"Atkins v. Virginia" (2002) dramatically raised the stakes for mental retardation in capital punishment cases, but neither defined this condition nor imposed uniform standards for its assessment. The basic premise that mean IQ scores shift over time enjoys wide recognition, but its application--including the appropriateness of…

African-American and Anglo-American children's assessments of four disciplinary methods (spanking, reasoning, withdrawing privileges, and time-out) were investigated with 108 children ages 6-10 years old and one of their parents. Children watched videos depicting a child being disciplined and then rated each discipline method. Reasoning was rated…

The authors sought to provide an initial evaluation of the hypothesis that corporal punishment is less strongly associated with parental emotion and impulsivity among African American ("Black") in contrast to European American ("White") parents. White-Latino and Black-Latino differences in corporal punishment, emotion, and impulsivity were…

The South African Schools Act of 1996 provides that school governing bodies (SGBs) should adopt and assist in the enforcement of a learner code of conduct to maintain discipline effectively. This study focuses on the perceptions and experiences of SGBs in managing discipline in rural secondary schools through the design and enforcement of learner…

The present study developed the Child Abuse Risk Assessment Scale (CARAS), an actuarial instrument for the assessment of the risk of physical child abuse. Data of 2,363 Chinese parents (47.7% male) living in Hong Kong were used in the analyses. Participants were individually interviewed with a questionnaire assessing their perpetration of child…

The hypothesis that a penny lost is valued more highly than a penny earned was tested in human choice. Five participants clicked a computer mouse under concurrent variable-interval schedules of monetary reinforcement. In the no-punishment condition, the schedules arranged monetary gain. In the punishment conditions, a schedule of monetary loss was…

Corporal punishment was an important part of the educational experience of many children educated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has often been assumed that it was an uncontroversial and widely accepted means of maintaining school discipline. This article questions these assumptions, using autobiographical accounts produced by…

The efficacy of the Incredible Years parent and child training programs is established in children diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder but not among young children whose primary diagnosis is attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We conducted a randomized control trial evaluating the combined parent and child program…

This working paper is part of a series on early transitions from "Young Lives," a 15-year longitudinal study of childhood poverty in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam. It explores the diverse experiences of 28 children from four contrasting communities in Peru as they start school. These detailed case studies highlight common problems:…

To encourage critical thinking and expression of viewpoints by undergraduate students, an in-class debate on the issue of spanking as a disciplinary practice and its impact on children's development is presented as a class activity. Specific details on how the debate is conducted are provided. Evaluation results suggest that the activity is…

Objective: The primary goal of this study was to explore the relationship between childhood sexual abuse and parenting practices among non-offending mothers of sexually abused girls. Guided by a developmental-ecological perspective of parenting, several models with different potential pathways starting from the mothers' childhood experiences of…

The use of interventions to create behavior change among students with disabilities has an extended and complex history (Horner et al., 2005). Practitioners involved in the field of special education often debate best practices from an immense array of available interventions (Heflin & Simpson, 1998). Service providers express concern about…

Young offending is perceived as a serious social problem and always remains near the top of the political agenda. Over the post-war years, policy and practice moved from welfare/treatment towards punishment as the key for addressing the problem, culminating in New Labour's Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Thereafter there was increasing concern about…

Increases in rates of punished behavior by the administration of drugs with anxiolytic effects (called antipunishment effects) are well established in animals but not humans. The present study examined antipunishment effects of ethanol in humans using a choice procedure. The behavior of 5 participants was placed under six concurrent…

This article reports on a study designed to examine the perceptions of house arrest (HA) and electronic monitoring (EM) among offenders who have recently experienced this criminal sentence. Data were gathered via a self-administered questionnaire and follow-up interviews with a sample of offenders. Our primary areas of interest were to assess (a)…