National study comparing the characteristics of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia who committed homicide vs. those who died by suicide

Associations between serious mental disorder and violence are well-documented, but there is little epidemiological evidence linking these disorders and homicide risk. The reported study compares socio-demographic and clinical characteristics of people diagnosed with schizophrenia who committed homicide vs. those who died by suicide. The study is a national case series of male patients in England & Wales diagnosed with schizophrenia and convicted of homicide during 1997–2012 (n = 168), and a randomly selected comparison group of male patients with schizophrenia who died by suicide and who were matched to the homicide case series by age (n = 777). There are different patterns of behaviour in people with schizophrenia preceding homicide and suicide. Homicide perpetrators have frequently disengaged with services whilst patients who die by suicide are often in recent contact. This is important knowledge for clinical services as it indicates a different preventive emphasis despite the existence of other shared characteristics.     

The role of social learning in adaptiveness: insights from water management

The article introduces the notion of adaptiveness and discusses the role of social learning in it. Adaptiveness refers to the capacity of a social actor or social–ecological system to adapt in response to, or in anticipation of, changes in the environment. We explore arguments both from a theoretical perspective and through illustrations from case studies of water management in the Alps of Europe and Mekong in southeast Asia. We propose and illustrate that social learning processes are important for building adaptiveness in several ways and at different scales. Social learning can help cope with informational uncertainty; reduce normative uncertainty; build consensus on criteria for monitoring and evaluation; empower stakeholders to take adaptive actions; reduce conflicts and identify synergies between adaptations; and improve fairness of decisions and actions. Findings in the case studies provide some support for these generalizations but often with caveats related to diversity of stakeholder interests, levels of shared understanding versus contested knowledge and scale of coordination. For this reason, we suggest that future work pays greater attention to issues of agency, knowledge and scale: What strategies have individuals and organizations pursued in successful examples of social learning? How are the boundaries and interactions between science, policy and practice managed? How does social learning occur across spatial and temporal scales?     

An Examination of Authoritarian Personality Traits among Police Officers: The Role of Experience

This study compared authoritarian traits as determined by MMPI-2 scores between inexperienced versus experienced police officers. The purpose of this comparison was to investigate whether experienced police officers possessed higher levels of authoritarian traits which may be related to years on the job. Results found that inexperienced and experienced police officers tend to be psychologically healthy and do not possess high levels of authoritarian traits. Some specific differences emerged with inexperienced police officers demonstrating higher scores on ASP (antisocial practices) but lower scores on HY (emotional reactions to stress). Possible reasons for these results are discussed.     

Hemispheric reconfigurations in Northern Amazonia: the ‘Three Guianas’ amid regional change and Brazilian hegemony

Regional and hemispheric reconfigurations in Latin America and the Caribbean are increasingly mediated by Brazilian power, and the engagement of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana with this emerging context is intriguing. They are tentatively moving away from a Caribbean region with which they are culturally contiguous, towards a South American continent in which they are geographically located. This is partly a reflection of the gradual opening up of the Northern Amazonian space that they share collectively, and also with Venezuela and Brazil. These processes are occurring as cause and effect of Brazil’s emergence as a regional – and even regionally hegemonic – power. With reference to wider debates on regionalism and hegemony, we analyse the uncertain consequences of these shifts.     

Government Assistance Protects Low‐Income Families from Eviction

A lack of affordable housing is a pressing issue for many low‐income American families and can lead to eviction from their homes. Housing assistance programs to address this problem include public housing and other assistance, including vouchers, through which a government agency offsets the cost of private market housing. This paper assesses whether the receipt of either category of assistance reduces the probability that a family will be evicted from their home in the subsequent six years. Because no randomized trial has assessed these effects, we use observational data and formalize the conditions under which a causal interpretation is warranted. Families living in public housing experience less eviction conditional on pre‐treatment variables. We argue that this evidence points toward a causal conclusion that assistance, particularly public housing, protects families from eviction.     

The 2008 Guinea Conakry coup: Neither inevitable nor inexorable

This article examines the issue of democratic governance in Guinea–Conakry and the impact that international donors had on the political debate in the last years of the Conté regime. Our contention here is that there was and continues to be an evolving pluralism and embryo group of self-defined civil society organisations in both urban and rural Guinea but as a result of the December 2008 military coup opportunities have been lost in the promotion of democratic governance and more pluralistic group dynamics in Guinea. Support for indigenous (and self-defined) civil society groups, including the development of political parties by the international community, is essential to the return to institutionalised governance.     

Learning on the job: Studying expertise in residential burglars using virtual environments*

In this article, we describe a quasi‐experiment in which experienced incarcerated burglars (n = 56), other offenders (n = 50), and nonoffenders (n = 55) undertook a mock burglary within a virtual neighborhood. We draw from the cognitive psychology literature on expertise and apply it to offending behavior, demonstrating synergy with rational choice perspectives, yet extending them in several respects. Our principal goal was to carry out the first robust test of expertise in offenders by having these groups undertake a burglary in a fully fledged reenactment of a crime in a virtual environment. Our findings indicate that the virtual environment successfully reinstated the context of the crime showing clear differences in the decision making of burglars compared with other groups in ways commensurate with expertise in other behavioral domains. Specifically, burglars scoped the neighborhood more thoroughly, spent more time in the high‐value areas of the crime scene while traveling less distance there, and targeted different goods from the comparison groups. The level of detail in the data generated sheds new light on the cognitive processes and actions of burglars and how they “learn on the job.” Implications for criminal decision‐making perspectives and psychological theories of expertise are discussed.