Prior Allegations of Harassment Impact Mock Jurors’ Perceptions of Sexual Harassment in a Criminal Trial

The current study examined factors that may influence jurors’ judgments in a criminal sexual harassment case with Canadian undergraduate students. Undergraduate students (n?=?268) examined whether defendant’s gender, victim’s gender, and whether the victim had made similar accusations in the past were influential in mock jurors’ judgments. Participants read a case summary describing an alleged sexual harassment and answered questions concerning defendant’s guilt, defendant’s culpability, and perceptions of the victim. Additionally, attitudes concerning sexual harassment and sexism were measured. The presence of prior allegations was a driving force in mock juror decisions, with mock jurors providing more guilty verdicts, more favorable perceptions of the victim, and less favorable perceptions of the defendant when no prior allegations of harassment had been made by the victim. The results of the current study suggest that the presence of prior allegations have a large impact on mock jurors’ decisions, suggesting that prior allegations may need to be considered more closely in court before they can be used as evidence.

     

An experiential approach to the inpatient anger management group

Groups that target aggression on the inpatient milieu usually use psycho-educational and cognitive-behavioral techniques. In contrast, this article presents an experiential approach that targets the moment-by-moment experience within the inpatient group. It makes unique use of group-closing relaxation exercises that facilitate cohesion, consolidate the affectively charged material generated during the session, and reorganize patients' emotional/cognitive understanding of themselves and the world around them. These groups also give patients the opportunity to negotiate the affective residue associated with past aggressive acts, and the opportunity to examine the personal meaning and underlying assumptions behind ongoing group interactions. We describe several techniques or modes of intervention. The authors also use case examples to illustrate the theory, technique, and impact the approach can have on its members.     

Inferring the mental processes of other minds

In 4 experiments, the authors examined how several variables influence the quality and quantity of information that people use to make judgments about other people. The results showed that when possible, participants consistently responded appropriately to variables that influenced information that they used to make inferences about other minds. The results also suggested that under circumstances with no opportunity to contrast behavior in different situations, people might not be sensitive to the quality and quantity of information present. The authors interpreted results to mean that under most circumstances, people make inferences in a way that efficiently uses information about the causes of behavior.     

Reducing self-control by weakening belief in free will

Believing in free will may arise from a biological need for control. People induced to disbelieve in free will show impulsive and antisocial tendencies, suggesting a reduction of the willingness to exert self-control. We investigated whether undermining free will affects two aspects of self-control: intentional inhibition and perceived self-control. We exposed participants either to anti-free will or to neutral messages. The two groups (no-free will and control) then performed a task that required self-control to inhibit a prepotent response. No-free will participants showed less intentional inhibitions than controls, suggesting a reduction of self-control. We assessed perceived self-control by asking participants whether the response resulted from a deliberate intention or from an impulsive reaction. Perceived self-control was lower in the no-free will group than in control group. Our findings show that undermining free will can degrade self-control and provide insights into how disbelieving in free will leads to antisocial tendencies.     

Egocentric/allocentric and coordinate/categorical haptic encoding in blind people

In this research, the impact of visual experience on the capacity to use egocentric (body-centered) and allocentric (object-centered) representations in combination with categorical (invariant non-metric) and coordinate (variable metric) spatial relations was examined. Participants memorized through haptic (congenitally blind, adventitiously blind, and blindfolded) and haptic + visual (sighted) exploration triads of 3D objects and then they were asked to judge: "which object was closest/farthest to you?" (egocentric-coordinate); "which object was on your left/right?" (egocentric-categorical); "which object was closest/farthest to a target object (e.g., cone)?" (allocentric-coordinate); "which object was on the left/right of the target object (e.g., cone)?" (allocentric-categorical). The results showed a slowdown in processing time when congenitally blind people provided allocentric-coordinate judgments and adventitiously blind people egocentric-categorical judgments. Moreover, in egocentric judgments, adventitiously blind participants were less accurate than sighted participants. However, the overall performance was quite good and this supports the idea that the differences observed are more quantitative than qualitative. The theoretical implications of these results are discussed.     

Choosing Your Words and Pictures Wisely: When Do Individuation Instructions Reduce the Cross‐Race Effect?

Recognition accuracy for faces of an individual's own race typically exceeds recognition accuracy for other‐race faces. The categorization–individuation model (Hugenberg, Young, Bernstein, & Sacco, 2010) attributes this cross‐race effect to motivation to encode distinctive features of own‐race faces but category defining features for other‐race faces. Two experiments using different stimuli tested hypotheses generated from this model with both Black and White participants. For White participants, instructions to individuate reduced the cross‐race effect in both studies but did not eliminate it in Study 1. Black participants did not exhibit the cross‐race effect in either study, but individuation instructions improved both their same‐race and other‐race sensitivity. The present quality of interracial contact moderated the relationship between instructions and other‐race sensitivity for both Black and White participants in Study 1 but not in Study 2. Overall, results provide mixed support for this social categorization model. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Aspects of the unity of consciousness and everyday memory failures

We argue that analyzing everyday memory failures in terms of the "unity of consciousness" can elucidate the bases of such failures. A perfect unity amongst one's mental states is rare. In extreme cases the unity of consciousness can breakdown in dramatic fashion (e.g., in Dissociative Identity Disorder), but such breakdowns also occur in less dramatic ways that affect us in everyday life. For example, disruptions in the unity of consciousness can result in everyday memory failures, such as forgetting to put on a tie for an important formal meeting. After providing some philosophical background into the notions of "unity of consciousness" and "functionalism," we offer preliminary analyses of three examples of everyday memory failure. We then introduce and develop what we call the "unity model" of memory failure and show how it explains the examples. We also describe different ways that unity can break down which, in turn, can lead to memory failure and inappropriate behavior. We then show how slips of action and other kinds of cognitive failures (e.g., memory blocks) differ from everyday memory failures. Finally, we examine alternative models (e.g., Absentmindedness and Multimodal) arguing that the unity model is preferable, and then show how our model is consistent with some experimental results.     

Emergence: selection,allowed operations,and conserved quantities

We treat emergence via reference to four ideas: (1) the different levels of emergence are characterised by distinct conservation laws, (2) the emergence process starts from some instability, (3) the driving force of emergence is given by selection processes allowing canalisation of specific (emerging) paths, and (4) new forms of stability are determined by new kinds of operations. At a quantum-mechanical level entropy is conserved in an isolated system or at global level and the only allowed operations are local shifts in order and disorder – that implies weakening and strengthening correlations. The stable state is here represented by a highly symmetric state. Emergence of the classical physical world arises when energy is conserved and allowable operations include building and breaking of physical-chemical connections. The stable state is here the energy minimum. Emergence of the biotic world implies that the conserved quantity is energy efficiency. Energy is no longer locally conserved. The allowed operations are those that are consistent with the survival (persistence) of the organism. The emergence of the mind is grounded in selecting those operations that are rational (in the sense of maintaining biological self-organisation). Here, the rational value of behaviour is the quantity of interest. Mounting the ladder of (both cosmic and biological) evolution means to have more and more selection of the possible outcomes (and therefore of the relative operations) but in a growing space of possibilities: if selection would reduce more and more the space of possibilities, the final result would be a rigid order; at the other extreme, if we had only expansion of the possibilities without selection, the final result would be disorder. So growing complexity can be understood as a path in the evolutionary landscape of the systems in which a balance of order and disorder is maintained although each level emerges as a result of the selection.     

Development of egocentric and allocentric spatial representations from childhood to elderly age

Spatial reference frames are fundamental to represent the position of objects or places. Although research has reported changes in spatial memory abilities during childhood and elderly age, no study has assessed reference frames processing during the entire lifespan using the same task. Here, we aimed at providing some preliminary data on the capacity to process reference frames in 283 healthy participants from 6 to 89 years of age. A spatial memory task requiring egocentric/allocentric verbal judgments about objects in peri-/extrapersonal space was used. The main goals were: (1) tracing a baseline of the normal process of development of these spatial components; (2) clarifying if reference frames are differently vulnerable to age-related effects. Results showed a symmetry between children of 6–7 years and older people of 80–89 years who were slower and less accurate than all other age groups. As regards processing time, age had a strong effect on the allocentric component, especially in extrapersonal space, with a longer time in 6- to 7-year-old children and 80- to 89-year-old adults. The egocentric component looked less affected by aging. Regarding the level of spatial ability (accuracy), the allocentric ability appeared less sensitive to age-related variations, whereas the egocentric ability progressively improved from 8 years and declined from 60 years. The symmetry in processing time and level of spatial ability is discussed in relation to the development of executive functions and to the structural and functional changes due to incomplete maturation (in youngest children) and deterioration (in oldest adults) of underlying cerebral areas.     

Deconstructive and Constructive Dynamics in the Clinical Process: A Step Further in the Validation of the Two-Stage Semiotic Model

The two-stage semiotic model (TSSM) suggests that the basic dynamics of a psychotherapy process could be described in terms of alternation of two different processes aimed respectively at constraining patients’ meanings regulating experience and action (deconstructive process) and at supporting the elaboration of innovative meanings (constructive process). The present case study tests the specificity of each of these processes in terms of clinically relevant features detected at interpersonal, intrapsychical, and clinical levels. A 76-session good-outcome psychodynamic treatment was studied. The results enable constructive and deconstructive sessions to be differentiated in terms of interaction modalities and the patient's modalities of thinking. This is consistent with the TSSM hypothesis that the constructive and deconstructive sessions are composed of qualitatively different clinical processes.