The effects of occupational stress on cognitive performance in police officers

The occupational stress of police officers, and its’ effect on working memory and other psychological and behavioral factors over a two-week work period have been investigated. Cognitive performance and stress levels were examined at pre and post work cycles by using a memory test and several self-reporting surveys, each designed for a specific purpose and to gauge a particular set of behaviors and personality traits. The police officers were assigned to patrol duties at the time of the investigation and placed into three groups based on years of service (1–20 years). The results of the investigation identified a deficit in working memory in Junior, Veteran, and Senior Officers, based on the Ray Osterreith Complex Figure Scores at Baseline (pre-stress) vs. Test Day (post-stress). The other survey tools measuring stress impact on personality and behavior, did not demonstrate any statistical differences in the responding groups of officers in their survey performances.     

Snap Judgment: Implicit Perceptions of a (Political) Court

Do people fundamentally perceive the Supreme Court as a political institution? Despite the central importance of this question to theories of public evaluations of the Court and its decisions, it remains largely unanswered. To this end, we develop a new, implicit measure of political perceptions of the Court. This new measure relies on a categorization task wherein respondents quickly associate political or non-political attributes with the Supreme Court relative to institutions that are high or low in politicization. We find that the public implicitly perceives the Court as less political than Congress (high politicization) and more political than traffic court (low politicization) and that this measure is distinct from self-reported (explicit) perceptions of politicization. Finally, we find that implicit perceptions have a distinct effect on predicting diffuse support for the court and specific support for one of two Court decisions.     

Introduction: the EU,East Asian conflicts,and the norm of integration

The promotion of regional integration is a core objective of the European Union’s (EU) foreign policy and has been seen as part of its attempt to transform international society and to make the world a more peaceful place to live. However, the success of this regionalization strategy has been limited and East Asia has been a particularly problematic case. This introduction raises some fundamental questions by first presenting some basic concepts so that the overall studies of the special issue can be systematically undertaken. The underlying questions are the following: How bleak is the picture with regard to regionalism in East Asia and the roles of the EU? Has the EU had no effect on the development of East Asian regionalism? And what potential does regional integration have in helping the transformation of conflicts in East Asia? In addition to these questions, it also discusses and conceptualizes underlying discourses on regional integration, conflict transformation, and regionalism in East Asia. By doing so, it aims to point out that the East Asia region is changing, the EU does play a role in this, and regionalization cannot be ignored as an institutional context that has the potential to assist conflict transformation, especially if windows of opportunity for such engagement arise in the future.     

The Dredd-Ful Day of Judgement: Judicial Models and the Twilight of the West

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - I am the Law It is hard to imagine two more disparate characters than Judge Joseph Dredd and...     

Sex trafficking in Cambodia: fabricated numbers versus empirical evidence

Large numbers of sex trafficking victims, on the order of 80,000–100,000, have been alleged to exist in Cambodia over the past decade. Empirical results obtained from measuring the numbers of such victims in Cambodia are contrasted with the lack of support for the widely circulated guesstimates of these numbers. Examples of similar fabrications are discussed and followed through some of their early publication history. The methodology of conducting empirical field research in less developed countries is discussed and the origin of the guesstimates is probed in detail. Both the multiple methodologies employed by and the results of a program of empirical research on trafficking numbers in Cambodia conducted from 2002 to 2008 are discussed. These are compared with the results of additional empirical studies, and with the guesstimates. The existence of empirical results creates location knowledge of victims, presenting ethical questions.