Month: May 2016

Mentally ill inmate who spent 1,001 days in solitary confinement now feels alone outside

The Miami Herald has an interesting article about one recently released inmate who spent nearly his entire three year term in solitary. Worse yet, he had mental illnesses that were exacerbated by solitary.

In Abnormal Psychology we were discussing the effects of deinstitutionalization and the shift to community care, but the lack of community care shifting mental illness to the streets. Another big location that people with mental illness wind up is prison. The article makes the point that community mental health services are underfunded and lacking. We see the cost here.

Devon Davis was one of more than 2,000 North Carolina inmates released each year after being imprisoned with a mental illness. He is one of hundreds released directly from solitary confinement within a state prison. They emerge from a cell roughly the size of a parking space into a world they sometimes know little about.

Source: Mentally ill inmate who spent 1,001 days in solitary confinement now feels alone outside | Miami Herald

Psychology Of A Pedophile

Later in Abnormal Psychology we will be studying Sexual Disorders. One such disorder is generally known as paraphilias, disorders that are characterized by the preference for atypical sexual practices, but most importantly practices or desires that the person is distressed by or that cause harm to another or involve unwilling partners or those who cannot give consent. One such paraphilia is pedophilic disorder. There’s an interesting article in IFL Science on pedophiles that covers the behaviors, causes, and implications.

One of the points made in the article is that 90% of sexual abuse of minors is by someone known to the victim. This statistic made me think of the current moral panic over transgender individuals using the bathroom of their gender identity. A main argument made by the Texas attorney general is that some pedophile might switch gender identity for a day to gain access to children in bathrooms. Specifically, he claimed non-discrimination would set up a situation that would allow “men to have open access to girls in bathrooms.”

Unfortunately his argument is specious, since it involves public schools, which already have policies in place to prevent people from entering the grounds that do not have legitimate business there. So, a pedophile would not be able to walk off the street and into a girls bathroom without breaking the law.

While I can appreciate the horror that any parent will feel thinking that their child could possibly be abused by a stranger in a bathroom, I believe the resources of the state of Texas and the other states joining the lawsuit would be better spent on identifying children at risk for actual abuse in their own homes or by someone they know, and preventing that abuse, or funding treatment, rather than to propose a lawsuit framed by worry about a hypothetical abuse that is statistically much much less likely.

Furthermore, the health and productivity cost to transgender people caused by discrimination is real, not hypothetical. Rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and substance use are much higher (also see this abstract) in transgender people, compared to non-transgender individuals, and it is exacerbated discrimination, and the identity conflict that discrimination sets up.

Why would we want to create policies and laws that limit the potential of anyone to live a full, happy life, and that might contribute to their depression, substance use, and suicide? Oh right, it’s an election year.

Having worked with police forces in Australia and the United Kingdom identifying those who sexually prey on children, people are always asking me how you can tell a paedophile from everyone else. Well, I can tell you one thing – they don’t have horns and tails. They look and act like you and me. Except for one key difference: they’re sexually attracted to children. What Is A Paedophile?

Source: Psychology Of A Paedophile: Why Are Some People Attracted To Children? | IFLScience

Why Do So Many Studies Fail to Replicate? – The New York Times

Over the last two semesters, our lab, the Peace and Justice Psychology Lab, has tried to replicate a finding from a 2007 article (Sommers & Norton, 2007) that showed a racial bias in excluding jurors during jury selection. They showed that black potential jurors were struck from jury selection more than white jurors, a finding that generalized from college students to law students and to attorneys. This finding matched the findings of a report issued last year that documented race bias in jury selection in Louisiana over the last decade.

We contacted Dr. Sommers to ask about his methods, and had a good conversation with him. One of the comments he made was that we needed to pilot test our juror profiles extensively to find ones that were effective in making the jurors undesirable. We did that (but only tested four different profiles). We asked him for the images he used in his study, but it was a long time ago and he couldn’t find his exact materials.

So, we set about selecting juror images from a database of facial images – one black and one white – that were matched on gender, age, expression, attractiveness, etc. We settled on two images of middle-aged women.

The replication failed spectacularly: There was no difference between the rates of striking black and white jurors. If we want to interpret our finding optimistically, we might say that students at Southern Arkansas University are impervious to racial bias. Realistically, I believe the replication failed because the materials were not identical. That tells us that the effect has something to do with factors other than race. For example, it is possible that Sommers & Norton used images that were not matched on attractiveness, and the black juror’s image simply was less attractive. Sommers used male juror profiles and images, and there is a pervasive (replicated) effect that black men are typically viewed as more threatening than white men by research subjects, which may not have affected our participants’ impressions of the female jurors. If we replicated with male jurors, we might get the same effect.

The one finding we did get was that people high in Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) (which is a preference for hierarchical power structures, traditional social roles, and status quo among other things) struck the jurors (of both races) at a higher rate than those low in SDO. I believe that this reflects a gender role preference consistent with SDO. To wit, the jurors were women, middle aged, with no children, who had advanced degrees and a job as journalist. This may violate the gender roles that our culture typically assigns to women as homemakers, child bearers, etc., and those high in SDO might be more sensitive to this violation of social roles and want to “punish” the women. We have not directly tested this hypothesis, and I am not sure we will try.

I was motivated to blog about this because the social psychologist Jay Van Bavel wrote an opinion piece for this Sunday’s New York Times about the replication crisis. He addresses the difficulty with conducting direct replications of previous findings in social psychology because of the effect of context: there are lots of factors going on in the social environment that may be related to whether a replication fails or succeeds. But, I think that helps us understand that the effect is not as robust as only one, unreplicated, research finding might suggest.

Because it is hard to recreate the exact conditions of the original research.

Source: Why Do So Many Studies Fail to Replicate? – The New York Times

Sommers, S. R., & Norton, M. I. (2007). Race-based judgments, race-neutral justifications: Experimental examination of peremptory use and the Batson challenge procedure. Law and Human Behavior, 31, 261–273.