Factors That Influence Decision-Making In Insanity Cases

The insanity defense has been one of the most hotly debated issues in criminal law for centuries. Jurors are generally hostile to the insanity defense and people with psychological disorders and often fail to find defendants insane even when an insanity verdict is warranted. The current study attempted to determine why jurors are hostile to the insanity defense and people with psychological disorders. Participants read one of two case vignettes depicting a defendant suffering from paranoid schizophrenia who committed murder. The vignettes differed in how sympathetic the defendant is in the vignettes, and how dangerous the defendant is to society. The participants rendered a verdict in the case and indicated how confident they were in their verdict. Next, participants were presented with several commonly used insanity tests in the U.S. Lastly, they completed various assessment instruments and provided demographic information to assess whether lack of knowledge about psychological disorders and the insanity defense, attitudes toward psychological disorders and the insanity defense, different views of morality, authoritarianism, Type I thinking, and various demographic variables would affect their verdicts

Co-evolution of density and topology in a simple model of city formation

We study the influence that population density and the road network have on each others' growth and evolution. We use a simple model of formation and evolution of city roads which reproduces the most important empirical features of street networks in cities. Within this framework, we explicitely introduce the topology of the road network and analyze how it evolves and interact with the evolution of population density. We show that accessibility issues -pushing individuals to get closer to high centrality nodes- lead to high density regions and the appearance of densely populated centers. In particular, this model reproduces the empirical fact that the density profile decreases exponentially from a core district. In this simplified model, the size of the core district depends on the relative importance of transportation and rent costs.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figure

State-dependent Neural Inhibition by Extracellular Stimulation

Utilizing the Aplysia california buccal ganglia neurons, our research built upon previous findings concerning the presence of neuronal activity states, but demonstrate that these states play a role in the cell’s responsiveness to electrical stimulation. It was demonstrated that fast-firing neurons are more resistant to inhibitory stimulation as compared to slow-firing neurons. NEURON computational modeling revealed differences in ion channel dynamics that may underlie the differences in stimulation responsiveness that are associated with neuronal states

Infiltration of tobacco leaf tissue

Method for transient expression in tobacco (N. tobacum and N. benthamiana) leaf lower epidermal cell

Moral Disengagement and Risk Prototypes in the Context of Adolescent Cyberbullying: Findings From Two Countries

Cyberbullying is associated with a wide range of mental health difficulties and behavioral problems in adolescents and research is needed to better understand psychological correlates of this behavior. The present study used a novel model that incorporated Social Cognitive Theory and the prototype/willingness model to identify the correlates of behavioral willingness to engage in cyberbullying in two countries. Adolescent students were randomly selected from secondary schools in Italy (n = 1710) and Greece (n = 355), and completed anonymous measures of moral disengagement, descriptive norms, risk prototype evaluations and behavioral willingness to engage in cyberbullying. Hierarchical linear regression analyses showed that willingness to engage in cyberbullying was associated with moral disengagement, prototype evaluations and descriptive social norms in Italy, and with gender, moral disengagement and descriptive social norms in Greece. Regression-based multiple mediation modeling further showed that the association between moral disengagement and cyberbullying willingness was mediated by prototype evaluations in Italy and by descriptive norms in Greece. The implications of our findings are discussed in the context of self-regulating cyberbullying perpetration in adolescents and informing school-based policies and interventions to prevent cyberbullying behavior