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Predicting Sexual Crime: Are the Experts Biased?
Leroy Hendricks had a long history of sexually molesting children, including his own stepdaughter and stepson. When he was 21, he was convicted of exposing himself to two girls, and he continued to prey on kids until he was sent to prison at age 50 for molesting two 13-year-old boys. He served ten years of his 5- to 20-year term, with time off for good behavior, and then was set free. Except that the state of Kansas did not want him to be free. Under its Sexual Violent Predator Act, and based on expert mental health evaluation, the state decided that Hendricks remained a public menace and a threat to public safety.
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The Oscar Pistorius Trial: Psychologists Predict How a Jury Would Decide
The Huffington Post: 'Are Celebrities Charged with Murder Likely to be Acquitted?' is the title of a unique psychology experiment, inspired by boasts of a famous US lawyer, Eric Dubin, who claimed practically unbeatable court room strategies for representing celebrities, accused of committing serious crimes. Dubin helped win in 2005 a $30million jury verdict in the wrongful death lawsuit against actor Robert Blake, accused of murdering his wife. Blake, had become famous, ironically enough, for his TV portrayal of Tony Baretta, an undercover police detective.
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Does Having Children Make You Happier?
NPR: There's been a debate raging in academic circles for years. Does having children really make one happier? Most parents say their kids absolutely make them happy, but some researchers have come to question that. One of the questions he asked was: How happy are you when you're taking care of your kids? I spoke with Sonja Lyubomirsky, she's at the University of California at Riverside, and she told me that 2004 study and found that parents really weren't very happy. "When they sort of ranked the different activities on happiness, they found that taking care of children was read it, you know, fairly low.
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Where’s the Beef? Obama’s Valentine to Early Education
The Huffington Post: We are starting to think that all good things start in Chicago. First, President Obama makes statements about the importance of preschool for our nation's children in his State of the Union address. Did you hear the collective jaw drop from people who study children for a living (like us) and educators? A president who understands the importance of early education for America's children? Are we dreaming? ... In a recent article in Perspectives on Psychological Science, aptly entitled, "How to Make a Young Child Smarter," scholars at New York University reviewed 16 studies with a total of 7,370 participants in which poor children were enrolled in preschool.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The Capacity of Audiovisual Integration Is Limited to One Item Erik Van der Burg, Ed Awh, and Christian N. L. Olivers Recent research has suggested that only three to four visual events can be processed at a time, but does this processing limit also apply to audiovisual events? Participants viewed black and white discs placed in a circle around a fixation point. A randomly determined number of the discs then reversed color. This reversal in color was accompanied by an auditory tone.
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The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food
The New York Times: On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.’s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it. While the atmosphere was cordial, the men assembled were hardly friends.
