Juror Psychology–Can juries ignore inadmissible evidence or pretrial publicity?
Answer: probably not. Superb chapter by Lieberman, Arndt, & Vess: “Inadmissible evidence and pretrial publicity: The effects (and ineffectiveness) of admonitions to disregard.” You “cannot unring the bell” as one judge put it. The last 30 years of social cognitive psychology, starting with the work of Tversky and Kahneman, up to the most recent work […]
Psychopathic sexuality– a component of psychopathy?
There has been a running debate over the past 18 years as to whether psychoapthy is a “taxon”; “an entity, type, syndrome, disease, or more generally, a nonarbitrary class.” The concept goes back to Paul Meehl (1982; 1995) who laid out the importance of the concept for classifying psychopathology. Harris, Rice and Quinsey (1994) argued that psychopathy is a taxon, […]
New Developments in Psychopathy
Jennifer Skeem and her colleagues have challenged the status quo in recent controverises concerning the definition and measurement of psychopathy. Is psychopathy a unitary entity (a global syndrome with a discrete underlying cause) or rather is it a configuration of several distinguishable but intersecting trait dimensions? Is psychopathy synonymous with criminal behavior? Is there a positive-adjustment type of […]