An eyewitness paradox

Two methods of analysing data from an identification parade give rise to seemingly contradictory outcomes, both of which reach statistical significance. The traditional method is based on the first choices of eyewitnesses, whereas the paired-comparison method takes account of each eyewitness's full rank ordering of the lineup participants. The person that most eyewitnesses pick out as the perpetrator of an offence (according to the first-choice method) may in fact be the person that those same eyewitnesses as a group regard as least likely to have committed the act (according to the paired-comparison method). Implications of the paradox for the analysis of lineup data are considered.     

Interviews with ethnic interviewees: Non-verbal communication errors in impression formation

Two studies are described concerning ethnic interviewees in interviews. The first study (a style of presentation study) revealed several differences in non-verbal behaviour displayed by Dutch and ethnic interviewees in interviews. The second study showed that interviewees with an ‘ethnic style’ of non-verbal presentation were assessed more negatively than interviewees with a ‘Dutch style’ of non-verbal presentation by a Dutch selection board. Finally, some implications of the results are discussed.     

The real and the ideal; gender differences in heterosexual behaviour among Norwegian adolescents

This article focuses on gender differences in early heterosexual behaviour among Norwegian adolescents. The material comprised a random sample of 3000 Norwegian adolescents aged 17–19 years. The response rate was 63%. Data were collected by means of anonymous self-administered questionnaires. Sixty-nine per cent of the girls and 59% of the boys had had sexual intercourse. The majority of the adolescents, and a larger percentage of girls than of boys, had their first intercourse within a relationship of mutual commitment. The boys' first coital partners were 0.2 years younger than the boys themselves and the girls' partners were 2.8 years older than were the girls. Boys had had more coital partners than girls but girls had had intercourse more often than boys. Coital frequency was affected more by how long the adolescents had known the partner than by gender as such. In conclusion, boys and girls aged between 17 and 19 years form part of couples at two different stages of development. For this reason, boys and girls accumulate different sexual experiences in the early stage of their sexual careers.     

The effects of recency and story content on children's moral judgments

Sixteen stories were read to children at ages 4, 7, and 11 years and to college freshmen (n = 24 per age level) to investigate the effects of recency and specific story content on the development of moral reasoning. The stories consisted of either positive or negative intention and either positive or negative consequence in one of four situations: rule breaking, property damage, property damage with peer interaction, or injury to a person. At each age level, half of the subjects heard the stories with the intention first and the consequence second, and half heard them in the reverse order. Analyses confirmed that in general younger children judged on consequence, whereas older children utilized intention, and that on stories containing intentional injury to a person, the younger child took intention into account. Recency effects were evidenced for both the 4- and 7-year-olds. In the 4-year-old group, however, the recency effects failed to override the salience of negative consequence in contexts of positive intention and negative consequence. This suggests that preschool children may respond primarily to the negative aspect of the story, whether intention or consequence.     

The selective impact of question form and input mode on the symbolic distance effect in children

Five experiments are reported on the symbolic distance effect (SDE) and related phenomena with 6- and 9-year-old children. In the first of these, children were asked to judge the relative sizes of animals in verbal and pictorial tests featuring the comparatives "bigger" and "smaller." A perceptual condition with actual objects was included by way of comparison. A Symbolic Distance Effect was obtained for both lexical and pictorial input. Mode differences were also observed. Pictures produced faster responses than words, and congruity effects occurred only in the pictorial condition. Although performance was similar in tests with either comparative, our subsequent experiments on both 6- and 9-year-olds reveal a significant asymmetry in the child's capacity to verify statements of relation as a function of the direction along the (size) continuum implied by the question. However, important differences between age groups also apparent in the data lead us to conclude that the older subjects develop strategies to overcome this asymmetry by translating certain statements of relation into a form more congruent with their natural modes of encoding.     

RESCUE AND RECOVERY AS A THEOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE,AND A KEY TO MORALITY IN EXTRATERRESTRIAL SPECIES

New theological understanding can emerge with the advancement of scientific knowledge and the use of new concepts, or older concepts in new ways. Here, the authors present a proposal to extend the concept of “rescue and recovery” found in the United Nations Law of the High Seas, off-world and within a broader purview of other intelligent and self-aware species that humans may someday encounter. The notion of a morality that extends to off-world species is not new, but in this analysis, rescue and recovery become an imperative when any intelligent and self-aware species is in harm's way. Rescue and recovery encompass a necessary action component except perhaps in those cases where rescuers are in danger. The authors explore three biblical examples of rescue and recovery to derive a fundamental meaning of the concept.     

We need to move beyond rating scales,white faces and adult perceivers: Invited Commentary on Sutherland & Young (2022), understanding trait impressions from faces

Sutherland and Young's perspective is a timely and rigorous examination of trait impressions based on facial cues. We propose three strtegies to further advance the field: incorporating natural language processing, including diverse facial stimuli, and re-interpreting developmental data.     

Stimulus control and delayed reinforcement

Pigeons were tested for generalization along the line-orientation dimension, after being trained on various two-component multiple schedules. The first component contained either a variable-interval 1-min schedule of immediate reinforcement or an extinction schedule and was associated with a plain white key (S1). The second component contained a variable-interval 1-min schedule of delayed reinforcement and was associated with a black line on a white background (S2). The major results showed that (a) decremental gradients were obtained around the stimulus associated with the delayed reinforcement component when S1 was associated with extinction, but that incremental gradients were obtained when S1 was associated with immediate reinforcement, (b) the subjects' pretraining did not affect the generalization gradients if sufficient training on the terminal multiple schedule was provided, and (c) changing the S1 schedule from immediate reinforcement to extinction produced behavioral contrast if reinforcement was delayed for 10 sec during S2, but not if it was delayed for 20 sec.