This study examined whether reinforcement can induce children to falsely incriminate themselves. Ninety-nine children in kindergarten through third grade were questioned regarding the staged theft of a toy. Half received reinforcement for self-incriminating responses. Within 4 min reinforced children made 52% false admissions of guilty knowledge concerning the theft, and 30% false admissions of having witnessed it. Corresponding figures for controls were 36 and 10%. Twelve percent of children admitted to participating in the theft, but the effect of reinforcement was only marginally significant. The findings indicate that reinforcement can induce children to falsely implicate themselves in wrongdoing.

No abstract

This study explores the psychological type profile of Roman Catholic priests serving in the USA, drawing on data provided by 55 priests who completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales. The data demonstrated clear preferences for introversion (67%), for sensing (64%), and for judging (91%), and a balance between thinking (49%) and feeling (51%). A very high proportion of priests reported preferences for ISTJ (27%), compared with 16% of men in the USA population. Implications of these findings are discussed for ministry in the Roman Catholic Church.

Abstract. We consider the problem of modeling and designing publish/subscribe protocols that safeguard the privacy of clients' subscriptions and of servers' publications while guaranteeing efficient latency in challenging scenarios (i.e., realtime publication, high data arrival rate, etc.). As general solutions from the theory of secure function evaluation protocols would not achieve satisfactory performance in these scenarios, we enrich the model with a third party (e.g., a cloud server). Our main result is a three-party publish/subscribe protocol suitable for practical applications in such scenarios because the publication phase uses only symmetric cryptography operations (a result believed not possible without the third party). At the cost of only a very small amount of privacy loss to the third party, and with no privacy loss to the publishing server or the clients, our protocol has very small publication latency, which we measured for large parameter ranges to be just a small constant factor worse than a publish/subscribe protocol guaranteeing no privacy.

The benefits of religiousness for promoting well-being and avoiding risky behaviors has long been noted, especially for adolescents, but a precise understanding of the mechanism underlying this effect on risky behaviors has not yet been developed. We hypothesized that religious practices help religious adolescents form implementation intentions (IIs) when pursuing decisions and goals to avoid risky behaviors. We predicted that participants with higher rates of private religious practice would generate greater numbers and higher quality IIs to avoid risky behaviors relative to other participants. In this preliminary exploration, 50 college students completed assessments of private religious practices, risk-benefit evaluations about risky scenarios, and the number and quality of IIs they could generate to avoid risk in those scenarios. Results supported our predictions: After controlling for age and gender, participants who engaged more frequently in private religious practice were able to generate both more and higher quality IIs about avoiding risky scenarios. This provides initial support for the hypothesis that religiousness may protect against risky behaviors by enhancing the abilities of religious adolescents to form IIs to avoid risky behaviors.