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AbstractUS Federal legislation mandates the treatment of underaged youth induced to sell themselves for commercial sex as victims and not criminal offenders of prostitution laws. Nonetheless, state prosecutors often take action in juvenile court against these youth. This study explored the impact of negative moral emotions, victim blame, and victim believability on public judgments of child sex trafficking victims under varying case facts. We presented an online scenario involving a trafficking case to 682 participants and manipulated youth sex, trafficker sex, vulnerability background, and prior arrest history to determine how emotions, victim blame, and believability mediate child sex trafficking decisions. Two different paths emerged depending on the youth's sex. Participants reported greater victim responsibility and greater negative moral emotions towards a male youth trafficked by a female when he had a prior commercial sex arrest, which in turn predicted a lower certainty of recommending social services over legal consequences. With the same facts, participants reported lower believability for a female youth when she had a prior commercial sex arrest, which in turn predicted a lower certainty of recommending social services over legal consequences. The paper ends with a discussion of the implications of the findings for practice and theory.

AbstractOne collateral consequence of a criminal conviction for parents with young children is the loss of custody, which turns on the subjective "best interests of the child" standard. This research explored whether criminal conviction and substance abuse history influenced custody decisions. Experiment 1 presented community participants with a vignette describing a parent with combinations of manipulated stigmatized characteristics (i.e., gender, race, offender status, and substance abuse). Participants completed a custody determination scale, which showed that mothers with an offense received more favorable custody decisions than fathers with an offense, as did ex‐offenders without substance abuse. Experiment 2 added a positive or negative psychological fitness evaluation of the ex‐offender. It found main effects of the professional parenting evaluation and replicated the parent's substance abuse findings from Experiment 1, but not the offense status result. Most importantly, these results were significant after controlling for the participants' ratings of the best interests of the child in question and mediation analyses revealed that the child's best interests only partially explained the relationships between substance abuse, the parental evaluation, and the custody determination. This suggests that participants made custody decisions based on factors extraneous to the current legal standard, namely, the best interests of the child.

AbstractResearch has consistently demonstrated minority youth are treated unfairly within the juvenile justice system, yet little research has explored the psychology of juvenile probation judgments and the ways they contribute to disparate treatment. This article reports on two experiments that explored the influence of participant fear on juvenile probation judgments by varying the offender's race (Black or White) and risk information across two studies which invoked fear, anger or no emotion in participants. In Study 1, fearful participants who received no risk information were more likely to recommend a control‐oriented supervision approach for a Black offender, but not a White offender. Fearful participants who received moderate risk information were not influenced by the offender's race. Study 2 increased the amount of risk information (Low, Moderate, High), such that all participants received some risk information. Participants relied on the risk information to make their decisions, and we found no biasing race or emotion effects.

As related concepts, justice, conflict and wellbeing have a profound impact on individuals, groups, nations, and each other. Separately and in combination, they are the subjects of scientific attention, public concern, and formal policy. Justice, Conflict and Wellbeing closely examines the many intersections of the three, combining perspectives across branches of psychology, law, and political science for a book whose scope is at once personal, local, and global. Unifying these chapters is the latest research on the psychological and physical toll resulting from forms of conflict such as inequality, objectification, and war, and possibilities for corrective measures through the legal system, arbitration, and policy. As a unit, the book models the effectiveness of interdisciplinary research in arriving at novel answers to longstanding problems. Noted contributors offer nuanced analysis of a broad range of contemporary real-world issues, including: The fairness of distributing resources equally. Hostile work environments. Mental illness, dangerousness, and police power interventions in pursuit of justice. The complexity of accountability for mass atrocity. Everyday opportunities for children to manage conflict. The public and ethical costs of alternative dispute resolution. A volume poised to help shape future policy on multiple fronts, Justice, Conflict and Wellbeing is a path-breaking guidebook that researchers and instructors in social science and law, as well as policymakers, can learn from, expand upon, and put into practice.

From questions surrounding motives to the concept of crimes of passion, the intersection of emotional states and legal practice has long interested professionals as well as the public - recent cases involving extensive pretrial publicity, highly charged evidence, and instances of jury nullification continue to make the subject particularly timely. With these trends in mind, Emotion and the Law brings a rich tradition in social psychology into sharp forensic focus in a unique interdisciplinary volume. Emotion, mood and affective states, plus patterns of conduct that tend to arise from them in legal contexts, are analyzed in theoretical and practical terms, using real-life examples from criminal and civil cases. From these complex situations, contributors provide answers to bedrock questions - what roles affect plays in legal decision making, when these roles are appropriate, and what can be done so that emotion is not misused or exploited in legal procedures - and offer complementary legal and social/cognitive perspectives on these and other salient issues: Positive versus negative affect in legal decision making. Emotion, eyewitness memory, and false memory. The influence of emotions on juror decisions, and legal approaches to its control. A terror management theory approach to the understanding of hate crimes. Policy recommendations for managing affect in legal proceedings. Additional legal areas that can benefit from the study of emotion. Emotion and the Law clarifies theoretical grey areas, revisits current practice, and suggests possibilities for both new scholarship and procedural guidelines, making it a valuable reference for psycholegal researchers, forensic psychologists, and policymakers.

AbstractCommunities across the United States integrate thousands of men and women coming out of jail or prison each year and studies suggest that over 75% of this population will reoffend within a decade of release. According to research, positive employment outcomes are linked to preventing recidivism; however, employers routinely check or inquire about criminal histories and discriminate against ex‐offender applicants. The current research focused on employer stigma against applicants with a criminal history with an online sample of adults (N = 296). The analogue experiment examined hiring decisions for Black versus White applicants with or without a criminal history in order to explore the effect of race and criminal history on hiring outcomes. As expected, participants were less likely to recommend applicants with a criminal history for employment, but the sex of the respondent moderated the differences in racial bias. Male hiring decision makers did not differentiate between applicants with or without a criminal history when presented with a White applicant but did show a stigma against Black ex‐offenders versus Black applicants with a clean criminal history. Female hiring decision makers showed the opposite pattern demonstrating no preference between Black applicants with or without a criminal history but preferring White applicants without a criminal record versus White ex‐offenders. These findings suggest that male and female hiring managers are differently affected by the presence of a criminal history depending on the race of the applicant and these differences if replicated have interesting policy implications.

In 2009, the Supreme Court decided, in Gross v. FBL, that the law governing age discrimination should be interpreted in a stricter manner than before. After Gross, age discrimination claims are tried under but for causality in which the plaintiff's age must be the direct cause of the adverse action, as opposed to mixed motive causality allowable under Title VII, in which age would only have to be a motivating factor. Previous research has shown that but for instructions lead to more pro‐defendant verdicts, regardless of case strength, as compared to mixed motive instructions. This study reports on a simulated jury experiment that sought to uncover the influence of stereotypes concerning older workers on juror verdicts in an age discrimination case. Older worker stereotypes were assessed using the Stereotype Content Model's warmth and competence dimensions. In line with previous research, participants were more likely to find for the defendant under but for instructions, as compared to mixed motive. Further, mock jurors' stereotypes predicted their verdicts, but only under the but for instructions, suggesting that jurors rely on stereotypes when they are limited in the case facts they can consider. Implications for policy changes and future research directions are discussed.

Previous research discusses the superiority of actuarial models over clinical models in a number of areas related to accuracy and consistency in decision making. The current project sought to develop an actuarial candidate selection model for affirmative action in higher education that would achieve the goal of diversity by assigning points for a number of diversity‐related characteristics in addition to standard academic admission criteria. Two experiments showed that participants who used actuarial models selected applicants with more markers of academic success and greater diversity using factors favored by recent U.S. Supreme Court cases. The second experiment showed that an unweighted actuarial model also helped decision makers select more minority student candidates and that it produced higher ratings of procedural fairness. The article discusses how an actuarial model might pass Constitutional muster in light of recent Supreme Court cases.

AbstractTwo studies tested the hypothesis that men who are sexually objectified during an interview will experience a negative emotion, rate the experience as harassing, and perform badly on tasks compared to un‐objectified controls. However, observers who watch videos of objectified experiencers and predictors who read about the interaction will demonstrate stronger effects, with women showing the strongest. In Study 1, 90 undergraduates (60 men) were interviewees or watched a video of a mock job interview in a 2 (objectification: objectifying interview vs. non‐objectifying interview) × 3 (perspective: experiencer who was a man vs. observers, some men and some women) mixed model design with repeated measures on the second factor. In Study 2, 71 undergraduates read about a job interview in a 2 (objectification: objectifying vs. non‐objectifying interview) × 2 (gender: man vs. woman) between‐subjects design. Results showed that while objectified experiencers (men) showed no objectification effects, observers and predictors anticipated a reasonable person would experience more harassment than the experiencers reported, with observers' enjoyment of sexualization moderating these forecasts. Additionally, the predictors' forecasted negative emotions mediated the effects of objectification on judgments and task performance. These studies argue for informing Title VII's 2‐prong subjective‐objective test with social fact testimony in same‐sex harassment cases.