An Examination of the Communication Styles Associated with Psychopathy and Their Influence on Observer Impressions

Psychopathic individuals are characterized as “intra-species predators”—callous, impulsive, aggressive, and proficient at interpersonal manipulation. For example, despite their high risk for re-offending, psychopathic offenders often receive early release on parole. While reputed to be social chameleons, research suggests that even naive observers can accurately infer high levels of psychopathic traits in others with very brief exposures to behavior, but accuracy degrades with extended observation. We utilized a lens model approach to examine the communication styles (emotional facial expressions, body language, and verbal content) of offenders varying in levels of psychopathic traits using “thin slice” video clips of psychological assessment interviews and to reveal which cues observers use to inform their evaluations of psychopathy. Psychopathic traits were associated with more (a) Duchenne smiles, (b) negative (angry) emotional language, and (c) hand gestures (illustrators). Further, psychopathy was associated with a marked behavioral incongruence; when individuals scoring high in psychopathic traits engaged in Duchenne smiles they were also more likely to use angry language. Naïve observers relied on each of these valid behavioral signals to quickly and accurately detect psychopathic traits. These findings provide insight into psychopathic communication styles, opportunities for improving the detection of psychopathic personality traits, and may provide an avenue for understanding successful psychopathic manipulation.     

Impact of an Overt Response System on Staff Performance and Maintenance of Computer-Based Instruction

Interactive Computer Based Instruction (CBI) systems involve teaching strategies to facilitate greater response opportunities during training in an effort to improve learner performance. The current study investigated the effect of online staff training videos with and without overt response requirements on posttest and maintenance test scores across six block-randomized instructional modules for four employees of a university located in the southeastern region of the United States. The overt response consisted of multiple-choice questions administered throughout select teaching modules using an alternating treatment design. Findings suggest that learning occurred as a result of the CBI training; however, the effectiveness of the overt response system varied across individuals, with no discernible differentiation between learning gains associated with response requirements. Other areas of research for expanding the efficacy of CBI and overt response systems are highlighted.     

Utilizing social media for social work: insights from clients in online youth services

ABSTRACT

This study explored and conceptualised service users’ experiences in online outreach projects supported by the Hong Kong SAR government. Fifteen active users were interviewed. The study used thematic analysis to explore service users’ experiences that might not have been possible without technology. Participant utterances were non-mutually-exclusively tagged with a specific theme. Each utterance reflected an aspect of user experience which combined a technical component with a service-need component. Six themes were identified, including: (i) Personalised newsfeeds help identify service information and news, (ii) Online status indicators improve service accessibility, (iii) Online communications enable a disinhibition effect, (iv) Asynchronous communications facilitate continual feedback loops, (v) Incomplete communicative modalities may cause misunderstanding and (vi) Asynchronous communication may disrupt conversations. The findings reveal that there are middle-level concepts between broad social work concepts and ever-changing technology. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

What Cruising Infants Understand about Support for Locomotion

“Cruising” infants can only walk using external support to augment their balance. We examined cruisers' understanding of support for upright locomotion under four conditions: cruising over a wooden handrail at chest height, a large gap in the handrail, a wobbly unstable handrail, and an ill‐positioned low handrail. Infants distinguished among the support properties of the handrails with differential attempts to cruise and handrail‐specific forms of haptic exploration and gait modifications. They consistently attempted the wood handrail, rarely attempted the gap, and occasionally attempted the low and wobbly handrails. On the wood and gap handrails, attempt rates matched the probability of cruising successfully, but on the low and wobbly handrails, attempt rates under‐ and overestimated the probability of success, respectively. Haptic exploration was most frequent and varied on the wobbly handrail, and gait modifications—including previously undocumented “knee cruising”—were most frequent and effective on the low handrail. Results are discussed in terms of developmental changes in the meaning of support.     

Life Satisfaction in Australia: Evidence from Ten Years of the HILDA Survey

Employing data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, this paper examines the level, determinants and distribution of self-reported life satisfaction, as well as the prevalence and severity of dissatisfaction in Australia over the period 2001–2010. Against most objective measures Australia’s economic performance during this period was exemplary. Yet our results indicate a steady decline in life satisfaction from 2003 onwards, as well as a diminishing gap between the life satisfaction of males and females. Results also suggest that inequality in life satisfaction has generally declined. Geographic heterogeneity in the distribution of life satisfaction is apparent, and a number of socio-economic and demographic factors are found to serve an important role in determining an individual’s level of life satisfaction. Measures of the extent of dissatisfaction reveal an encouraging downward trend and provide policy makers with an alternative perspective from which to assess societal welfare.     

Improved cross-entropy method for estimation

The cross-entropy (CE) method is an adaptive importance sampling procedure that has been successfully applied to a diverse range of complicated simulation problems. However, recent research has shown that in some high-dimensional settings, the likelihood ratio degeneracy problem becomes severe and the importance sampling estimator obtained from the CE algorithm becomes unreliable. We consider a variation of the CE method whose performance does not deteriorate as the dimension of the problem increases. We then illustrate the algorithm via a high-dimensional estimation problem in risk management.     

Social networks and the organisation of big business groups in post New Economic Policy (NEP) era in the 1990s in Malaysia

Personal ties are generally regarded as important to big business growth in Malaysia, particularly after the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1990s. Common types are informal ones established between multi-ethnic big business people and Malay key state and political leaders. Other types of ties, company directorship links and informal ties, are seldom studied especially those between the business people and former state bureaucrats and corporate professionals. Thus, by conceptualising the directorship links and informal personal ties as social networks, the author conducted a sociological analysis of some intra- and inter-ethnic directorship links and ties established by four prominent big businessmen after the NEP in the 1990s. This article reports the main finding on the links and ties becoming a common organisational mechanism of business groups owned and controlled by the businessmen, besides providing access to the state. Therefore, another understanding of inter- and intra-ethnic personal ties in big business growth, especially after the NEP is achieved.