Hot Cognition in Investigative Judgments: The Differential Influence of Anger and Sadness

The authors predicted that the cognitive appraisal tendencies associated with sadness and anger would exert different influences on investigators' crime-related judgments. Supporting evidence was found in an experiment with 61 experienced criminal investigators. First, when judging the reliability of a witness statement, sad participants relied on their perception of both witness and situational variables, whereas angry participants relied only on their perception of witness variables. This corresponds to the emphasis placed on situational and individual control in the appraisals associated with sadness and anger, respectively. Second, when making judgments of the case, sad participants were sensitive to the consistency of a witness statement with the central hypothesis of the investigation, indicating substantive processing, whereas angry participants were unaffected by statement-hypothesis consistency, indicating heuristic processing. The findings suggest that the process of reliability assessment can be better understood by consulting theories of attribution and information processing.     

Firms’ rationales for interaction with research universities and the principles for public co-funding

R&D managers at 50 firms who have formal relations with two research universities in Stockholm are interviewed about their rationales for collaboration. Drawing on this material, a distinctive typology of rationales for establishing cooperative relations is presented. While the typology demonstrates a considerable breadth of interaction rationales, rationales related to innovation, in terms of invented or improved products or processes, are found to be the main drivers for interaction. Based on this framework, we analyse which rationales for interaction are consistent with public rationales for supporting university-industry relationships. Public co-funding that allow firms to influence (part of) the academic agenda is identified as a particularly interesting case that requires further theoretical attention.     

Adam Smith or Machiavelli? Political incentives for contracting out local public services

Why do some local governments deliver public services directly while others rely on providers from the private sector? Previous literature on local contracting out and on the privatization of state-owned enterprises have offered two competing interpretations on why center-right governments rely more on private providers. Some maintain that center-right politicians contract out more because, like Adam Smith, they believe in market competition. Others claim that center-right politicians use privatization in a Machiavellian fashion; it is used as a strategy to retain power, by ??purchasing?? the electoral support of certain constituencies. Using a unique dataset, which includes the political attitudes of over 8,000 Swedish local politicians from 290 municipalities for a period of 10 years, this paper tests these ideological predictions together with additional political economy factors which have been overlooked in previous studies, such as the number of veto players. Results first indicate support for the Machiavellian interpretation, as contracting out increases with electoral competition. Second, irrespective of ideological concerns, municipalities with more veto players in the coalition government contract out fewer services.     

Predictors of the Authorities' Decision to Grant Asylum in Denmark

With the aim of identifying predictors for being granted a residencepermit, adult members of 149 refugee families from the MiddleEast answered a structured interview shortly after arrival onsocial and demographic background and family exposure to organizedviolence. At follow-up, 90 families (60.4 per cent) had beengranted a residence permit. This was positively associated withIraqi nationality, with the duration of the father's educationand the family's religion being another than Islam, and negativelywith being a single mother family. No association was foundwith exposure to war, having lived in a refugee camp or to humanrights violations. Without transparency of the asylum grantingdecision process the conclusion is that this seems to favourthe selection of socially and culturally well situated refugees,while human rights violations seem to play a diminishing role.In order to develop its quality, continuous and transparentmonitoring of the asylum granting decision process appears relevant.     

Legitimate peace in post-civil war states: towards attaining the unattainable

Within the literature on conflict resolution and peace-building, there is a growing awareness about the need to move beyond ‘minimalist’ (absence of war) and ‘maximalist’ (absence of different types of structural violence) notions of peace. While the first concept is too narrow—it conceals much human suffering and does not take into account the root causes of armed conflict—the latter is too inclusive, open-ended and difficult to measure. There is, despite this growing consciousness, a lack of midterm definitions of peace that can help peacemakers assess whether a peace process is on the right track, say 10 or 15 years after a civil war has been terminated. In fact, when operationalising and empirically measuring how ‘peaceful’ post-civil war societies are, many scholars continue to employ indicators based on minimalist or maximalist visions of peace. In this article we introduce the concept of ‘legitimate peace’, which we argue can function as a midterm benchmark for peacemakers, and outline the benefits associated with its use.     

Explaining Modes of Participation: A Dynamic Test of Alternative Rational Choice Models

Rational choice accounts of political participation identify two major solutions to ‘the paradox of participation’: collective incentives and selective incentives. Prior findings regarding the viability of these solutions are seemingly inconclusive and contradictory. One important reason for this could be that the applicability of these solutions varies across participatory modes. In this article, a first attempt is made to develop a theoretical answer to the question of why this may be the case. The predictions are then tested across four different modes of participation, using longitudinal data that eliminate or reduce the biases inherent in cross‐sectional designs. The results show different types of incentives to strike with distinctly variable force across different modes of participation. Most importantly, whereas electoral modes of participation (voting and party activity) are affected by selective incentives only, the non‐electoral modes (contacting and manifestations) are the consequence of both collective and selective incentives.     

Quantitative MRI in Isotropic Spatial Resolution for Forensic Soft Tissue Documentation. Why and How?*

Abstract: A quantification of T1, T2, and PD in high isotropic resolution was performed on corpses. Isotropic and quantified postmortem magnetic resonance (IQpmMR) enables sophisticated 3D postprocessing, such as reformatting and volume rendering. The body tissues can be characterized by the combination of these three values. The values of T1, T2, and PD were given as coordinates in a T1–T2–PD space where similar tissue voxels formed clusters. Implementing in a volume rendering software enabled color encoding of specific tissues and pathologies in 3D models of the corpse similar to computed tomography, but with distinctively more powerful soft tissue discrimination. From IQpmMR data, any image plane at any contrast weighting may be calculated or 3D color‐encoded volume rendering may be carried out. The introduced approach will enable future computer‐aided diagnosis that, e.g., checks corpses for a hemorrhage distribution based on the knowledge of its T1–T2–PD vector behavior in a high spatial resolution.