Digital Commons Network^™

The Impact Of Callous-Unemotional Traits And Externalizing Tendencies On Neural Responsivity To Reward And Punishment In Healthy Adolescents, Yonglin Huang, Tingting Wu, Yu Gao, Yuyang Luo, Ziyan Wu, Shawn Fagan, Stephanie Leung, Xiaobo Li

Publications and Research

Both externalizing behavior and callous-unemotional (CU) traits in youth are precursors to later criminal offending in adulthood. It is posited that disruptions in reward and punishment processes may engender problematic behavior, such that CU traits and externalizing behavior may be linked to a dominant reward response style (e.g., heightened responsivity to rewards) and deficient punishment-processing. However, prior research has generated mixed findings and work examining both the sole and joint contribution of CU traits and externalizing problems related to functional brain alterations is lacking. In this pilot functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we measured externalizing behavior and CU traits in …

Reciprocity Through Ratings: An Experimental Study Of Bias In Evaluations, Simon Halliday, Jonathan Lafky

Economics: Faculty Publications

This paper studies the potential for ratings of seller quality to be influenced by side payments to raters. In a laboratory setting, we find that even modest side payments from sellers to raters have large effects, with the type of rating (favorable or unfavorable) given to a seller determined primarily by how large a monetary transfer the seller makes to the rater. Our results demonstrate that side payments can crowd out a rater’s concern for buyers, even in situations where there is no potential for long-term relationship building.

‘It’S Kinda Punishment’: Tandem Logics And Penultimate Power In The Penal Voluntary Sector For Canadian Youth, Abigail Salole

Publications and Scholarship

This paper draws on original empirical research in Ontario, Canada which analyses penal voluntary sector practice with youth in conflict with the law. I illustrate how youth penal voluntary sector practice (YPVS) operates alongside, or in tandem with the statutory criminal justice system. I argue that examining the PVS and the statutory criminal justice system simultaneously, or in tandem, provides fuller understandings of PVS inclusionary (and exclusionary) control practices (Tomczak and Thompson 2017). I introduce the concept of penultimate power, which demonstrates the ability of PVS workers to trigger criminal justice system response toward a young person in conflict …

Villains, Morality, And Redemption: A Content Analysis Of Children’S Movies, Iqra Ishaq

Senior Honors Projects

Research on children’s movies has yielded important findings on messaging about gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, (dis)ability, mental illness, aging, and even death. All of this research has recognized the important role children’s movies play in children’s upbringing and informal education. Not only do children’s movies reflect the commonly-held values of the time, but they impart these values to their audience. Children, as the target audience of these movies, are extremely susceptible to absorbing these values and messages.

My research examines what messages children’s movies impart about villains. It includes a content-analysis of 80 full-length animated movies released by Disney, DreamWorks, …

Is Shaming An Important Moral Tool?, Rachel Robinson-Greene

Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Misbehaving students at Washington Middle School last month couldn’t expect their bad behavior to go unnoticed by their peers and teachers. A list titled “Today’s Detention” was projected onto the wall of the cafeteria, making the group of students to be punished public knowledge. This particular incident made local news, but it’s just one instance of a phenomenon known as an “accountability wall.” These take different forms, sometimes they involve displays of grades or other achievements, and sometimes they focus on bad behaviors. The motivation for such public displays of information is to encourage good behavior and hard work from …

Perceptions About Sexual Offenses: Misconceptions, Punitiveness, And Public Sentiment, Laura L. King

Criminal Justice Faculty Publications and Presentations

Decades of research on public opinion about crime reveal varying, yet relatively punitive attitudes that are often riddled with misconceptions. Sparked by the increased media and legislative attention devoted to sex offenders beginning in the 1990s, researchers began to more closely examine public opinion about sexual offenses. Findings suggest the public adheres to several misconceptions about sexual offenses and supports harsh sanctions for offenders. However, further research is warranted to more closely examine the relationships among these variables. Thus, the goal of the present study was to survey Pennsylvania residents to examine the degree to which misconceptions about sexual offenses …

Aging And Blaming In The Criminal Justice System, Rachel Robinson-Greene

Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

A recent study in the medical journal The Lancet suggests that, if trends hold, 50% of babies born today will live to be over 100 years old. Though long life is typically thought of as a good thing, some of our ordinary practices may need to change to track philosophical and practical challenges posed by longer life spans. In particular, we need to reflect on whether our attitudes about blame and punishment need to be adjusted. For example, last year, John “Sonny” Franzese was released from an American prison at the age of 100. Franzese was sentenced to fifty years …

Capital And Punishment: Resource Scarcity Increases Endorsement Of The Death Penalty, Keelah E. G. Williams, Ashley M. Votruba, Steven L. Neuberg, Michael J. Saks

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

Faced with punishing severe offenders, why do some prefer imprisonment whereas others impose death? Previous research exploring death penalty attitudes has primarily focused on individual and cultural factors. Adopting a functional perspective, we propose that environmental features may also shape our punishment strategies. Individuals are attuned to the availability of resources within their environments. Due to heightened concerns with the costliness of repeated offending, we hypothesize that individuals tend toward elimination-focused punishments during times of perceived scarcity. Using global and United States data sets (studies 1 and 2), we find that indicators of resource scarcity predict the presence of capital …

Foreword: Abolition Constitutionalism, Dorothy E. Roberts

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Foreword, I make the case for an abolition constitutionalism that attends to the theorizing of prison abolitionists. In Part I, I provide a summary of prison abolition theory and highlight its foundational tenets that engage with the institution of slavery and its eradication. I discuss how abolition theorists view the current prison industrial complex as originating in, though distinct from, racialized chattel slavery and the racial capitalist regime that relied on and sustained it, and their movement as completing the “unfinished liberation” sought by slavery abolitionists in the past. Part II considers whether the U.S. Constitution is an …

Technologically Distorted Conceptions Of Punishment, Jessica M. Eaglin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Much recent work in academic literature and policy discussions suggests that the proliferation of actuarial — meaning statistical — assessments of a defendant’s recidivism risk in state sentencing structures is problematic. Yet scholars and policymakers focus on changes in technology over time while ignoring the effects of these tools on society. This Article shifts the focus away from technology to society in order to reframe debates. It asserts that sentencing technologies subtly change key social concepts that shape punishment and society. These same conceptual transformations preserve problematic features of the sociohistorical phenomenon of mass incarceration. By connecting technological interventions and …

Hog Board, Joe Maslanka

Mighty Pen Project Anthology & Archive

A young Marine in training stands up to his drill instructors on behalf of his mother.

Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit.