Empathy and jurors' decisions in patricide trials involving child sexual assault allegations.

In a mock-trial paradigm, 205 participants considered a patricide trial in which a child defendant claimed the patricide was done in self-defense after years of sexual abuse. Participants in an empathy-induction condition were asked to take the perspective of the defendant and to detail how they would be thinking and feeling if they were the defendant. Control condition participants received no such instructions. Results indicated that, compared to jurors in the control condition, jurors who were asked to take the defendant's perspective had more empathy for the defendant (without feeling more similar to or more sympathy for the defendant), found the defendant less guilty and less responsible for the murder, and were more likely to consider abuse to be a mitigating factor in the killing. Overall, compared to men, women were more likely to believe the defendant's abuse allegations, find the defendant credible, and consider the defendant to be less responsible for the murder. Women in the empathy condition found the defendant less guilty than did all other jurors. Finally, child defendant gender was also varied, but this had few effects on case judgments overall. Jurors, however, were more likely to believe that the girl defendant was sexually abused than the boy defendant. We discuss theoretical implications for understanding the social psychological construct of empathy as well as implications for understanding jurors' decisions in cases involving child sexual assault allegations.

Human working memory capacity is 7+/-2 in a radial maze with distracting interruption: possible implication for neural mechanisms of declarative and implicit long-term memory.

Human participants were instructed to walk out along each of the arms of a 15-m in diameter, 8-arm radial maze once and only once. In order to approximate the circumstances under which laboratory rats remember visited sites, our human participants were asked to select arms in an unsystematic order. They scored an average of 7.6 to 7.8 correct choices, even if midway during a trial there was a 5-min interruption filled with a verbal-spatial interfering task (a scavenger hunt) or a 15-min interruption filled with a visuospatial task (a maze-running computer simulation). This finding extends our earlier research with humans in 13- or 17-arm radial mazes under nondelay conditions, in which we also found working memory (WM) capacity for about 7 to 9 places, the same as that of laboratory rats. We discuss earlier findings in other laboratories, showing that rats can successfully bridge long radial maze task interruptions of 5 or 8 h, and we compare our results also to those from studies in which human participants were not discouraged from reducing memory load by responding systematically in radial mazes. Because the radial maze task takes minutes to complete even under nondelay conditions its routine consideration as a working memory task in the animal literature alters the assumptions often made about the duration of WM in the human literature. Accumulating empirical findings about place-memory in humans, nonhuman mammals, and birds suggest it might be productive to reevaluate this theoretical issue with respect to present knowledge about the roles of the hippocampus and other brain structures in declarative memory and in procedural or implicit memory, while considering the hypothesis that some forms of information may exploit long-term memory in parallel with working memory.