A Lay Perspective on the Accuracy of Eyewitness Testimony1

To understand more about what laypeople think they “know” about eyewitness testimony, 276 jury-eligible university students were asked to indicate what factors they believe affect the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. In contrast to the large proportion of eyewitness-memory research that concerns system variables, the lay respondents overwhelmingly generated factors related to estimator variables, while system-variable factors such as police questioning and identification procedures were rarely mentioned. Respondents also reported that their own common sense and everyday life experiences were their most important sources of information about the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Not only do these results clarify the need for further research on the lay perspective of eyewitness testimony, but they also provide some insight into the way in which many jurors might approach cases involving eyewitness evidence.     

Weapon Focus and Gender Differences in Eyewitness Accuracy: Arousal Versus Salience

Competing theories of arousal versus salience and object enhancement vs. reduced perceptual processing as explanations for the weapon focus effect in eyewitness identification were examined. Male and female students ( N = 200) viewed a videotape of a male or female intruder rudely barging into a classroom while carrying a book, a gun, or an unusual object and demanding to know the whereabouts of another student. Feature accuracy recall of both the intruder and the object were assessed on a postexperimental questionnaire. Results supported the salience and reduced-perceptual-processing hypotheses, suggesting that weapon focus may be a special instance of a more general salient object effect. An own-gender bias in eyewitness identification was replicated when no weapon or unusual objects distracted eyewitnesses, but was reversed when a weapon or an unusual object was present.     

Preschool boys' development of emotional self-regulation strategies in a sample at risk for behavior problems

Little longitudinal research has been conducted on changes in children's emotional self-regulation strategy (SRS) use after infancy, particularly for children at risk. In this study, the authors examined changes in boys' emotional SRS from toddlerhood through preschool. Repeated observational assessments using delay of gratification tasks at ages 2, 3, and 4 years were examined with both variable- and person-oriented analyses in a low-income sample of boys (N = 117) at risk for early problem behavior. Results were consistent with theory on emotional SRS development in young children. Children initially used more emotion-focused SRS (e.g., comfort seeking) and transitioned to greater use of planful SRS (e.g., distraction) by 4 years of age. Person-oriented analysis using trajectory analysis found similar patterns from 2 to 4 years, with small groups of boys showing delayed movement away from emotion-focused strategies or delay in the onset of regular use of distraction. The results provide a foundation for future researchers to examine the development of SRS in low-income young children.     

What chance-credence norms should be

Synthese - Multiple realizability says that the same kind of mental states may be manifested by systems with very different physical constitutions. Putnam (1967) supposed it to be...     

Intentional Action and the Post-Coma Patient

Detecting conscious awareness in a patient emerging from a coma state is problematic, because our standard attributions of conscious awareness rely on interpreting bodily movement as intentional action. Where there is an absence of intentional bodily action, as in the vegetative state, can we reliably assume that there is an absence of conscious awareness? Recent neuroimaging work suggests that we can attribute conscious awareness to some patients in a vegetative state by interpreting their brain activity as intentional mental action. I suggest that this change of focus, from the interpretation of motor behaviour as intentional bodily action to the interpretation of neural activity as intentional mental action, raises philosophical issues that affect the interpretation of the neuroimaging data.     

Self‐monitoring,status, and justice‐related information flow

We develop and test a multi‐level interactive model of the relationships among self‐monitoring, co‐workers' formal and informal status, and justice‐related information flow in a scenario‐based field study of 4,011 unique relationships collected from 84 respondents. We predict that individuals high in self‐monitoring, because they attend more carefully to social cues and have higher levels of expressive control, will be more likely than low self‐monitors to intend to seek, accept, and provide justice‐related information as a function of their co‐workers' formal status, the size of their co‐workers' networks, and the advantageousness of their co‐workers' position in the networks (betweenness centrality). This cross‐level interaction hypothesis receives strong support in terms of co‐workers' network size, limited support in terms of co‐workers' betweenness centrality, and no support in terms of co‐workers' formal status. We address the implications of these findings for the literature on self‐monitoring, social construction of organizational justice, and social networks, as well as the strengths and limitations of our approach.     

Review of the Evidence for Motivation Deficits in Youth with ADHD and Their Association with Functional Outcomes

Preeminent theories of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suggest that motivation deficits are core underlying features of the disorder. However, it is currently unclear whether empirical evidence supports the assertion that significant group (ADHD v. comparison) differences in motivation exist or that problems with motivation contribute to the functional impairments that youth with ADHD experience. Accordingly, this review focused on evaluating and summarizing the empirical literature on the presence of motivation deficits and their association with functional outcomes in samples of youth with ADHD. Twenty studies met the review inclusion criteria. Results support the assertion that youth with ADHD have lower academic-related motivation in comparison to their peers and that motivation plays an important role in academic outcomes, with the strongest evidence to date for reading achievement. However, the available evidence is limited, and few existing studies are aligned with the much larger theoretical and empirical motivation literature in typically developing youth. Given preliminary evidence that motivation plays a role in the academic impairments of youth with ADHD, the review concludes with a discussion of whether current ADHD interventions adequately target motivation and highlights important future directions.     

Mimicry and Investigative Interviewing: Using Deliberate Mimicry to Elicit Information and Cues to Deceit

We examined the effect of deliberate mimicry on eliciting (accurate) information and cues to deceit. Mimicry is considered to facilitate cooperation and compliance in truth tellers, whereas liars are constrained to provide detail. We therefore expected truth tellers to be more detailed than liars, particularly after being mimicked. A total of 165 participants told the truth or lied about a meeting they attended. During the interview, an interviewer mimicked half of the participants. Truth tellers were more detailed than liars, but only in the ‘mimicry present’ condition. Truth tellers also gave more accurate units of information than liars, and the difference was most pronounced in the ‘mimicry present’ condition. Mimicry as a tool for eliciting information and cues to deceit fits well with the emerging ‘interviewing to detect deception’ literature, particularly in the ‘encouraging interviewees to say more’ approach. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.