Expert psychological testimony

Experimental psychologists increasingly are asked to give expert testimony in court, especially with regard to issues of eyewitness reliability. Whether or not experimental psychologists should give expert testimony on these matters is a controversial issue. The empirical literature suggests that potential jurors do not have a good understanding of the variables influencing eyewitness accuracy and that they cannot discriminate adequately between accurate and false eyewitness identification testimony. Experiments using expert testimony as a treatment variable, however, have not made a definitive case that expert testimony can benefit trial outcomes. The question of whether or not to give expert testimony must be broadened to consider not only the effects on verdicts but also the effects of expert testimony on the process by which verdicts are reached, the practices of police in subsequent investigations, the public's view of psychology, the practices of judges in subsequent cases, and the interaction between expert testimony and research activities.     

Mit § 3 Abs. 2 des Niedersächsischen Gesetzes über das Halten von Hunden i.d.F. vom 30.10.2003 hat der Gesetzgeber eine Rechtsgrundlage für Grundrechtseingriffe geschaffen, mit denen bereits einer möglichen Gefahr (Gefahrenverdacht oder Besorgnispotential) begegnet werden soll

Keine Zusammenfassung     

Account-making and confiding as acts of meaning in response to sexual assault

A study was conducted to compare the interpretive and coping responses of female and male survivors of incest and female survivors of sexual assault by a nonrelative. Twenty-eight persons responded to a questionnaire that asked them to provide an account of the nature of an assault(s), the role of confidants in helping them cope with the assault, how they coped and tried to understand the assault over time, how they felt the assault affected their close relationships, and how they evaluated their current state of recovery. The results for male and female incest groups were similar in revealing great difficulty in coping and in having adult close relationships. These two groups showed more continuing lack of resolution than did the female nonfamilial survivors. The male group of incest survivors showed the greatest overall difficulty. The findings are discussed in terms of the roles of searching for meaning via account-making and confiding as ways of dealing with long-term, major Stressors in people's lives.     

Fools Suffer Gladly: The Use of Economic Sanctions in International Crises

A number of recent international situations have raised again questions regarding the usefulness of economic sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy. Sanctions continue to be applied in a variety of contexts, yet we have not developed a sufficient understanding of the processes involved to determine when, or even if, sanctions can "work." While a great deal has been written on the subject, there have been neither attempts to subject the theoretical arguments to empirical testing nor efforts to provide systematic theoretical explanations for the empirical results that have been produced. In this article, we attempt to address this shortcoming in the literature. We propose a theory of sanctions effectiveness that is based on the spatial model of bargaining in international crises and use this theory to derive a number of hypotheses regarding when sanctions should produce favorable policy outcomes. We then subject some of the derived hypotheses to an empirical test based on a large number of international disputes. The model suggests that while sanctions will not work in many cases, they can have a slight effect on the distribution of expected outcomes if the costs of the sanctions are sufficiently high relative to the values at stake. The available evidence appears to support these expectations.