Juvenile homicide: The need for an interdisciplinary approach

Most of the empirical literature on juvenile homicide has emerged from the clinical experience of mental health professionals who have diagnosed and/or treated youngsters who killed. After a critical review of this literature, data on 787 juvenile homicide offenders are presented and discussed. These data indicate that intrafamilial killings represent but a small fraction of all homicides perpetrated by juveniles and that there are clear differences between intrafamilial and extrafamilial juvenile homicides.     

Acquisition of spatial knowledge under conditions of temporospatial discontinuity in young and elderly adults

Summary Young and elderly adults acquired route information from a sequence of slides depicting a walk through an actual environment. The accuracy of their distance knowledge after viewing the slides was compared for a normal presentation and a presentation with temporospatial discontinuity. No differences between age groups were noted under normal presentation conditions, but young adults were more accurate under conditions of temporospatial discontinuity. Results were interpreted in terms of an age-related decrement in the operational capacity of working memory. They were also viewed as supportive of a constructivist-representational theory of spatial learning.This research was conducted while the senior author served as Principal Investigator for National Institute on Aging Grant No. 1 ROI AG05169, Aging and Spatial Cognition, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA     

The influence of Friedrich Engels on Alexander Bogdanov’s Basic Elements of the Historical View of Nature

Studies in East European Thought - Alexander Bogdanov’s first work of philosophy, Basic Elements of the Historical View of Nature, was fundamentally influenced by Friedrich Engels. As a...     

The Role of Parents’ School Climate Perceptions on Attainment Expectations for Black Middle Schoolers

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Parents’ beliefs about their children’s schools are important influences on their parenting and on their children’s outcomes. Because of...     

Counter‐intuitive moral judgement following traumatic brain injury

Several neurological patient populations, including traumatic brain injury (TBI), appear to produce an abnormally ‘utilitarian’ pattern of judgements to moral dilemmas; they tend to make judgements that maximize the welfare of the majority, rather than deontological judgements based on the following of moral rules (e.g., do not harm others). However, this patient research has always used extreme dilemmas with highly valued moral rules (e.g., do not kill). Data from healthy participants, however, suggest that when a wider range of dilemmas are employed, involving less valued moral rules (e.g., do not lie), moral judgements demonstrate sensitivity to the psychological intuitiveness of the judgements, rather than their deontological or utilitarian content (Kahane et al., Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 7, 2011, 393). We sought the moral judgements of 30 TBI participants and 30 controls on moral dilemmas where content (utilitarian/deontological) and intuition (intuitive/counter‐intuitive) were measured concurrently. Overall TBI participants made utilitarian judgements in equal proportions to controls; disproportionately favouring utilitarian judgements only when they were counter‐intuitive, and deontological judgements only when they were counter‐intuitive. These results speak against the view that TBI causes a specific utilitarian bias, suggesting instead that moral intuition is broadly disrupted following TBI.     

Sectioned offenders presenting with enduring mental illness: a study exploring behaviors indicative of bullying

Logit and logistic regression analyses were employed to explore the nature, extent and predictors of behaviors indicative of "being bullied" and of "bullying others" in a sample of 125 adult male offender-patients sectioned for enduring mental illness and detained within a high-secure psychiatric hospital. The study addresses the lack of research into this specialized population to date, with a subsidiary aim of comparing the results directly with a previous study conducted with a population of adult male personality-disordered offender-patients (n = 53). Participants were required to complete a self-report behavioral checklist (Direct and Indirect Patient behavior Checklist-Hospital version Revised). The prediction that indirect (subtle) aggression would be reported more frequently than direct aggression was supported in relation to perpetration estimates, with evidence such aggression was also more prevalent among personality-disordered than mentally ill offender-patients. As predicted verbal aggression was the most commonly reported direct behavior. Although it was predicted that those perpetrating aggression would present with increased experience with secure settings this was only supported with regard to bully-victims. Contrary to the prediction made, those victimized did not present with less experience of secure settings. Consistent with the hypothesis, bully/victims were predicted by increased negative behavior toward staff and hospital rules. The results are discussed in relation to the environment in which the aggression is taking place with the implications for practice and future research outlined.     

The Effects of Belief Systems on the Job-Related Satisfaction of Managers and Subordinates

The research reported here examined the effect of personal belief systems of managers and their subordinates on their interrelationships as measured by several job-related satisfaction variables. Results from a sample of 175 manager-subordinate dyads demonstrate that the belief system construct may significantly affect job-related satisfaction as well as the quality and outcomes of manager-subordinate relationships. This research also suggests that socially oriented managers are positively associated with higher levels of subordinate satisfaction.     

A generation effect with numbers rather than words

Memory &; Cognition - It has previously been shown that a word from a list is more likely to be remembered if the word was generated, rather than read, by the subject. Two simple experiments...     

Image analysis of small animal feeding behavior: An update

Recently we published a design for an automated feeding behavior system (Rowley, Stitt, & Hanson, 2003). One disadvantage of this system is that it relied on expensive, custom hardware. Here we present a modified version that replaces the custom hardware with a simple, commercially available webcam and modified the MATLAB analysis software as well. The new system is much less expensive and easier to implement, while still providing for bias-free collection of consumption data in a feeding behavior trial.