Teleological explanations are based on the assumption that an object or behavior exists for a purpose. Two studies explored the tendency of adults and first-, second-, and fourth-grade elementary-school children to explain the properties of living and nonliving natural kinds in teleological terms. Consistent with the hypothesis that young children possess a promiscuous teleological tendency, St...

There are significant numbers of mentally ill men and women in jail and the level of their psychopathology is often serious. Once in jail, the psychotic individual is subjected to conditions conducive to further decompensation and higher suicide rates. If this is the case, the duration of confinement--that is, the duration of exposure to this toxic environment--is not trivial. Of further concer...

Life-time criminality, family history, and situational factors during a fire-setting offense were compared between 44 fire setters who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia or delusional psychosis and 260 nonpsychotic fire setters who had undergone a pretrial forensic psychiatric evaluation. The same comparisons were made between alcoholic (n = 25) and nonalcoholic (n = 19) schizophrenic fire s...

This article examines the effectiveness of using different kinds of written reminders to reduce misdemeanor defendants’ failure-to-appear (FTA) rates. A subset of defendants was surveyed after their scheduled court date to assess their perceptions of procedural justice and trust and confidence in the courts. Reminders reduced FTA overall, and more substantive reminders (e.g., with information o...

Litigation seems to be a Pareto-inefficient outcome of pretrial bargaining; however, this paper shows that litigation can be the outcome of rational behavior by a litigant and her attorney. If the attorney has more information than his client concerning the characteristics of the lawsuit, the client can use litigation as a way of extracting information. I show that, counterintuitively, litigati...

Previous research showed that the effects of incentive downshift in male rats are attenuated by a pretrial opportunity to ejaculate. Because ejaculation raises testosterone (T) levels and has anxiolytic-like effects in male rats, the present experiments were designed to assess the role of T and gonadectomy (GDX) on two situations involving incentive downshift. In consummatory successive negativ...

The effects of conditioning on the discharges of single neurons in primary auditory cortex (AI) were determined during acquisition of the pupillary conditioned response in chronically prepared cats. Acoustic stimuli (1-s white noise or tone) were presented with electrodermal stimulation unpaired during a sensitization control phase followed by pairing during a subsequent conditioning phase. Sti...

A typology of inmates and pretrial detainees admitted to a secure forensic psychiatric hospital was developed using the referral or adjustment problem at the correctional setting as the classifying variable. An eight-group typology was derived along with a description of each type's demographic, criminal, psychiatric, and institutional characteristics. Although the typology appears to be center...

The purpose of the investigations was to dissociate processes of task preparation from task execution in the task-switching paradigm. The basic assumption was that task repetitions have 2 advantages over task shifts: an activation advantage as a result of the execution of the same task type in the pretrial, and an expectation advantage, because participants, in general, implicitly expect a repe...

Medical records of 42 pretrial detainees charged with stalking in South Carolina from January 1992 to January 1996 were reviewed. The group was divided into 22 nonviolent and 20 violent stalkers. Stalkers were classified as violent if they had associated charges involving bodily harm to their victims or if they met the criteria for South Carolina's legal definition of aggravated stalking. Varia...