South African Serial Homicide: Consistency in Victim Types and Crime Scene Actions Across Series

Key to understanding the significance of behavioural evidence for linkage purposes is in establishing how consistently an offender displays the same or similar behaviours across their series. There have however to date been very few studies aiming at identifying salient components of offending behaviour that can be used reliably for linking individual crimes as part of a single series. In addition, studies that have been conducted have all dealt with serial homicide in the Western world and have been based on small samples of cases from each country. Some of the recent literature has started to disentangle some of these salient features, notably the victim, violence levels, control, and planning. The current study focused on evaluating the consistency of these features across series, using a sample of serial homicides from South Africa consisting of 30 offenders with a total of 283 victims and 235 crime scenes. Results indicate that the level of interaction with the victim may be influential to the stability or instability of offending patterns across the series. How offenders approach planning in their offence also showed a certain degree of consistency, with patterns of violence being the least consistent across the series of all components tested. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Extending the Knapsack: Using the White Privilege Analysis to Examine Conferred Advantage and Disadvantage

This article describes a self-awareness activity that utilizes a directed reading on privilege and a small-group discussion format to examine unearned disadvantage and unearned advantage in one’s life. This exercise can help clinicians to better understand systemic and individual sources of power and privilege in society. Beginning with my previous work on white privilege, students can extend this analysis to other domains of privilege, including, for example, gender, class, sexuality, age, nationality, and physical ability, to name a few. The primary goals of this reflective exercise are to help clinicians understand how clients’ lives are influenced by societal disadvantages and advantages, to encourage a new understanding of oneself, and to increase empathy towards clients.     

My Recency,Our Primacy: How Social Connection Influences Evaluations of Sequences

Individuals have many life experiences (e.g., work and vacations) that consist of a series of interconnected episodes (i.e., temporal sequences). Assessments of such experiences are integral to daily life in that they facilitate future planning and behaviors for individuals. Therefore, these experiences often culminate in evaluations of their global affect. Past work has shown that retrospective, affective evaluations of these sequences generally exhibit an “end effect,” whereby a sequence's end intensity—but not its start intensity—is disproportionately weighted. Yet, researchers have largely investigated experiences that occur alone. In contrast, many real‐world experiences vary in their extent of social connection to others (e.g., working in an office with others versus alone in a cubicle). The present work fills this gap by showing the moderating role of social connection on how episodes are weighted in global affective ratings. Five studies involving two autobiographical experiences spanning several days each (workweek and spring break) and two brief simulated experiences show that high social connection leads to greater (lesser) weighting of the first (last) episode. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate that these effects persist across different forms of social connection (i.e., interpersonal interaction versus semantic priming tasks) and are supported regardless of whether social connection occurs at encoding or retrieval of an experience. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Concurrent cognitive processes in rat serial pattern learning: II. Discrimination learning,rule learning,chunk length,and multiple‐item memories

The current experiment examined the factors that determine acquisition for elements of highly structured serial patterns. Three groups of rats were trained on three patterns with parallel rule‐based hierarchical structure, but with 3‐, 4‐, or 5‐element chunks, each with a final violation element. Once rats mastered their patterns, probe patterns were introduced to answer several questions. To assess the extent to which the learned response pattern depended on intrachamber location cues for anticipating different element types, Spatial Shift Probes shifted the starting lever of patterns to locations that positioned chunk boundaries where they had never been experienced during training. To assess the extent to which a phrasing cue is necessary for rats to perform a chunk‐boundary response, a Cue Removal Probe tested whether rats would produce a chunk‐boundary response in the correct serial position if the phrasing cue was omitted. To assess the extent to which cues from multiple trials leading up to the violation element are required to anticipate the violation element, Multiple‐Item Memory Probes required rats to make an unexpected response on one of the elements in the last two chunks of the pattern prior to the violation element. The results indicated that rats used multiple concurrent learning and memory processes to master serial patterns, including discrimination learning, rule learning, encoding of chunk length, and multiple‐item memories.     

Regulatory job stressors and their within-person relationships with ego depletion: The roles of state anxiety,self-control effort,and job autonomy

Our research aimed at disentangling the underlying processes of the adverse relationship between regulatory job stressors and ego depletion. Specifically, we analyzed whether state anxiety and self-control effort would mediate the within-person relationships of time pressure, planning and decision-making, and emotional dissonance with ego depletion. In addition, we also tested potential attenuating effects of situational job autonomy on the adverse effects of regulatory job stressors on state anxiety, self-control effort, and ego depletion. Based on an experience sampling design, we gathered a sample of 97 eldercare workers who provided data on 721 experience-sampling occasions. Multilevel moderated serial mediation analyses revealed that time pressure and emotional dissonance, but not planning and decision-making, exerted significant serial indirect effects on ego depletion via state anxiety and self-control effort. Finally, we found conditional serial indirect effects of all three regulatory job stressors on ego depletion as a function of job autonomy. Theoretical implications for scholarly understanding of coping with regulatory job stressors are discussed.     

Linking Crimes Using Behavioural Clues: Current Levels of Linking Accuracy and Strategies for Moving Forward

The number of published studies examining crime linkage analysis has grown rapidly over the last decade, to the point where a special issue of this journal has recently been dedicated to the topic. Many of these studies have used a particular measure (the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, or the AUC) to quantify the degree to which it is possible to link crimes. This article reviews studies that have utilised the AUC and examines how good we are currently at linking crimes (within the context of these research studies) and what factors impact linking accuracy. The results of the review suggest that, in the majority of cases, moderate levels of linking accuracy are achieved. Of the various factors that have been examined that might impact linking accuracy, the three factors that appear to have the most significant impact are crime type, behavioural domain, and jurisdiction. We discuss how generalisable these results are to naturalistic investigative settings. We also highlight some of the important limitations of the linking studies that we reviewed and offer up some strategies for moving this area of research forward. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Initial goals,goal trajectories,and serial argument resolvability: A growth curve analysis

This study examines dyadic patterns of goal pursuit during a serial argument interaction and their associations with perceived argument resolvability. The authors utilize a growth curve framework to highlight how both initial importance and trajectories (i.e., over‐time increases/decreases) of goal importance predicted perceived resolvability. Seventy‐six heterosexual couples discussed a current serial argument and reported their goals at 1‐min increments, using a video‐assisted recall method. Both initial importance and increases in actors' partner‐focused goals were positively associated with perceived resolvability, and increases in a partners' self‐focused goal importance across the course of the interaction were negatively associated with actors' postinteraction resolvability perceptions. Results suggest that partners should attend to both initial goals and trajectories of goal pursuit during argumentative interactions.     

Comparing serial homicides to single homicides: A study of prevalence,offender, and offence characteristics in Sweden

Multiple and serial homicides constitute around 1.6% of all homicides but have unusually tragic outcomes. The aims of this study were to report the prevalence serial‐homicide offences and the characteristics of serial‐homicide offenders in a non‐North American context. The study included all convicted serial‐homicide offenders in Sweden from 1973 to 2012 (n = 25), as well as a population‐based control sample of single‐homicide offenders collected during 2007 and 2009 (n = 201). Similar to U.S. findings, approximately 1.6% of homicides could be attributed to serial‐homicide offenders. Serial offenders were more often diagnosed with personality disorders and autism‐spectrum disorders compared with single offenders; and serial offences more often involved victims who were female and unacquainted with the offender, as well as planning, sexual motives, and asphyxia as method of violence. One third of serial offences involved actions aimed at disguising the manner of death; such actions were considerably less common in single‐homicide offences. Few offenders displayed the traditional profile of a serial‐homicide offender; however, one third displayed sexual motives, a rate roughly 10 times higher than that in the single‐homicide group. The study concludes that serial‐homicide offenders should be subjected to forensic‐psychiatric examinations and that research involving cross‐contextual differences and similarities in serial‐homicide offenders is needed.     

Distinctiveness and serial position functions in implicit memory

Serial position functions, with their characteristic primacy and recency effects, are ubiquitous in episodic memory tasks, and have also been observed in tasks tapping semantic memory. However, only one experiment, [Raanaas, R. K., & Magnussen, S. (2006a). Serial position effects in implicit memory. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 18, 398–414. doi:10.1080/09541440500162065], has demonstrated primacy and recency effects in implicit memory using an indirect memory test. In Experiment 1, we replicate this finding and in Experiment 2, we confirm a prediction that holds only if the serial position function observed in Experiment 1 was a “real” serial position function. These results confirm the presence of serial position functions in implicit memory and also support a general prediction of the relative distinctiveness principle that serial position functions should obtain whenever a set of items are ordered along a relevant dimension.     

系列再生法:实验模拟文化动态(英文)

系列再生法是一种用来探讨文化动态中的社会心理过程之实验方法。所谓文化动态是指文化如何形成、维持,以及如何随着时间而变化。此方法特别有利于以下研究:文化讯息是如何透过社会网络被传播、什么类型的文化讯息较可能透过社会网络被传播,以及文化讯息由一个人传到另一个人的过程中,是如何转化的。本文概述了系列再生实验方法的优点及缺点,讨论此方法的理论架构,并举例展诉如何有系统地应用此法,做有关文化刻板印象的研究。最后,本文讨论未来的研究方向,如文化动态的潜在文化差异,以及文化动态与社会网络之间的互动过程。