Legal issues for the pediatric dentist confronted with suspected child abuse or neglect include: what must be reported, to which agency, with what certainty, and with what liabilities and protections. Reporting laws are part of an overall protective structure which extends to children victimized either within families or by unfamiliars. Dentists need to be at least generally aware of the requir...

The basic discrimination of friend and foe was likely one of the earliest interpersonal judgments to evolve (e.g., O’Sullivan, 2003). Such decisions had to occur rapidly, perhaps intuitively, to inform the best course of action for survival. Intuitive interpersonal decisions appear to be based largely on the face, which acts as the display board on which emotions and intentions are communicated...

In this paper we describe a case study which supports the claim that ontologies are reusable components in the design of knowledge systems. An ontology documents important domain assumptions which would otherwise remain implicit. Whereas a conceptual (or formal) system specification differs between different knowledge systems (even in the same domain), we show the underlying ontology to be inva...

Research has shown that moral judgments depend on the capacity to engage in mental state reasoning. In this article, we will first review behavioral and neural evidence for the role of mental states (e.g., people’s beliefs, desires, intentions) in judgments of right and wrong. Second, we will consider cases where mental states appear at first to matter less (i.e., when people assign moral blame...

Research on the relationship between community race/ethnic and economic change and the base rates of hate crimes has been rarely studied in the social sciences. The present study examined the role of race/ethnic and economic change in Los Angeles between 1990 and 2000 to determine their relationship to hate crime occurrence. Data collected from Los Angeles hate crime reports, including victim a...

The concerns of jury research have extensively focused on subject selection, yet larger issues loom. We argue that observed differences between students vs. non-students in mock juror studies are inconsistent at best, and that researchers are ignoring the more important issue of jury deliberation. We contend that the lack of information on deliberating jurors and/or juries is a much greater thr...

The agentivity of social entities has posed problems for ontologies of social phenomena, especially in the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) designed for use in the semantic web. This article elucidates a theory by which physical and social objects can take action, but that also recognizes the different ways in which they act. It introduces the “carry” relati...

One of the most pervasive and undisputed gender stereotypes is that men are more aggressive than women. However, this stereotype has, until recently, led researchers to conclude that women are nonaggressive and, therefore, to ignore the topic of female aggression as a distinct phenomenon. The basis of the myth, factors supporting its maintenance, and theories of female aggression are examined. ...