Personality Pathways to Impulsive Behavior and Their Relations to Deviance: Results from Three Samples

The importance of the relation between impulsivity and deviance is well-acknowledged among criminologists. However, differences in the representations of impulsivity, some merely titular and others substantive, may cloud our understanding of these relations. The current study examines the argument, offered by Whiteside and Lynam Pers. Individuals Diff. (2000) 30: 669–689, that there may be four distinct personality pathways through which impulsive behavior may be manifested. Across three samples (two undergraduate, one community), we examine the validity of a four-factor structure of impulsivity, test whether these four pathways manifest divergent relations with various forms of deviant behavior such as crime and substance use, as well as laboratory manifestations of aggressive and impulsive behavior, and examine the invariance of these results across gender. The results support the existence of a four-factor model of impulsivity, the importance of two specific personality pathways in relation to self-reports of deviance (lack of premeditation and sensation seeking), as well as actual behavior, and suggest that these pathways are important for both men and women.     

Improving Children's Recall of an Occurrence of a Repeated Event: Is It a Matter of Helping Them to Generate Options?

Three experiments were conducted to explore whether children's recall of an occurrence of a repeated event could be improved by encouraging them to consider various details that occurred across a series of events prior to making a judgement about which details were included in the target (to-be-recalled) occurrence. Experiment 1 explored whether children's recall of the target occurrence was better after the interviewer presented all the items from the series prior to the child identifying the final item. Experiment 2 explored whether having the children generate all the items facilitated their subsequent recall of the target occurrence. Finally, Experiment 3 directly compared the effectiveness of the above 2 procedures. Regardless of the children's age, the retention interval, or the type of item, children's capacity to identify which details were included in a target occurrence was enhanced when they were initially provided with all the possible details from the series of events. However, without relying on the interviewer to generate the options, the benefit of the technique was directly contingent on the children's ability to generate content details; this was a distinct source of difficulty for the children. Indeed, having children generate options had no beneficial effect on decisions about the temporal position of items unless performance was made conditional on the children's ability to remember the relevant details in the first place. The implications of the findings for the legal setting and for future research are discussed.     

Recovering the Indigenous Legal Traditions of India: Classical Hindu Law in Practice in Late Medieval Kerala

The collection of Malayalam records entitled Vanjeri Grandhavari, taken from the archives of an important Namputiri Brahmin family and the temple under its leadership, provides some long-awaited information regarding a wide range of legal activities in late medieval Kerala. The organization of law and the jurisprudence represented by these records bear an unmistakable similarity to legal ideas found in dharmastra texts. A thorough comparison of the records and relevant dharma texts shows that landholding Namputiri Brahmins, who possessed enormous political and economic power in the region, mediated the implementation of dharmastra into the legal system. From this comparison arise new understandings of law and legal categories such as custom and positive law. Moreover, such comparisons begin to elucidate the problems involved in Western assumptions that it is textual law, not its interpretation and application by humans, which controls behavior. The Vanjeri records demonstrate not only the importance of dharmastra as a historical document but also the manner and extent to which dharmastra provided the foundation for legal systems in Kerala as well as in other regions of India.     

Municipal politics and government: development of the field in Canadian political science

Abstract. Following what has become almost a tradition within the Canadian discipline of political science, this paper attempts an analysis of the development of one field in that discipline. In a sense, a main purpose of the paper is to define the boundaries of the field, an exercise which, given the nature of the field, results in a rather personal definition. Two approaches are taken. First there is a review of the Canadian literature since 1886. That review helps identify the more important sub-fields and analytical approaches. Secondly, the paper reports on a survey of the ways the field is presently taught in Canadian universities and colleges. Assuming that an image of a discipline or of a field is most accurately obtained by examining both writings over time and teaching approaches, the analysis proceeds to identify some of the problems within the field, and offers suggestions for future development of it. The author concludes that because of the highly eclectic nature of the field, in terms of both scope of subject matter and in approaches to analysis, there is a need for more integration among the sub-fields.