Attachment and social bonding in maximum and minimum security prison inmates

Attitudes towards social attachment and bonding were evaluated in groups of maximum (N = 48) and minimum (N=46) security prison inmates and compared with the attitudes of a group of 49 noncriminal college students. Three primary styles of attachment were considered: avoidant, ambivalent/anxious, and secure. It was predicted that the maximum security condition, a group hypothesized to contain a large number of lifestyle criminals, would evidence more of an avoidant style of attachment compared to minimum security inmates or a group of coliege student controls. Consistent with this hypothesis, the maximum security inmates exhibited greater avoidance in their attitudes towards relationships than subjects in the other two conditions. The implications of these results are discussed.     

Some conditions maximizing eyewitness accuracy: A learning/memory analogy

Jurors continue to rely heavily on eyewitness testimony despite numerous demonstrations that it is often inaccurate. As part of the effort to provide jurors with good estimates of the accuracy of any specific testimony, a study was designed to test the proposal that eyewitness accuracy is governed by the same variables and in the same way as is retention of much simpler material in classical learning and memory paradigms. Prior exposure to the criminal (trials), arousal value of the incident (drive), and delay between prior exposure and incident, and between incident and test (inner-trial intervals) all affected eyewitness accuracy in the expected manner. Correct recognitions of the criminal in a line-up ranged from 14 percent to 86 percent, depending on the particular conditions under which the incident was observed.     

Sudden unexpected death in infancy and childhood due to undiagnosed neoplasia: an autopsy study

Sudden unexpected death due to clinically undiagnosed neoplasia in infancy and childhood (SUDNIC) is a rare phenomenon, with only small numbers of cases reported in the literature. In the majority of instances, the tumors involve critical structures within the heart or central nervous system and include gliomas, medulloblastomas, rhabdomyomas, and neoplasms of stromal elements. A 20-year retrospective review of autopsy records from the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, was performed (1984-2003, n = 4926), and 7 cases of SUDNIC were identified (0.14%). In addition, 1 case was obtained from the files of the Children's and Women's Health Centre of British Columbia, Vancouver. Diagnoses included 2 cases of acute leukemia (1 myelogenous, 1 lymphoblastic), 2 cases of mediastinal lymphoblastic lymphoma (pre-T cell type), 1 papillary fibroelastoma of the mitral valve prolapsing into and totally occluding the left anterior descending coronary artery, 1 medulloblastoma, 1 Wilms tumor associated with fatal intraperitoneal hemorrhage, and 1 widely disseminated gastric carcinoma. These cases demonstrate that infants and children may have minimal or no symptoms in the presence of significant disease and highlight the need for a thorough autopsy examination in cases of sudden unexpected death in infancy and childhood.     

Shifting Terrain: Styles of Liberalism, Periodization, and Levels of Analysis

The appraisal of background conditions is an important but often neglected element of political interpretation. Influential interpretations of American politics, such as Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America, dismiss the importance of changing political contexts. Set in terms of the debate over American exceptionalism, this article explores changes in political mood in the United States during the twentieth century. Hartz is not wrong to assert the persistence of a uniform underlying political culture in the United States, nor the lasting impact of Lockeanism in establishing boundaries to possibility—for the left and the right. But a finer-grained appraisal of the interaction between political-cultural ethos and activism is possible. As David Greenstone rightly argued, contestation still occurs within a predominantly liberal society. This article contends that the character of this contestation is determined by the nature of political periods produced by interpretations of the underlying Lockean bedrock by political actors. It makes explicit that Hartz and Greenstone were operating at different levels of analysis—Hartz established the persistence of dedication to Lockean liberal tenets in the deep structure of American politics, while Greenstone's interpretation established a meso-level of analysis, above this deep structure. The present article adds temporal periodization to this meso-level. Political actors make history upon a stage received from the past—in the United States, the Lockean bedrock—but they inflect this stage with crucial interpretations that set or stretch the limits of political expression in a new period. It discerns four varieties of liberalism—economic liberalism, social state liberalism, social movement liberalism and cold war liberalism—that have interpreted the deep structure differently since the 1920s. It also suggests that sensitivity to historical changes in political mood does not necessitate repudiation of Hartz's thesis of Lockean liberal predominance in the United States.     

Editors' Note

Note

Editors' Note