摘要:

Purpose.The present research investigated the relationship between underlying justice and vengeance motivations and sentencing recommendations made by expert clinicians, semi‐experts, and lay‐people. It was hypothesized that the semi‐experts would recommend significantly different sentence lengths from those recommended by the expert and lay‐person groups, in line with previous research findings. It was also hypothesized that justice and vengeance motivations would be related to punitive sentencing recommendations, and that these would not be the same across the three levels of expertise.Method.An independent groups design was utilized in the main analysis, with participants belonging to three distinct levels of clinical experience (experts, semi‐experts, and lay‐people). A questionnaire was administered, with participants being measured on levels of justice and vengeance motivations, and asked to recommend appropriate sentence lengths based on nine separate crime‐scenarios. These covariables were correlated and the correlation coefficients were compared across the three levels of expertise.Results.The former hypothesis was not upheld. Findings do, however, support the latter hypothesis, with the key finding indicating that for both justice and vengeance motivations in punitive judgement, it is the lay‐participants who appear distinct from the experts and semi‐experts.Conclusions.The current findings emphasize that while expert and lay‐person judgements may often appear to be the same, different processes and motivations underlying clinical judgements are occurring at the different stages of expertise. With the differences in the relationships between justice and vengeance motivations and judgements found in the current research, it is argued that expert and lay judgements that appear to be the same are, in fact, distinguishable and are related to quite different underlying motivations and decisi

ISSN:1355-3259    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02021.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:2013

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Purpose. Victims of rape are often attributed a certain amount of responsibility, which is often translated into reduced victim credibility and fewer convictions in the courtroom. The purpose of the present study was to apply Weiner's attribution model to the literature on rape blame to understandwhyvictim blame impacts credibility and verdict. Weiner's model posits that perceptions of a target's responsibility will lead to less sympathy and therefore reduced willingness to help the target. In line with this model, it was hypothesized that sympathy for a rape victim mediates the relationship between victim responsibility and: (a) willingness to help the victim, (b) credibility, and (c) verdict.Methods. Participants read a 1,000‐word transcript of a rape trial and made judgements regarding the victim's responsibility for the rape, sympathy for the victim, willingness to help the victim, perceived witness credibility, and verdict. The victim's responsibility for the rape was manipulated between subjects.Results. The hypotheses were supported: sympathy mediated the relationships between perceived victim responsibility and: (a) willingness to help the victim, (b) credibility, and (c) verdict. Using EQS, two models are presented (one hypothesized and one modified) that further delineate these relationships.Conclusions. The present study applied a well‐established theory in social psychology to further understand the relationship between victim blame, willingness to help, victim credibility, and verdict. In line with Weiner's attribution model, sympathy for the victim played a key role in those relationships. Implications of these findings for legal professionals ar

ISSN:1355-3259    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02022.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:2013

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Objectives. To document criminality, psychiatric difficulty, IQ, EQ, and EI amongst Irish, male juvenile detainees (Detainee Group). To compare their IQ, EQ, and EI to non‐offending boys attending a child psychiatry clinic (Psychiatric Group) and boys without offending or psychiatric problems (Community Group). To compare psychiatric morbidity between the detainee and psychiatric groups.Method. Criminality levels of 30 detainees were evaluated using official court charge sheets. Psychiatric status was assessed through structured clinical interview (DISC‐IV); IQ through an individually administered IQ‐scale (WASI); EQ using the BarOn EQi:Youth Version (EQi:YV); and EI using the MSCEIT: Youth Version – Research Edition (MSCEIT:YV‐RE). IQ, EQ, and EI levels in the psychiatric and community groups were compared. Psychiatric morbidity between detainee and psychiatric groups were compared.Results. A total of 335 crimes led to the detention of detainees. Eighty‐three percent of detainees had a psychiatric disorder compared to 60% of young people in the psychiatric group. Detainees had 3.1 disorders each compared to 1.4 disorders in the psychiatric group. A total of 63.3% of detainees had an externalizing problem, 37.9% an internalizing problem, and 66.7% a substance dependency or use problem. A total of 21.4% of detainees had an IQ score below 70. The detainee and psychiatric groups had similar deficits in EI and significantly lower EI than the community groups.Conclusions.Serious levels of criminality and psychiatric disorder exist amongst Irish detainees. They have significantly lower IQ than young people attending a psychiatry clinic and both share deficits in the ability to accurately identify emotions, use emotions to guide thought processes and to prioritize thinking and to effectively

ISSN:1355-3259    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02027.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:2013

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Purpose.Enhanced Thinking Skills (ETS) has been the most widely delivered cognitive skills programme in the prisons of England and Wales. Four quasi‐experimental outcome studies have produced mixed results, a qualitative survey of offenders’ and facilitators’ experience on the programme proved useful in programme refinement, and a study using random allocation provided evidence that ETS impacts significantly and positively on short‐term attitudinal change. This study aims to make a further contribution, using another methodology, to the accumulation of evidence.Methods.This was a real‐world evaluation, comparing the reconviction outcomes of the population of 17,047 ETS participants in custody from 2000 to 2005 with a national cohort of 19,792 prisoners released over the same period.Results.Overall, prisoners who had attended ETS were found to reoffend at a rate 6.4 percentage points less than the cohort (rising to 7.5 percentage points for programme completers) and 9.5 percentage points less than the predicted rate. In all but the very highest risk group and in every sentence length band, the reoffending outcomes for ETS participants were significantly better than for prisoners in the cohort.Conclusions.It is argued that this non‐experimental methodology makes a contribution to the ‘What Wo

ISSN:1355-3259    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02026.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:2013

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Purpose.Critically important to effectively treating and managing sexual offending is the identification or validation of an offender's deviant sexual interests as the nature of their sexual interests is what demarcates repetitive sexual offenders from non‐offenders and lower risk offenders. As an alternative or verification to self‐report or phallometric measures, focus has turned to attention‐based measures. These measures assess sexual content‐induced delay (SCID), a specific form of attentional bias associated with preferred sexual content (images or text). Viewing time (VT) and choice reaction time (CRT) were developed and utilized to assess sexual interest via SCID (Geer&Bellard, 1996) and examine the measures’ clinical utility via estimates of sensitivity and specificity.Method.Participants were 44 youth non‐sexual offenders, 60 university students, and 22 adult sexual offenders. Differences between groups were examined on various sub‐scores and receiver operator characteristic curves provided information on clinical utility.Results.The VT and CRT measures produced subtest scores with high reliability in all three samples. There were significant differences in VT between the adult sexual offenders and the youth non‐sexual offenders, but not between the youth non‐sexual offenders and the university students. Some of the VT subtests demonstrated good clinical utility in their ability to differentiate adult heterosexual sexual offenders from non‐sexual offenders (e.g., area under the curve (AUC) = 0.87 female mature images, 0.88 male child images). Interestingly, the VT and CRT measures provided significantly different results.Conclusion.The results of this study provide further evidence that measures of SCID are accurate and are useful as indications of sexual interest. Differences between measures suggest, however, that furt

ISSN:1355-3259    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02032.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:2013

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Purpose. Many studies have reported that professionals have a limited understanding of mental capacity issues. Implementation (in England and Wales) of the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) (2005) presents a challenge to services. The aim of this study was to evaluate the extent to which National Health Service (NHS) staff benefited from attending MCA training courses.Methods. Participants were assessed before and after MCA training using a structured interview, which included three scenarios describing mental capacity dilemmas, four vignettes addressing the role of the Independent Mental Capacity Advocate (IMCA), and 16 true–false items.Results. Interview performance improved post‐training, but this could be largely ascribed to an increased awareness of mental capacity issues, with minimal improvements in the knowledge that would be needed to undertake the assessments. Nine areas were identified where there remained significant gaps in participants’ knowledge post‐training. Participants with experience of dealing with mental capacity issues performed better than those without.Conclusions. The results suggest that methods other than formal training events may be needed to prepare health staff to implement

ISSN:1355-3259    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02035.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:2013

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Purpose. This study used statistical text analysis to examine the features of crime narratives provided by psychopathic homicide offenders. Psychopathic speech was predicted to reflect an instrumental/predatory world view, unique socioemotional needs, and a poverty of affect.Methods. Two text analysis tools were used to examine the crime narratives of 14 psychopathic and 38 non‐psychopathic homicide offenders. Psychopathy was determined using the Psychopathy Checklist‐Revised (PCL‐R). The Wmatrix linguistic analysis tool (Rayson, 2008) was used to examine parts of speech and semantic content while the Dictionary of Affect and Language (DAL) tool (Whissell&Dewson, 1986) was used to examine the emotional characteristics of the narratives.Results. Psychopaths (relative to their counterparts) included more rational cause‐and‐effect descriptors (e.g., ‘because’, ‘since’), focused on material needs (food, drink, money), and contained fewer references to social needs (family, religion/spirituality). Psychopaths’ speech contained a higher frequency of disfluencies (‘uh’, ‘um’) indicating that describing such a powerful, ‘emotional’ event to another person was relatively difficult for them. Finally, psychopaths used more past tense and less present tense verbs in their narrative, indicating a greater psychological detachment from the incident, and their language was less emotionally intense and pleasant.Conclusions.These language differences, presumably beyond conscious control, support the notion that psychopaths oper

ISSN:1355-3259    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02025.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:2013

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Purpose. We examined whether language proficiency had an impact on lie detection.Methods. We collected video footage of 30 targets who spoke English as their native or second language and who lied or told the truth about a transgression. Undergraduate students (N = 51) then judged the veracity of these 30 clips and indicated how confident they were in their ratings.Results. Participants were more confident when judging native‐language truth‐tellers than second‐language truth‐tellers. In addition, participants were more likely to exhibit a truth‐bias when observing native‐language speakers, whereas they were more likely to exhibit a lie‐bias when viewing second‐language speakers.Conclusions. Given the difficulties and biases associated with second‐language lie detection,

ISSN:1355-3259    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02030.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:2013

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Purpose. When eyewitnesses to crime receive feedback about their choice of a suspect from a line‐up (orpost‐identification feedback), such information can substantially alter their recollections of the witnessing experience. This study examined whether feedback exerts similar effects on investigators’ recollections of a suspect's behaviours.Methods. Participant‐investigators received training on speech cues that they were told, when present in a speaker's account, signal either honesty or deception. After hearing a suspect's account of a theft, participants decided whether the suspect was lying or telling the truth. One‐third of participants subsequently received immediate confirming feedback about their performance, while another third received disconfirming feedback. The remaining one‐third of participants did not receive feedback about their decision. Finally, participants rated the frequencies of speech cues that they had been instructed to detect in the suspect's account.Results. Disconfirming feedback significantly altered retrospective judgments about the characteristics of the suspect's account. Specifically, when told that the decision they made about the speaker's credibility was incorrect, participants judged the speaker as having exhibited fewer behaviours consistent with the credibility decision they had made, relative to those who either received no feedback or confirming feedback.Conclusions. Biases in recollections of a suspect may have consequences in real‐world interrogations wherein investigators assess credibility on the basis of numerous behavioural cues. Results are discussed in light of findings of post‐identification feedback

ISSN:1355-3259    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02037.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:2013

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Purpose.Most past research on detecting deception has relied on the assumption that liars often fabricate a story to account for their whereabouts, whereas truth tellers simply recall an autobiographical memory. However, little research has examined whether liars, when free to choose the topic of their own reports, will actually choose to fabricate information rather than use a different strategy for constructing their lies. We describe two studies that evaluated liars’ strategies for selecting the content of their lies when given the freedom to choose whatever content they desired.Method.In Studies 1 (N= 35) and 2 (N= 22) participants (a) described a truthful story in order to identify a salient event, then (b) lied about the event, and finally (c) described their strategies for choosing the content of the reported lies.Results.Liars overwhelmingly chose to report a previously experienced event for the time period they were to be deceptive about (67% and 86% in Studies 1 and 2, respectively). The majority of discrete details reported were experienced, occurred relatively frequently, occurred relatively recently, and were typical or routine.Conclusions.These findings have significant implications for the development of cognitive‐based interventions for detecting deception. In particular, some methods of deception that rely on content analysis may be ineffective if liars choose to report previous experiences rather than outright fabricati

ISSN:1355-3259    

DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02041.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:2013

数据来源: WILEY