Childhood immunization, vaccine hesitancy, and provaccination policy in high-income countries.
This article first outlines the background of the problem of increasing vaccine hesitancy. It then explores the pros and cons of 3 types of policy: (a) interventions focused on increasing awareness of the benefits of vaccination while eliminating mistaken perceptions of risks, (b) “nudges,” which make certain choices more likely to be voluntarily chosen by manipulating the decision environment, and (c) policies that impose costs to make nonvaccination undesirable even for parents who are hesitant. It argues that a wide range of policies, including coercive policies, is desirable from a public health perspective, as the...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - March 16, 2017 Category: Medical Law Source Type: research
Police officers’ ability to detect lies within a deception paradigm.
This study aimed to examine police officers’ accuracy in classifying guilty and innocent participants using 3 interviewing styles (evidence-focused, relationship-focused, and control). In a modified version of Russano, Meissner, Narchet, and Kassin’s (2005) deception paradigm, participants who had violated a rule (i.e., cheating while solving problems) were considered guilty, whereas those who had followed the rule were considered innocent. After interviewing 234 adult men, 11 experienced male police officers accurately classified over 90% of them as guilty or innocent. Of 160 participants who did not admit to cheating...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - March 16, 2017 Category: Medical Law Source Type: research
The ability to detect false statements as a function of the type of statement and the language proficiency of the statement provider.
The ability to detect deception is critical in criminal and investigative contexts. Society continues to become more diverse as international travel becomes more commonplace; as such, it has never been so essential to understand the potential impact of speakers’ language proficiency on assessing their credibility. Recently, deception researchers have turned their attention to statements provided by nonnative English speakers, thus far yielding inconsistent results. To further investigate this issue, community members, who were classified into 4 English proficiency groups (i.e., fluent, higher proficiency, medium proficie...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - March 16, 2017 Category: Medical Law Source Type: research
Logical but incompetent plea decisions: A new approach to plea bargaining grounded in cognitive theory.
Although much research considers the cognitive processes involved in legal decision making of jurors and judges, decisions to accept or reject plea bargains have received far less attention. We examine decisions in plea scenarios to test predictions of Fuzzy-Trace Theory regarding how cognitive processing style (specifically, greater reliance on gist or verbatim representations) affects plea decisions and how this could lead to suboptimal decision making, especially among defendants who are young adults. Results support Fuzzy-Trace Theory’s predictions by showing that the type of mental representation relied on by an ind...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - February 23, 2017 Category: Medical Law Source Type: research
Legal responses to nonconsensual pornography: Current policy in the United States and future directions for research.
Technological advances have created new avenues for the perpetration of sexual violence. The widespread availability of cameras has made it easier to take covert recordings of an individual ’s intimate body parts, and whether sexually explicit images are recorded with or without an individual’s consent, growing access to the Internet has facilitated the nonconsensual dissemination of those images. Yet criminal laws have not kept pace with technology in most jurisdictions across the United States, and victims of nonconsensual pornography typically have no avenue by which to seek justice. There have been efforts to refor...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - February 16, 2017 Category: Medical Law Authors: Najdowski, Cynthia J. Source Type: research
Justice is (change) blind: Applying research on visual metacognition in legal settings.
We describe 4 experiments that bridge the gap between lab studies of visual metacognition and 1 relevant legal context: negligence litigation. In the first 2 experiments, we expand on the existing visual metacognition research by demonstrating that participants ’ overestimation persists when they are asked what an observer should see and what an observer can be blamed for failing to see. Then, we examine the extent to which participants treat their presumptions that someone should have seen a stimulus like evidence of verified visual detection. Finally, we use vignettes of negligence cases modeled on existing change blin...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - February 9, 2017 Category: Medical Law Authors: Jaeger, Christopher Brett; Levin, Daniel T.; Porter, Evan Source Type: research
Applying the lessons of developmental psychology to the study of juvenile interrogations: New directions for research, policy, and practice.
This article highlights key features of adolescent psychosocial, neurobiological, and social develop ment that are directly relevant to the police interrogation context. It argues that an explicit recognition of developmental principles is vital to juvenile suspects’ due process rights and to the future of juvenile interrogation research. The article outlines specific directions for future resear ch on juvenile interrogation, including recommendations for interdisciplinary collaborations, laboratory research, and field studies. It then discusses implications of several key recommendations for interrogation policy and pra...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - February 1, 2017 Category: Medical Law Authors: Cleary, Hayley M. D. Source Type: research
And justice for all: Determinants and effects of probation officers ’ processing decisions regarding first-time juvenile offenders.
When a youth is accused of committing a crime, juvenile justice system arbiters, such as probation officers, interview both the youth and the youth ’s guardian to gather information before deciding to either process the youth formally or informally. Factors about a youth that are unrelated to the criminal charge may contribute to arbiters’ processing decisions. Such extralegal factors include demographic characteristics and characteristics of the youth’s context (e.g., home environment, peer delinquency). Little is known about how extralegal factors other than age and race affect youth processing. The present study d...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - February 1, 2017 Category: Medical Law Authors: Fine, Adam; Donley, Sachiko; Cavanagh, Caitlin; Miltimore, Sarah; Steinberg, Laurence; Frick, Paul J.; Cauffman, Elizabeth Source Type: research
Life without parole for juvenile offenders: Public sentiments.
This article examines the public’s sentiment concerning juvenile LWOP. An online sample (n = 599) weighted to be representative of the U.S. population was queried about juvenile LWOP as a general policy and in response to a specific case in which they had to impose a prison sentence on a juvenile convicted of murder. The age of the juvenile was experimentally manipulated as either 12 or 16. Overall, 31% of participants favored juvenile LWOP as a general policy while 55% were willing to impose juvenile LWOP in a specific case. The age of the juvenile moderated this effect, such that participants were more willing to impos...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - February 1, 2017 Category: Medical Law Authors: Gongola, Jennifer; Krauss, Daniel A.; Scurich, Nicholas Source Type: research
An examination of showups conducted by law enforcement using a field-simulation paradigm.
While there is a growing body of research examining the relatively “cold,” cognitive decision-making components of showups, few attempts have been made to capture the “hot” affective components of showups that are thought to exacerbate the suggestiveness of the procedure. In 3 simulated-field experiments, we partnered with law enforcement to examine how par ticipants who were led to believe they were involved in an actual criminal investigation (Field-simulation condition) differed from participants who knew they were not part of an actual investigation (Lab-simulation condition). We staged crimes for both conditio...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - February 1, 2017 Category: Medical Law Authors: Eisen, Mitchell L.; Smith, Andrew M.; Olaguez, Alma P.; Skerritt-Perta, Amaia S. Source Type: research
Redundant deliberation about negative consequences: Decision inertia in emergency responders.
Major emergencies are high-stakes, ambiguous, dynamic, and stressful events. Emergency response commanders rely on their expertise and training to mitigate these factors and implement action. The Critical Decision Method was used to interview 31 commanders from the police (n = 12), fire and rescue (n = 15), and ambulance services (n = 4) in the United Kingdom about challenges to decision making. Transcripts were analyzed in 2 ways: (a) using thematic analyses to categorize the challenges to incident command and (b) grounded theory to develop a theoretical understanding of how challenges influenced decision processing. Ther...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - January 26, 2017 Category: Medical Law Authors: Power, Nicola; Alison, Laurence Source Type: research
Top-down processes in interpersonal reality monitoring assessments.
We examined to what extent, and how, the judgment framework within which assessments of reality monitoring (RM) criteria are made affects the efficacy of these assessments in predicting veracity. In Experiment 1, trained participants assessed the presence of RM criteria in truthful and false life stories. Participants either: (a) knew the real purpose of RM and assessed the criteria in order to determine the veracity of the stories (forensic-judgmental context), (b) were misled to believe that RM is a tool for the prediction of literary attractiveness and assessed the criteria to determine the perceived attractiveness of t...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - January 26, 2017 Category: Medical Law Authors: Nahari, Galit Source Type: research
Pragmatic failure and referential ambiguity when attorneys ask child witnesses “do you know/remember” questions.
This study examined how 4- to 9-year-old (N = 104) children testifying in child sexual abuse cases responded to DYK/R wh- (who, w hat, where, why, how, and which) and yes/no questions. When asked DYK/R questions containing an implicit wh- question requesting information, children often provided unelaborated “yes” responses. Attorneys’ follow-up questions suggested that children usually misunderstood the pragmatics of the questions. When DYK/R questions contained an implicit yes/no question, unelaborated “yes” or “no” responses could be responding to the explicit or the implicit questions resulting in referent...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - January 26, 2017 Category: Medical Law Authors: Evans, Angela D.; Stolzenberg, Stacia N.; Lyon, Thomas D. Source Type: research
Twenty-six years prosecuting historic child sexual abuse cases: Has anything changed?
In many common-law jurisdictions around the world, criminal courts are facing or will soon face the unmitigated challenge of prosecuting cases of child sexual abuse that are reported to have happened in the past, often decades earlier. In Canada, criminal prosecutions of historic child sexual abuse (HCSA) have been common for a long time, providing an opportunity to study changes over time in such prosecutions. In the current research, we coded 3,035 HCSA complaints on 12 variables and looked at changes in those variables between 1986 and 2012. Across court dates, the average age of the complainant when the alleged offense...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - January 26, 2017 Category: Medical Law Authors: Connolly, Deborah A.; Coburn, Patricia I.; Chong, Kristin Source Type: research
Challenging the credibility of alleged victims of child sexual abuse in Scottish courts.
This study examined the effects of credibility-challenging questions (n = 2,729) on 62 5- to 17-year-olds ’ testimony in child sexual abuse cases in Scotland by categorizing the type, source, and content of the credibility-challenging questions defense lawyers asked and assessing how children responded. Credibility-challenging questions comprised 14.9% of all questions asked during cross-examination. Of defense lawyers’ credibility-challenging questions, 77.8% focused generally on children’s honesty, whereas the remainder referred to specific inconsistencies in the children’s testimony. Children resisted credibilit...
Source: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law - January 23, 2017 Category: Medical Law Authors: Szojka, Zs ófia A.; Andrews, Samantha J.; Lamb, Michael E.; Stolzenberg, Stacia N.; Lyon, Thomas D. Source Type: research
