Responses to Domestic Violence Public Service Ads: Memory, Attitudes, Affect, and Individual Differences

Public service ads (PSAs) are an increasingly visible part of efforts to decrease the occurrence and consequences of domestic violence. Like other advertising, domestic violence PSAs are designed to grab attention, influence attitudes, and enhance memory for ad content. Over the years, images in domestic violence PSAs have changed substantially; agencies have started using pictures that generate emotions - either vivid negative images (bruised faces or body parts), or positive images (smiling faces) that contrast with the negative text. It is not clear, however, how different types of ad images influence memory for the message and attitudes about domestic violence, and what role affect may play in such responses. Moreover, the extent to which individual differences (trauma history, posttraumatic distress - PTSD symptoms) influence outcomes is not known. In three studies with undergraduate and community samples, using methods ranging from psychophysiology to self-report, the impact of images on attitudes and memory for ad content are investigated, also considering affect and individual differences. Results indicate graphic negative images enhanced memory for ad content, are rated as more persuasive, and are more likely to compel the viewer to act. Affective responses to ads also differed based on image type, and in some cases, partially mediated the relationship between ads and outcomes. Trends in the data suggest further study of the role of individual differences (trauma history, PTSD symptoms) is needed. This research provides information specifically relevant to the design of domestic violence public service campaigns and broadly relevant to understanding the role of emotional responses and individual differences on outcomes associated with public service ads.

Ethnic Violence on Kenya's Periphery: Informal Institutions and Local Resilience in Conflict-Affected Communities

Deadly, inter-ethnic group conflict remains a threat to international security in a world where the majority of armed violence occurs not only within states but in the most ungoverned areas within states. Conflicts that occur between groups living in largely ungoverned areas often become deeply protracted and are difficult to resolve when the state is weak and harsh environmental conditions place human security increasingly under threat. However, even under these conditions, why do some local conflicts between ethnic groups escalate, whereas others do not? To analyze this puzzle, the dissertation employs comparative methods to investigate the conditions under which violence erupts or stops and armed actors choose to preserve peace. The project draws upon qualitative data derived from semi-structured interviews, focus group dialogues, and participant observation of local peace processes during field research conducted in six conflict-affected counties in Northern Kenya. Comparative analysis of fifteen conflict episodes with variable outcomes reveals the conditions under which coalitions of civic associations, including local peace committees, faith-based organizations, and councils of elders, inter alia, enhance informal institutional arrangements that contain escalation. Violence is less likely to escalate in communities where cohesive coalitions provide platforms for threat-monitoring, informal pact making, and enforcement of traditional codes of restitution. However, key scope conditions affect whether or not informal organizational structures are capable of containing escalation. In particular, symbolic acts of violence and the use of indiscriminant force by police and military actors commonly undermine local efforts to contain conflict. The dissertation contributes to the literatures on civil society and peacebuilding, demonstrating the importance of comparing processes of escalation and non-escalation and accounting for interactive effects between modes of state and non-state response to local, inter-ethnic group conflict.

The influence of memory for prior instances on performance in a conflict detection task

In 3 experiments, the authors examined the role of memory for prior instances for making relative judgments in conflict detection. Participants saw pairs of aircraft either repeatedly conflict with each other or pass safely before being tested on new aircraft pairs, which varied in similarity to the training pairs. Performance was influenced by the similarity between aircraft pairs. Detection time was faster when a conflict pair resembled a pair that had repeatedly conflicted. Detection time was slower, and participants missed conflicts, when a conflict pair resembled a pair that had repeatedly passed safely. The findings identify aircraft features that are used as inputs into the memory decision process and provide an indication of the processes involved in the use of memory for prior instances to make relative judgments.

Stories from the Inside:The Prisons Memory Archive

A close textual reading of the online-available recording of ex-prison officer, John Heatherington, who is filmed as he returns to the site of the Maze and Long Kesh Prison, which was the largest prison oeperating during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Using the empty site as stimulant for his memory, John recalls the tension, violence and dark humour of the period, while also showing exceptional empathy for all those, including prisoners, who passed through the prison system.The interview is taken from the Prisons Memory Archive (www.prisonsmemoryarchive.com) and, as director of the PMA, I have a particular insight to the recording process and John's special contribution to it.

Paramilitary punishments in Belfast: policing beneath the peace

As an enduring legacy of the conflict, paramilitary policing remains an unpalatable but indisputable fact within Belfast's working-class, Republican communities. Historically, while much attention has been devoted to the causes and consequences of paramilitarism along with the terrorist threat posed by such organizations, little attention has been paid to the influence upon, or relations between, such nonstate policing actors, the communities in which they exist and the delivery of policing by the Police Service of Northern Ireland. While local and international literature surrounding paramilitary violence has tended towards political axiom or physical impact of such activity, the current paper presents an empirical study of the relations between communities and Republican paramilitary organizations who seek to exploit a perceived dearth of state-based policing at the community level within Belfast. Framing the ontology of paramilitary policing and its support from a community, rather than political or security perspective, the paper argues that continuing grass-roots support for this ‘new’ paramilitary policing within Republican communities of Belfast is more complex and nuanced than the political antecedents of the conflict from which such activity emerged – especially in terms of such support surviving successive political negotiations and police reforms since the ‘Good Friday’ Agreement of 1998.

Addressing conflict and tolerance through the curriculum

Political, religious and national divisions in Northern Ireland go back many hundreds of years so it is not surprising that the lack of a common national narrative has made the teaching of history in schools difficult. The fact that schools have largely been organized on a denominational basis has added to the challenge. When political violence broke out in the late 1960s many looked to schools to contribute to the promotion of reconciliation and the way history had been taught received significant critical attention. This chapter will outline the evolving nature of the history curriculum and review evidence on the impact of this curriculum on the historical understanding of students and young people. In addition, the chapter will briefly consider other ways in which students engage with historical issues through the teaching of citizenship, and wider family and community influences. Whereas the teaching of history in the past either was largely absent or often took on a partisan character, the development of a statutory curriculum in the 1990s helped promote a more dispassionate, skills-based approach which emphasized critical engagement with evidence and a multiperspectivity. While this represented a significant improvement on what had gone before, evaluation of the impact of this approach has highlighted the need for a consideration of the emotional impact of historical understanding and the need better to connect the lessons of history to contemporary society.

Accountability, transparency, impartiality, and other ethical issues : improving democracy reduces violence

Violence is detrimental to the stability of any democracy. If people are too scared to vote, or if they lack confidence in their government to bring peace, how will their voices be heard? By discussing how accountability, transparency, and ethics dissuade social confusion, improve democracy, and lessen occurrences of violence, perhaps one can increase the success in the instance of stabilizing a new democracy or reinvigorating an old one. Theoretically resulting in more peaceful governmental transitions; accountability, transparency, and ethics in democracy are a must to build social trust, improve democracy, and reduce violence.

Violence Profiles on International TV News

Journalism has achieved a crucial importance as a social institution linked with the notion of the public interest. It is still doing so but is nevertheless increasingly challenged by getting networked with the interested publics. This becomes more apparent in times when the media repertoires and audiences as such are changing, when the public relies on more than one news source for the transmission and formulation of world events, but when the importance of TV news nevertheless remains relatively stable. Against this backdrop we may ask what publics contribute to or take away from the new plethora of images and stories saturating the media? This article gives an approximate answer by drawing on a comparative analysis of the present-day presentations of violence on British, German, and Russian television news. Violence in the media is not a new phenomenon, as age-old literary masterpieces like Homer’s Odyssey show, but it is still a very popular one, especially in the news. This article highlights trans-national and national elements in the reporting of violence in three different news cultures. At first glance, both the substantial cross-national violence news flow and the cross-national visual violence flow (key visuals) may be interpreted as distinctly trans-national elements. Event-related textual analysis, however, reveals how the historical rootedness of nations and their specific symbols of power are still very much manifested in respective television mediations of violence. In conclusion, this study recommends the pursuit of conscientious comparisons in journalist research and practice in order to understand what violence news convey in the different arenas of present-day newsmaking.

Masculinity, rurality and violence

The assumption that the size, anonymity and weakened social controls of urban living generates social conflict, disorganization and higher rates of crime and violence has been an article of faith in much criminological and social scientific inquiry since the nineteenth century (i.e. Tönnies 1897; Shaw and McKay 1931; Levin and Lindesmith 1937; Nisbet 1970; Baldwin and Bottoms 1976; Felson 1994). The paper challenges this article of criminological faith and questions the utility of urban centric criminological theorizing about the causes of violence in rural settings. Drawing on descriptive data that show that rural men present a relatively high risk of inflicting harm upon themselves and others, this paper explores the larger socio-criminological question as to why this might be. The question is examined in relation to the processes of community formation that shape the everyday architecture of rural life. We explore how that architecture has historically valorized violent expressions of masculinity grounded in a relationship between men's bodies and the rural landscapes they inhabit - but how the legitimacy of these violent expressions are being challenged by sweeping social, economic and political changes. One psycho-social response to these sweeping social changes to rural life, we conclude, is a resort to violence as a largely strategic practice deployed to recreate an imagined rural gender order.

Impacts and opportunities : resident's view on sustainable development of tourism in regional Queensland, Australia

Tourism development is a priority for rural and regional areas of Australia. The challenge is how to develop the tourism industry in a sustainable manner. As part of a larger project investigating community perceptions of opportunities, strategies and challenges in regional sustainable development, this article explores participant's views and opinions of tourism development. Through purposive sampling, 28 local community leaders and residents in the Darling Downs region in Queensland, Australia, participated in four semi-structured focus groups. This paper focuses on two of these focus groups, where tourism was a critical issue. Participants were generally positive about the tourism industry and its impacts on their community, although they expressed several triple bottom line concerns about economic, environmental and scoial issues. Four key themes emerged: appropriate land use management, limited resources and ageing/insufficient infrastructure, preservaation of community heritage and lifestyle, and regional conflict. Residents supported sustainable tourism development and wanted to be more actively involved in decision-making, demanding greater transparency - and true engagement - from local government.

Introduction: Is a General Theory of Violence Possible?

"There once was a man who aspired to be the author of the general theory of holes. When asked ‘What kind of hole—holes dug by children in the sand for amusement, holes dug by gardeners to plant lettuce seedlings, tank traps, holes made by road makers?’ he would reply indignantly that he wished for a general theory that would explain all of these. He rejected ab initio the—as he saw it—pathetically common-sense view that of the digging of different kinds of holes there are quite different kinds of explanations to be given; why then he would ask do we have the concept of a hole? Lacking the explanations to which he originally aspired, he then fell to discovering statistically significant correlations; he found for example that there is a correlation between the aggregate hole-digging achievement of a society as measured, or at least one day to be measured, by econometric techniques, and its degree of techno- logical development. The United States surpasses both Paraguay and Upper Volta in hole-digging; there are more holes in Vietnam than there were. These observations, he would always insist, were neutral and value-free. This man’s achievement has passed totally unnoticed except by me. Had he however turned his talents to political science, had he concerned himself not with holes, but with modernization, urbanization or violence, I find it difficult to believe that he might not have achieved high office in the APSA." (MacIntyre 1971, 260)