Pygmalion in the reintegration process: Desistance from crime through the looking glass

The study of desistance from crime has come of age in recent years, and there are now several, competing theories to account for the ability of long-term offenders to abstain from criminal behavior. Most prominently, recent explanations have borrowed elements from informal social control theory, differential association theory and cognitive psychology. In the following, we argue that labeling theory may be a neglected factor in understanding the desistance process. Drawing on interview data collected as part of a study of an offender reintegration program, we illustrate how the idea of the

Psychological distress among family carers of oesophageal cancer survivors the role of illness cognitions and coping

Objective: The research aimed to determine the extent to which illness cognitions and coping explain psychological distress (fear of cancer recurrence, anxiety and depression symptoms) among family carers of survivors of oesophageal cancer.


Methods: Carers of patients registered with the Oesophageal Patients' Association in the UK were mailed a questionnaire booklet containing questions about medical and demographic variables, the Illness Perception Questionnaire-Revised, the Cancer Coping Questionnaire, the Concerns about Recurrence Scale and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale.


Results: Complete responses were received from 382 family carers (75% male; mean (SD) age=62 (10.91) years). Regression models indicated that the variables measured could explain between 35 and 49% of the variance in psychological distress among carers. Illness cognitions (particularly perceptions of the cause of, consequences of and personal control over oesophageal cancer and the carer's understanding of the condition) explained the majority of this variance. Positive focus coping strategies were also found to be important in explaining psychological distress.


Conclusion: The results of this study are consistent with previous research demonstrating that illness cognitions are significant correlates of adaptive outcomes, thereby suggesting that cognition-based interventions could potentially be effective in minimizing emotional distress among family carers of oesophageal cancer survivors.

The factor structure of the revised Illness Perceptions Questionnaire in a population of oesophageal cancer survivors

Objectives
To determine whether the proposed 7-factor structure of the Illness Perception Questionnaire-Revised (Timeline Acute/Chronic, Timeline Cyclical, Consequences, Personal Control, Treatment Control, Illness Coherence and Emotional Representations) is appropriate among a population of oesophageal cancer survivors.
Methods
Everyone registered with the Oesophageal Patients’ Association in the UK (n=2185) was mailed a questionnaire booklet which included the Illness Perception Questionnaire-Revised. Responses from 587 oesophageal cancer survivors (27%) were subjected to a confirmatory factor analysis.
Results
The proposed 7 factor structure provided a reasonable fit of the data. Modification indices suggested that a significantly better fit could be provided if one of the items on the Timeline Acute/Chronic factor loaded on the Treatment Control factor and an error covariance was added between 2 other items on the Timeline Acute/Chronic factor.
Conclusions
The model fit for the 7 factor structure proposed by Moss-Morris et al. (2002) was found to be adequate in our study. However, the structure of the timeline acute/chronic factor needs to be considered, particularly when the IPQ-R is to be used among older people with a potentially life-threatening illness or those receiving palliative care.

Children’s attributions of belief to humans and God: cross-cultural evidence

The capacity to attribute beliefs to others in order to understand action is one of the mainstays of human cognition. Yet it is debatable whether children attribute beliefs in the same way to all agents. In this paper, we present the results of a false-belief task concerning humans and God run with a sample of Maya children aged 4–7, and place them in the context of several psychological theories of cognitive development. Children were found to attribute beliefs in different ways to humans and God. The evidence also speaks to the debate concerning the universality and uniformity of the development of folk-psychological reasoning.

Essentialism and Folkbiology: evidence from Brazil

Experimental results in reference to Brazilian children and adults are presented in the context of current discussions about essentialism and folkbiology. Using an adoption paradigm, we replicate the basic findings of a previous article in this journal concerning the early emergence in children of a birth-parent bias (Atran et al. 2001). This cognitive bias supports the claim that causal essentialism cross-culturally constrains the reasoning about the origin, development and maintenance of the characteristics and identity of living kinds. We also report some intriguing differences with earlier findings that speak to theoretical and methodological issues of cultural relativity.

The Many Directions of Time

Event duration perception is fundamental to cognitive functioning. Recent research has shown that localized sensory adaptation compresses perceived duration of brief visual events in the adapted location; however, there is disagreement on whether the source of these temporal distortions is cortical or pre-cortical. The current study reveals that spatially localized duration compression can also be direction contingent, in that duration compression is induced when adapting and test stimuli move in the same direction but not when they move in opposite directions. Because of its direction-contingent nature, the induced duration compression reported here is likely to be cortical in origin. A second experiment shows that the adaptation processes driving duration compression can occur at or beyond human cortical area MT+, a specialised motion centre located upstream from primary visual cortex. The direction-specificity of these temporal mechanisms, in conjunction with earlier reports of pre-cortical temporal mechanisms driving duration perception, suggests that our encoding of subsecond event duration is driven by activity at multiple levels of processing.

Timing and trajectory in rhythm production

The Wing-Kristofferson movement timing model (A. M. Wing & A. B. Kristofferson, 1973a, 1973b) distinguishes central timer and motor implementation processes. Previous studies have shown that increases in interresponse interval (IRI) variability with mean IRI are due to central timer processes, not motor implementation. The authors examine whether this is true with IRI duration changes in binary rhythm production. Ten participants provided IRI and movement data in bimanual synchronous tapping under equal (isochronous) and alternating (rhythm) interval conditions. Movement trajectory changes were observed with IRI duration (300, 500, or 833 ms) and for 500-ms IRIs produced in rhythm contexts (300/500 ms, 500/833 ms). However, application of the Wing-Kristofferson model showed that duration and context effects on IRI variability were attributable largely to timer processes with relatively little effect on motor processes.

Indigenous rights in Chile: National identity and majority group support for multicultural policies

We examine support for policies affecting indigenous ethnic minorities in Chile. Specifically, we examine the role of national group definitions that include the largest indigenous group—the Mapuche—in different ways. Based on questionnaire data from nonindigenous Chilean students (N = 338), we empirically distinguish iconic inclusion, whereby the Mapuche are seen as an important part of Chile's history and identity on the one hand, from egalitarian inclusion, which represents the Mapuche as citizens of equal importance to the nonindigenous majority on the other. Both forms of inclusion positively predict support for indigenous rights, independent of participants' political affiliation, strength of national identification, and social distance. A second study (N = 277) replicates this finding whilst controlling for right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, blind patriotism, and constructive patriotism. It also finds iconic inclusion to be predictive of a pro-Mapuche position regarding the unrest over the issue of ancestral land in 2009. We conclude that understanding how national identity affects attitudes about minority rights necessitates appreciating the importance of particular meanings of nationality, and not only the strength of identification.

Planning in young children: A review and synthesis

Research on the development of planning is reviewed in the context of a framework that considers the role of three types of cognitive flexibility in planning development: event-independent temporal representation, executive function, and self-projection. It is argued that the emergence of planning abilities in the preschool period is dependent upon the development of event-independent temporal representation. Research on the development of executive function suggests that its sub-components, in particular inhibitory control, may be linked to developmental improvements on planning tasks. Recently, new paradigms have established that self-projection to the future appears to develop over the preschool period. We consider how these different forms of cognitive flexibility may themselves be related in development. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The development of regret

In two experiments, 4- to 9-year-olds played a game in which they
selected one of two boxes to win a prize. On regret trials the unchosen
box contained a better prize than the prize children actually
won, and on baseline trials the other box contained a prize of the
same value. Children rated their feelings about their prize before
and after seeing what they could have won if they had chosen
the other box and were asked to provide an explanation if their
feelings had changed. Patterns of responding suggested that regret
was experienced by 6 or 7 years of age; children of this age could
also explain why they felt worse in regret trials by referring to
the counterfactual situation in which the prize was better. No evidence
of regret was found in 4- and 5-year-olds. Additional findings
suggested that by 6 or 7 years, children’s emotions were
determined by a consideration of two different counterfactual
scenarios.

Children’s Reasoning About the Temporal Order of Past and Future Events

Four- and five-year-olds completed two sets of tasks that involved reasoning about the temporal order in which events had occurred in the past or were to occur in the future. Four-year-olds succeeded on the tasks that involved reasoning about the order of past events but not those that involved reasoning about the order of future events, whereas 5-year-olds passed both types of tasks. Individual children who failed the past-event tasks were not particularly likely to fail the more difficult future-event tasks. However, children's performance on the reasoning tasks was predictive of their performance on a task assessing their comprehension of the terms “before” and “after.” Our results suggest that there may be a developmental change over this age range in the ability to flexibly represent and reason about the before-and-after relationships between events.

Expertise is perceived from both sound and body movement in musical performance

Music is a rich form of nonverbal communication, in which the movements that expert musicians make during performance can influence the perception of expressive and structural features of the music. Whether the actual skill of a musician is perceivable from vision of movement was examined. In Experiment 1, musicians and non-musicians rated performances by novice, intermediate and expert clarinettists from point-light animations of their movements, sound recordings, or both. Performances by clarinettists of more advanced skill level were rated significantly higher from vision of movements, although this effect was stronger when sound was also presented. In Experiment 2, movements and sound from the novice and expert clarinettists' performances were switched for half the presentations, and were matched for the rest. Ratings of novice music were significantly higher when presented with expert movements, although the opposite was not found for expert sound presented with novice movements. No perceptual effect of raters' own level of musicianship was found in either experiment. These results suggest that expertise is perceivable from vision of musicians' body movements, although perception of skill from sound is dominant. The results from Experiment 2 further indicate a cross-modal effect of vision and audition on the perception of musical expertise. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.

Measurement and modelling of perceived slant in surfaces represented by freely viewed line drawings

Simple pictures under everyday viewing conditions evoke impressions of surfaces oriented in depth. These impressions have been studied by measuring the slants of perceived surfaces, with probes (rotating arrowheads) designed to respect the distinctive character of depicted scenes. Converging arguments indicated that the perceived orientation of the probes was near theoretical values. A series of experiments showed that subjects formed well-defined impressions of depicted surface orientation. The literature suggests that perceived objects might be flattened', but that was not the general rule. Instead, both mean slant and uncertainty fitted models in which slant estimates are derived in a relatively straightforward way from local relations in the picture. Simplifying pictures tended to make orientation estimates less certain, particularly away from the natural anchor points (vertical and horizontal). The shape of the object affected all aspects of the observed-object/percept relationship. Individual differences were large, and suggest that different individuals used different relationships as a basis for their estimates. Overall, data suggest that everyday picture perception is strongly selective and weakly integrative. In particular, depicted slant is estimated by finding a picture feature which will be strongly related to it if the object contains a particular regularity, not by additive integration of evidence from multiple directly and indirectly relevant sources.