What are the risk/protective factors in his background that might relate to the mass shooting he committed?

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 How would you argue the opposite side of this case? Please do it from an argue the opposite side

11

Discussion: Assessing Homicide Offenders

There are many types of homicides, including single, spree, mass, and serial. The motivation for each can be quite different. In most single homicides, the victim knows the offender and is commonly a family member. Murder sprees are the killing of three or more people without a cooling-off period and at multiple locations. These offenders may be motivated by a desire to show that they are to be reckoned with. Mass murder involves killing three or more individuals at a single location without a cooling-off period. These are more likely to be motivated by revenge and a desire to get even. The final type, the serial killer, will kill over time with an extended cooling-off period. They can be motivated by anger, thrill, financial gain, and attention seeking. Understanding the motivation and the mental status of homicide offenders has an influence on the potential prosecution and defense of the offender.

In this Discussion, you analyze the case of Charles Whitman. You will be the expert witness for the defense or the prosecution and provide recommendations for the case.

To prepare for this Discuss.

  • Review the Charles Whitman case in the appropriate resources.
  • The Instructor will assign you to serve as an expert witness for either the prosecution or the defense by Day 1 of this week.

If Charles Whitman had faced prosecution, how would you, as a forensic psychology professional expert witness for either the prosecution or the defense, have assessed his personality? What are the risk/protective factors in his background that might relate to the mass shooting he committed? If you are a witness for the defense, how would you have assisted the defense? If you are working for the prosecution, how would you have assisted that side?

 

Explain whether you made external (situational) and/or internal (dispositional) attributions for each person’s behavior during that first meeting.

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Week 3: Social Cognition and Perception

How do you form your first impressions of others? Do you look at their clothes or body language? Do you compare them in some way to someone else you know with similar characteristics? Do you allow your personal biases and prejudices to influence how you perceive the person? Does culture influence your impressions of others? Think about an example of making a social judgment about another person or a group of people. For instance, if you met a mother with four young children, you probably would have some preconceived ideas of what she is like and how she will behave. This expected behavior will be very different from a distinguished looking elderly man in a suit and bowtie. You probably make some kind of judgment with every encounter you have or observation you make of others.

This week, you explore social cognition and perception which deal with how people make sense of the world around them. This week’s readings focus on how the brain uses schemas and heuristics to make automatic inferences. You also study how additional factors, such as unintentional nonverbal communication, impact our impressions of other people.

Learning Objectives

Students will:
  • Apply causal attribution theories to human behavior
  • Analyze information and processes important in impression formation
  • Analyze processes and influences involved in making social inferences
  • Identify and apply social psychology concepts, principles, and processes related to person perception and social cognition

Learning Resources

Required Readings

Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Sommers, S. R. (2019). Social psychology (10th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson.
Chapter 3, “Social Cognition: How We Think About the Social World”
Chapter 4, “Social Perception: How We Come to Understand Other People”
“Social Psychology in Action 3: Psychology and the Law” (pp. 4831-493 on Eyewitness Testimony)

Boeree, C. G. (1999). Person perception. In Social psychology basics.
Click on the Person Perception link above to access a PDF copy of the article.
Credit: Boeree, C. G. (1999).Available from http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/socpsy.html

Required Media

Simons, D. (2010, March 10). Selective attention test [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo
This video shows selective attention task to demonstrate social perception and misperception. [1:21 minutes]

Optional Resources

Document: Week 3 Study Guide (PDF)

Na, J., & Kitayama, S. (2011). Spontaneous trait inference is culture specific: Behavioral and neural evidence. Psychological Science, 22(8), 1025–1032.

Assignment: Social Cognition and Perception

Social cognition is the study of the ways people think about themselves and the social world, including how they select, interpret, remember, and use social information. Two types of social cognition are controlled thinking and automatic thinking. Controlled thinking is thinking that is conscious, intentional, voluntary, and effortful, such as when you are weighing the pros and cons of an issue to make an important decision or are learning a skill for the first time. Automatic thinking is just as it sounds—thinking that happens without conscious thought—and it is this type of thinking that you will concentrate on this week.

Schemas, one example of automatic thinking, are mental structures that organize our knowledge about the social world and influence what we notice, think about, and remember. Schemas are important for making sense of the world. They help us to create continuity to relate new experiences to old ones and are especially helpful when information is ambiguous. We also engage in a second type of automatic thinking when we use mental strategies and shortcuts, or heuristics, that make judgments and decisions easier, allowing us to proceed with our lives and not turn every decision into a major hurdle. Examples of heuristics include availability, representativeness, and counterfactual thinking. Schemas and heuristics significantly influence our impressions of a social situation and facilitate our social cognition processes. Schemas are highly determined by the cultures in which we grow up, and they strongly influence what we notice and remember about the world.

Think back to this week’s Introduction. When you meet someone new, you no doubt use many different kinds of information available to you and process that information in a way that allows you to make sense of their behavior. You may see if a person fits into some group with which you are familiar and then try to make sense of the person’s behavior in light of others in that group. In addition, you probably have your own goals for relating to the person, which also influence your impression. If your goal is to form a long-term relationship with the person, you will process the information differently than you would the information from a store clerk with whom you don’t plan to have any kind of relationship.

The information you focus on, the strategies you use in processing the information, and the resulting impressions and preconceived ideas you form about a person make up what is called person perception. Since social psychology is all about relating to others, be it an individual or a group of people, person perception is an important topic.

In addition to understanding how people form impressions of others, it is helpful to dig deeper into why people might behave as they do. In doing so, you can more easily predict how people will behave and then control the environment accordingly. By having a better understanding of why people behave as they do, you also can understand your own emotions and feelings toward the situation, which impact your own future behavior. The simple question of “What causes what?” is essential in understanding those around you and your social environment. And, since it would be cumbersome to constantly ask the question “What causes what?”—people tend to ask and answer it automatically. The social psychology term for this concept is causal attribution. There are many related social psychological theories that you can use to understand why people behave as they do. This understanding in turn, helps you to better understand how people relate to one another and to the environment, predict behavior, and partly control social situations—all major goals of social psychology.

To prepare:

  • Review Chapters 3 and 4 of the course text, Social Psychology.
  • Review the article, “Person Perception” found in this week’s Learning Resources.
  • Watch the video on selective attention.

The Assignment (2–4 pages):

  • Select one person in each category below:
    • A person you do not know and who you probably will not see again (clerk at the grocery store, etc.)
    • A person you have known for some time and for whom you can remember your first impressions (acquaintance, friend, spouse, etc.)
  • Briefly describe each person including his or her specific behavior at your first meeting, the context of your interaction with each person, and your first impression of each person.
  • Explain whether you made external (situational) and/or internal (dispositional) attributions for each person’s behavior during that first meeting.
  • Did you engage in automatic thinking or controlled thinking in forming your first impression of each person? Explain. What, if any, schemas or heuristics did you use?
  • With which culture(s) do you identify? According to the information in this week’s readings, how does your culture influence your impressions of others? For example, (a) how does your culture influence the content of a particular schema (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2019, p. 70), (b) which culturally-specific display rules influence your impressions (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2019, pp. 889-90), or (c) when have you engaged in holistic or analytic thinking as your culture would predict (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2019, p. 110)?
By Day 7

Submit your Assignment.

Note: Support the responses within your Assignment with evidence from the assigned Learning Resources. Provide a reference list for resources you used for this Assignment.

Submission and Grading Information

To submit your completed Assignment for review and grading, do the following:

  • Please save your Assignment using the naming convention “WK3Assgn+last name+first initial.(extension)” as the name.
  • Click the Week 3 Assignment Rubric to review the Grading Criteria for the Assignment.
  • Click the Week 3 Assignment link. You will also be able to “View Rubric” for grading criteria from this area.
  • Next, from the Attach File area, click on the Browse My Computer button. Find the document you saved as “WK3Assgn+last name+first initial.(extension)” and click Open.
  • If applicable: From the Plagiarism Tools area, click the checkbox for I agree to submit my paper(s) to the Global Reference Database.
  • Click on the Submit button to complete your submission.
Grading Criteria

To access your rubric:
Week 3 Assignment Rubric

Check Your Assignment Draft for Authenticity

To check your Assignment draft for authenticity:
Submit your Week 3 Assignment draft and review the originality report.

Submit Your Assignment by Day 7

To submit your Assignment:
Week 3 Assignment

How do other, traditional distractions compare to cell phone use in their effects on driving (such as eating, attending to children, talking to passengers, listening to music/news, etc.)?

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Preparation for Generating a Policy Proposal

Although some states and cities have passed laws to ban texting and using handheld phones while driving, there is no current law to ban all cell phone use while driving. However, according to the National Safety Council (2009), 28 percent of all crashes—1.6 million per year—are caused by cell phone use and texting by drivers. The mission of a new national nonprofit organization called FocusDriven, patterned after Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is to make phone use while driving as illegal and socially unacceptable as drunk driving. US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood supports FocusDriven and its efforts.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, LaHood said that this movement would become “an army of people traveling the countryside” to push for bans on cell-phone use and tough enforcement (Schmitz, 2010). As a political advocate interested in this issue, you will be writing a policy proposal that utilizes the current research to propose a solution to the issue and submitting it in Module 5.

Annotated Bibliography: Effect of Cell Phone Use

Before you can write this proposal research, you will need to conduct initial research on the science behind this initiative. For this assignment, use the Argosy University online library resources to locate research reports from peer-reviewed journals that discuss the effects of cell phone use on vision, attention, perception, or memory. In selecting at least five research reports from peer-reviewed journals relevant to the topic, make sure they address one or more of the following issues:

  • How do texting, handheld phones, and hands-free phones compare with each other in their effects on driving?
  • How do other, traditional distractions compare to cell phone use in their effects on driving (such as eating, attending to children, talking to passengers, listening to music/news, etc.)?
  • Can cell phone use while driving be compared with drunk driving? Why or why not?
  • What other variables (such as age) can affect driving while using a cell phone?

Based on your reading of the five articles, create an annotated bibliography for each of the five sources. Each annotation should consist of the APA reference entry followed by a paragraph-long summary of the articles. In your summary, provide answers for the questions below. For the last question, think about how the research results could be generalized to fit other environments or not be generalized.

  • Summarize the main ideas in the reference. What were they investigating?
  • How were the studies conducted? What was the sample size? Is it appropriate?
  • Were the studies conducted in the real world or was a simulated environment used?
  • How might these methodological considerations affect the research findings and the conclusions drawn from them? How does this article fit in with your paper? How did it influence your own ideas about your paper?

Your annotated bibliography should be at 3–4 pages in length. Click here for the annotated bibliography template. This document will help you complete your paper more successfully.

Be sure to include a title page and reference page listing your articles. Use the following file naming convention: LastnameFirstInitial_M4_A2.doc.

By Wednesday, July 6, 2016, deliverthe assignment to the M4: Assignment 2 Dropbox.

Assignment 2 Grading Criteria
Maximum Points
Identified five, relevant research reports that discussed the effects of cell phone use on vision, attention, perception, or memory.
20
Summarized each article and explained the relevance of each article to the questions asked in an annotated bibliography.
60
Wrote in a clear, concise, and organized manner; demonstrated ethical scholarship in accurate representation and attribution of sources; displayed accurate spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
20
Total:
100

Schmitz, J. (2010, January 13). Cell phone ban for drivers is focus of new group. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Retrieved from
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10013/1027757-147.stm

National Research Council. (2010). National Safety Council estimates that at least 1.6 million crashes each year involve drivers using cell phones and texting. Retrieved from
http://www.nsc.org/pages/
nscestimates16millioncrashescausedbydriversusingcellphonesandtexting.aspx

Describe one skill or sensitivity you might need to develop or enhance in order to work effectively with military personnel who experienced war or combat.

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Imagine how you might respond if you were the helping professional working with the clients who made the following statements:

  • “How do you know what I feel? Have you ever picked up a weapon?”
  • “Do you know what it is like to kill someone?”
  • “I’m missing two legs. It makes me half a soldier. Don’t you get that?”
  • “My husband is not the same. What happened to him over there? He won’t talk to me anymore. I’m scared.”

As a helping professional, how do you begin to talk to military personnel about their war and combat experience? What approaches, skills, and sensitivities do you need to work with this population?

In Discussion 1, you considered the impact of war and combat on military personnel. In this Discussion, you consider the skills and sensitivities that you, as a helping professional, need to support and work with military personnel. A helping professional’s training is extensive. Most training programs require you to complete a self-assessment of the skills and sensitivities you need to work in the field. Training to work with military personnel is no different.

To prepare for this Discussion, review the media in the resources, and select one interviewee to address. Analyze the interviewee’s war and combat experience and consider the skills and sensitivities you would need if you were the helping professional assigned to treat this service member.

 

Post 1.an explanation of the skills and sensitivities you would need to possess if you were to talk about the personal effects of war and combat with the individual in the interview you selected.

2. Describe one skill or sensitivity you might need to develop or enhance in order to work effectively with military personnel who experienced war or combat.

3. Finally, explain how you might develop these skills. (2-3 pages)

Be sure to support your post with specific references to the resources. If you are using additional articles, be sure to provide full APA-formatted citations for your references.

 

Required Readings

Blaisure, K. R., Saathoff-Wells, T., Pereira, A., MacDermid Wadsworth, S., & Dombro, A. L. (2016). Serving military families (2nd ed.). New York: NY: Routledge.
Chapter 7, “The Effects of War on Service Members” (pp. 161-179)
Chapter 8, “The Effects of War on Families” (pp. 181-210)

Khamis, V. (2017). Psychological distress of parents in conflict areas: The mediating role of war atrocities, normative stressors and family resources. Journal of Mental Health, 26(2), 104-110.

Schryver, M., eVindevogel, S., Rasmussen, A.E., & Cramer, A.O.J. (2015). Unpacking constructs: A network approach for studying war exposure, daily stressors and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1896.