in a sample of 1,835 Arab and Jewish adolescents living in Israel. Paper and pencil surveys conducted in schools examined adolescents’ personal victimization and witnessing of community violence in the past year, and then queried adolescents about their help-seeking after violence exposure. Our findings indicated widespread exposure to community violence, particularly for the Arab respondents. Only one in three Arab and one in four Jewish adolescents reported seeking help from anyone to cope with such experiences following their violence exposure, and only rarely did adolescents seek help from a mental health professional (one in twenty for Jewish and one in nine for Arab adolescents). Adolescents across both samples indicated a variety of internal obstacles that might explain their lack of seeking help to cope with violence exposure, including cognitive minimization of the event, deliberately maintaining the secrecy of the event, wishing to maintain their autonomy, and failing to believe in the efficacy of seeking help from others. Such findings shed light on the difficult challenges to providing professional support to adolescents when they are exposed to community violence, and suggest that such challenges, while varying to a degree across cultures, are also prevalent across cultures.     

Shattering the Myth of Legality: The Impact of the Media's Framing of Supreme Court Procedures on Perceptions of Fairness

The tendency of the media to depict the Supreme Court as inherently apolitical, some scholars argue, is part of the reason that many believe in the "myth of legality" in which the Court is perceived to operate above the ideological skirmishes of everyday politics. Our experimental analyses show that citizens react more negatively to press reports of a politically motivated Court than they do to coverage portraying a Court that strictly follows legal guidelines. Interestingly, our results also suggest that it is not so much the perceived absence of political wrangling among justices but rather it is the presence of legal guidelines driving the outcome that is the source of the perception of fairness.     

Peer Effects in the Individual and Group Literacy Achievement of High-School Students in a Bi-dialectal Context

The theory of peer effect posits that students who find themselves in the company of high or low performing peers tend to exhibit better academic performance than what is solely attributable to their own individual characteristics. In this study, we investigate peer effects within literacy achievement among Trinidadian and Tobagonian youth, using a nationally representative sample of 15-year-old students. Findings indicate the presence of a strong literacy-based peer effect in mathematics, reading, and science even after controlling for individual demographic differences. Peer effect alone explained between 30% and 67% of the total variation in literacy. Implications are discussed.     

Will jurors correct for evidence interdependence in their verdicts? It depends

Throughout an investigation, pieces of evidence are likely to contaminate one another, yet at trial jurors are expected to treat pieces of evidence as if they are independent. Are jurors able to understand potential evidence contamination? The present study showed mock jurors a videotaped trial simulation. Participants were randomly assigned to hear testimony regarding one piece of evidence, two pieces of independent evidence, or two pieces of interdependent evidence. The study tested the hypothesis that jurors who hear evidence that is interdependent will be just as likely to find the defendant guilty as jurors who hear about two pieces of independent evidence. When an eyewitness's identification was the uncontaminated piece of evidence, our hypothesis was supported. However, when the confession was the uncontaminated piece of evidence, jurors seemed to understand that one piece of evidence had been influenced by another and adjusted their beliefs about the defendant's guilt accordingly. This study supports the conclusion that jurors can sometimes identify and correct for evidence contamination in their perceptions of a defendant's guilt. Implications for reform support are discussed.     

Technological advances in the assessment of impulse control in offenders: A systematic review

Deficits in impulse control have been linked to criminal offending, risk of recidivism, and other maladaptive behaviours relevant to the criminal justice system (e.g. substance use). Impulse control can be conceptualized as encompassing the broad domains of response inhibition and impulsive/risky decision‐making. Advancements in technology have led to the development of computerized behavioural measures to assess performance in these domains, such as go/no‐go and delay discounting tasks. Despite a relatively large literature examining these tasks in offenders, findings are not universally consistent. This systematic review aims to synthesize the literature using computerized neurocognitive tasks to assess two domains of impulse control in offenders: response inhibition and impulsive/risky decision‐making. The review included 28 studies from diverse geographic locations, settings, and offender populations. The results largely support the general conclusion that offenders exhibit deficits in impulse control compared with non‐offenders, with studies of response inhibition more consistently reporting differences than studies using impulsive and risky decision‐making tasks. Findings are discussed in the context of contemporary neuroimaging research emphasizing dysfunction in prefrontal cortex as a key contributor to impulse control deficits in offenders.     

Judging credibility: Can spaced lessons help students think more critically online?

Despite the prevalence of the spacing effect in the psychological literature, the impact of lesson timing has not yet been fully explored in real classrooms. The current study examined whether spacing could improve long‐term retention of both factual and critical thinking curriculum‐based teaching materials for children. Students 9 to 12 years old were taught to judge the credibility of websites in either three consecutive days of lessons or one lesson per week. Thirty‐five days after the final lesson, students were tested on factual knowledge and applied their knowledge to evaluating a new website. Students in the spaced condition remembered more facts from the lessons and were better able to explain their website ratings than students in the massed group.     

Toward a comprehensive test battery for face cognition: Assessment of the tasks

Despite the importance of face recognition in everyday life and frequent complaints about its failure, there is no comprehensive test battery for this ability. As a first step in constructing such a battery, we present 18 tasks aimed at measuring face perception, face learning, face recognition, and the recognition of facially expressed emotions. A sample of 153 healthy young adults completed all tasks. In general, reaction time measures showed high estimates of internal consistency; tasks focused on performance accuracy yielded reliabilities that were somewhat lower, yet high enough to support their use in a battery of face cognition measures. Some of the tasks allowed computation of established experimental effects in a within-subjects design, such as the part-whole effect. Most of these experimental effects were confirmed in our large sample, and valuable effect size estimates were obtained. However, in many cases these difference measures showed poor estimates of internal consistency.