Military and Crime: A Systematic Review of the Literature

ABSTRACT

This study systematically analyzed the literature on the effects of military participation on later criminal behavior. When all studies were analyzed as a whole, the findings did not indicate a clear effect. However, a focus upon specific offense types revealed that the military experience decreased non-violent crime but increased violent crime. Active military personnel tended to be less likely to commit crime. Some evidence demonstrated that male and non-white veterans committed more crime than their civilian counterparts, but future research is needed to replicate these subgroup differences. Theoretical implications and future research directions are also discussed.     

The role of temporal unpredictability for process interference and code overlap in perception-action dual tasks

Two experiments explore interference in dual tasks. The first task required perceptual judgment of the movement direction (left vs right) of a briefly presented stimulus; the second task was a tone-discrimination reaction-time (RT) task. Participants reported their judgment at leisure. In 50% of the trials they were told to ignore the stimulus (no report). The directions of stimulus movement and response in the RT task could either be the same or different, establishing cross-task compatibility (CTC) relations. We varied the degree of temporal unpredictability by using two stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOA, 100 ms vs 1200 ms) for the task stimuli. In Experiment 1, SOA was varied randomly within blocks of trials in one group and between blocks in another group. In Experiment 2, only the short SOA was used in one group and only the long SOA in another group. In both experiments, we observed substantially longer RTs with the short compared with the long SOA, regardless of whether there was temporal certainty (blocked or constant SOA) or uncertainty (random SOA) about stimulus onset. We assume that the process of encoding into short-term memory in one task interferes with concurrent retrieval processes (i.e., response selection) in the other task. This process interference effect was strongly reduced in no-report trials. Furthermore, we found shorter RT in compatible than in incompatible trials. This CTC effect diminished with long SOA but occurred even in no-report trials, implying that it refers to an automatically activated and then decaying code that primes response selection in the RT task.     

Phoneme Awareness in Children: A Function of Sonority

This study tested the hypothesis that the sonority of phonemes (a sound's relative loudness compared to other sounds with the same length, stress, and pitch) influences children's segmentation of syllable constituents. Two groups of children, first graders and preschoolers, were assessed for their awareness of phonemes in coda and onset positions, respectively, using different phoneme segmentation tasks. Although the trends for the first graders were more robust than the trends for the preschoolers, phoneme segmentation in the two groups correlated with the sonority levels of phonemes, regardless of phoneme position or task. These results, consistent with prior studies of adults, suggest that perceptual properties, such as sonority levels, greatly influence the development of phoneme awareness.     

Three Approaches to Iterated Belief Contraction

In this paper we investigate three approaches to iterated contraction, namely: the Moderate (or Priority) contraction, the Natural (or Conservative) contraction, and the Lexicographic contraction. We characterise these three contraction functions using certain, arguably plausible, properties of an iterated contraction function. While we provide the characterisation of the first two contraction operations using rationality postulates of the standard variety for iterated contraction, we found doing the same for the Lexicographic contraction more challenging. We provide its characterisation using a variation of Epistemic ranking function instead.     

Developmental Differences in the Naming of Contextually Non-Categorical Objects

This study investigates the naming process of contextually non-categorical objects in children from 3 to 9 plus 13-year-olds. 112 children participated in the study. Children were asked to narrate a story individually while looking at Mercer Mayer’s textless, picture book Frog, where are you? The narratives were audio recorded and transcribed. Texts were analyzed to find out how children at different ages name contextually non-categorical objects, tree and its parts in this case. Our findings revealed that increasing age in children is a positive factor in naming objects that are parts or extended forms of an object which itself constitutes a basic category in a certain context. Younger children used categorical names more frequently to refer to parts or disfigured forms of the object than older children and adults while older children and adults used specified names to refer to the parts or extended forms of the categorical names.     

Discriminating the stimulus elements during human odor-taste learning: a successful analytic stance does not eliminate learning

Odor "sweetness" may arise from experiencing odors and tastes together, resulting in a flavor memory that is later reaccessed by the odor. Forming a flavor memory may be impaired if the taste and odor elements are apparent during exposure, suggesting that configural processing may underpin learning. Using a new procedure, participants made actual flavor discriminations for one odor-taste pair (e.g., Taste A vs. Odor X-Taste A) and mock discriminations for another (e.g., Odor Y-Taste B vs. Odor Y-Taste B). Participants, who were successful at detecting the actual flavor discriminations, demonstrated equal amounts of learning for both odor-taste pairings. These results suggest that although a capacity to discriminate flavor into its elements may be necessary to support learning, whether participants experience a configural or elemental flavor representation may not.     

Trajectories of Adolescent Psychopathic Traits

There is growing evidence that psychopathic traits are stable across the adolescent developmental period. Yet, no previous studies have examined the longitudinal course of these traits across adolescence. In this study, we examined joint developmental trajectories of grandiose-manipulative traits, callous-unemotional traits, and impulsive-irresponsible behavior and how these trajectories were related to changes in parental behavior and delinquency over time. Participants were 1,068 adolescents from a community sample, who were followed annually over 4 years. Overall, our results showed that a four-class latent class growth model best represented the developmental pattern of adolescent psychopathic traits. Although the majority of adolescents showed low or moderate initial levels that also decreased over time, there was a small group of adolescents who, despite significant decreases in two out of three dimensions, still maintained relatively high levels on all three dimensions. We also found that parental behavior and delinquency developed differently for the groups over time, with the high-decreasing group engaging in more delinquent behavior over time and experiencing more negative parental behavior than any other group. In sum, our findings suggest that there is a group of adolescents at particular risk for negative development.     

Perceived sources and levels of stress,general self-efficacy and coping strategies in preclinical dental students

Dental education programs are known to be highly stressful and stress can affect general health. The aims were to identify sources of stress among preclinical students and to evaluate their perceived levels of stress, self-efficacy and effective coping strategies in a private dental school. One hundred preclinical students in a Turkish private dental school were surveyed using dental environment stress (DES), perceived stress (PSS), general self-efficacy (G-SES) and brief coping scales (Brief-COPE). Age, gender, history of psychiatric treatment, factors that affected the choice of dentistry, choice rank of dental school, scholarship and income was recorded. ‘Exams and grades’ followed by ‘Fear of failing course or year’ were found to be the most stressprovoking factors. The most and the least stressprovoking DES domains were ‘Workload’ and ‘Social stressors’, respectively. ‘Social stressors’ affected male more than female (p < .05). The most and the least common coping strategies were found to be ‘Planning’, and ‘Drug’, respectively. Female used ‘Instrumental support’ more than male (p < .05). Demographic factors had impact on the perceived stress factors and levels, as well as coping strategies. Unlike previous studies establishing high stress levels in dental students, preclinical students displayed moderate level of stress. Clinical dental education might be more responsible for creating stress.     

Mediating and Moderating Effects of Social Support in the Relationship Between Social Anxiety and Hope Levels in Children

This study aims to examine whether hope levels are predicted by social anxiety and social support and to investigate if the relationship between social anxiety and children’s hope levels is mediated and moderated by the social support of children. The Social Anxiety Scale for Children, Children’s Hope Scale, and Social Support Appraisals Scale for Children were administrated to a sample of 289 children (148 males and 141 females) enrolled in public school. To determine the relationships between variables, a Pearson correlation coefficient was utilized. Regression-based mediation and moderation analyses assessed whether social support mediates and moderates the relationship between social anxiety and children’s hope levels. Social anxiety and social support both correlated significantly with children’s hope levels; social anxiety had a negative correlation with children’s hope levels, while social support was positively correlated. Regression-based mediation and moderation analyses showed that social support mediates and moderates the relationship between social anxiety and children’s hope levels. The results of the present study emphasized the effects of social support on children; it had a positive effect on hope levels and a negative effect on social anxiety. Based on these results, it is recommended that the social support of children is increased via psycho-education programs for parents, caregivers, and teachers. It is further recommended that social-support-seeking behavior programs are developed in educational and mental health settings.     

The relationship between responsiveness to social and monetary rewards and ADHD symptoms

Alterations in reward processing are frequently reported in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). One important factor affecting reward processing is the quality of reward as social and monetary rewards are processed by different neural networks. However, the effect of reward type on reward processing in ADHD has not been extensively studied. Hence, in the current study, an exploratory research was conducted to investigate the effect of reward type (i.e., social or monetary) on different phases of reward processing. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) during a spatial attention paradigm in which cues heralded availability and type of the upcoming reward and feedbacks informed about the reward earned. Thirty-nine (19 males) healthy individuals (age range: 19-27 years) participated in the study. ADHD symptoms were assessed by using ADHD self-report scale (ASRS). Our results revealed a consistent negative correlation between the hyperactivity subscale of ASRS and almost all social-feedback related ERPs (P2, P3, and FRN). ERP amplitudes after social feedbacks were less positive for P2 and P3 and more negative for FRN for individuals with greater hyperactivity levels. Our findings suggest that hyporesponsiveness to social feedbacks may be associated with hyperactivity. However, the results have to be confirmed with clinical populations.