How rising social inequality may be fueling public demands for increasingly harsh criminal justice policies.

Public support for harsh criminal justice policy remains relatively high, despite falling crime rates and increasing prison populations. In new research Carolyn Côté-Lussier finds that public anger toward crime and support for harsh criminal justice policy is linked to factors associated with social inequality. She recommends additional reforms to change people’s perceptions towards criminals and to promote alternatives to incarceration

The evil, poor, disliked and punished: criminal stereotypes and the effects of their cognitive, affective and behavioural outcomes on punitiveness toward crime

Why does the public so staunchly support harsh criminal justice policies when the social, fiscal and political costs are so great? Individuals in countries such as Canada, the UK and USA continue to want criminal offenders to receive stiffer sentences despite growing prison populations and some indication of lower crime rates (Cullen, Fisher & Applegate, 2000; Donohue, 2007; King, 2008; Raphael, 2009; Tseloni et al., 2010; Useem et al., 2003; Walmsley, 2009). Criminological research has identified cognitive and affective pathways that predict punitiveness toward crime, such as the judged wrongfulness and harmfulness of crime, and moral outrage (Carlsmith & Darley, 2008). The overall contribution of the five papers presented in this thesis is to identify the cognitive, affective and behavioural pathways that link social perception of criminals to punitiveness toward crime. Working at the intersection of social psychology and criminology, the thesis applies theoretical frameworks such as the Stereotype Content Model (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick & Xu, 2002) and Behaviour from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes map (Cuddy, Fiske & Glick, 2007) to identify the functional relation between social perception and punitiveness. Using different methodologies and at different levels of analysis, this thesis provides strong evidence that the content of criminal stereotypes is associated with specific cognitive (e.g., perceiving crime as being more serious), affective (e.g., feeling anger and a lack of compassion) and behavioural (e.g., wanting to exclude and attack) responses. In turn, criminal stereotypes and their outcomes engender punitive intuitions, decisions and attitudes. These findings reconcile extant criminological research on punitiveness with social psychological research on the function of social stereotypes. This thesis also speaks more broadly to the association between punitiveness toward crime and basic social psychological processes related to interpersonal perception and relations. In this respect, this thesis makes a significant contribution to the study of punitiveness toward crime and has important social policy implications

Making teens feel safer at school could help improve their achievement

Classroom engagement is an important influence on how well students perform academically at school. In new research, Carolyn Côté-Lussier and Caroline Fitzpatrick find that how students engage in class can be affected by their environment – students who reported that they felt safer were more engaged . They write that teens might feel unsafe at school because of poverty at home, and if their school has a poor neighbourhood environment, such as a lack of green spaces

Lessons for 2016 from the smashup of the Second Party System and the War of the Whig succession.

The rise of Donald Trump has caused many to predict that the Republican Party as we know it is on the verge of self-destruction. But such party realignments are nothing new. In the first in a series of articles on political realignments, Walter Dean Burnham writes that conflicts between the states over slavery and immigration led to the “War of the Whig succession” of the late 1850s and the rise of the Know Nothing Party. What followed was the destabilization of the 2nd Party System, and the creation of the Republican Party

On the Impact of Voice Anonymization on Speech-Based COVID-19 Detection

With advances seen in deep learning, voice-based applications are burgeoning, ranging from personal assistants, affective computing, to remote disease diagnostics. As the voice contains both linguistic and paralinguistic information (e.g., vocal pitch, intonation, speech rate, loudness), there is growing interest in voice anonymization to preserve speaker privacy and identity. Voice privacy challenges have emerged over the last few years and focus has been placed on removing speaker identity while keeping linguistic content intact. For affective computing and disease monitoring applications, however, the paralinguistic content may be more critical. Unfortunately, the effects that anonymization may have on these systems are still largely unknown. In this paper, we fill this gap and focus on one particular health monitoring application: speech-based COVID-19 diagnosis. We test two popular anonymization methods and their impact on five different state-of-the-art COVID-19 diagnostic systems using three public datasets. We validate the effectiveness of the anonymization methods, compare their computational complexity, and quantify the impact across different testing scenarios for both within- and across-dataset conditions. Lastly, we show the benefits of anonymization as a data augmentation tool to help recover some of the COVID-19 diagnostic accuracy loss seen with anonymized data.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure

Corrigendum: Ready for kindergarten: Are intelligence skills enough?

No abstract available

Co-designing a Canadian adaptation of a lifestyle-oriented intervention aimed to improve daily functioning of individuals living with chronic pain: a multi-method study protocol of REVEAL(OT) Canada

BackgroundLiving with chronic pain (CP) often implies major lifestyle changes, including modifications of daily routines and work. Surprisingly, few validated and effective interventions specifically target functional outcomes in this population. Redesign your Everyday Activities and Lifestyle with Occupational Therapy [REVEAL(OT)] is a lifestyle-oriented intervention led by occupational therapists that directly targets the daily functional challenges of living with CP. The intervention was initially developed and studied as an add-on to standard treatment delivered by Danish multidisciplinary specialized pain clinics. Adapting, implementing, and evaluating REVEAL(OT) within the Canadian healthcare system will contribute to broadening the scope of treatments offered in specialized pain clinics that do not yet include occupational therapy.ObjectiveThe proposed study aims to define and refine REVEAL(OT)/CA with partners (authors of original intervention, people with lived experience, clinicians, managers).MethodsThis participatory action research will use a multi-method design and follow the ORBIT model for developing behavioral treatments for chronic diseases. A process of co-construction with partners and an advisory committee will take place in two Montreal specialized pain clinics. It consists of two related work packages (WPs). In WP1, a first series of focus groups with partners (n = 86) and workshops with the advisory committee will be conducted to co-develop the hypothetical pathway describing intervention components and their potential mechanisms of action on targeted outcomes, as well as the first version of the adapted intervention manual. WP2 will co-refine REVEAL(OT)/CA by exploring its acceptability, feasibility and mechanisms of action through intervention deliveries (at least twice in each of two specialized pain clinics; n ≥ 60 patients) and focus groups and/or individual interviews with participating patients and partners. At the end of this study, the intervention manual will be generated both in French and English.DiscussionThis study will set the stage for subsequent implementation and effectiveness assessment projects and be an important step towards the deployment of interventions aiming to improve engagement in meaningful daily activities among adults living with CP.RegistrationOSF Registries, osf.io/8gksa. Registered 3 August 2023, https://osf.io/8gksa

Nck2 promotes human melanoma cell proliferation, migration and invasion in vitro and primary melanoma-derived tumor growth in vivo

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Nck1 and Nck2 adaptor proteins are involved in signaling pathways mediating proliferation, cytoskeleton organization and integrated stress response. Overexpression of Nck1 in fibroblasts has been shown to be oncogenic. Through the years this concept has been challenged and the consensus is now that overexpression of either Nck cooperates with strong oncogenes to transform cells. Therefore, variations in Nck expression levels in transformed cells could endorse cancer progression.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Expression of Nck1 and Nck2 proteins in various cancer cell lines at different stages of progression were analyzed by western blots. We created human primary melanoma cell lines overexpressing GFP-Nck2 and investigated their ability to proliferate along with metastatic characteristics such as migration and invasion. By western blot analysis, we compared levels of proteins phosphorylated on tyrosine as well as cadherins and integrins in human melanoma cells overexpressing or not Nck2. Finally, in mice we assessed tumor growth rate of human melanoma cells expressing increasing levels of Nck2.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We found that expression of Nck2 is consistently increased in various metastatic cancer cell lines compared with primary counterparts. Particularly, we observed significant higher levels of Nck2 protein and mRNA, as opposed to no change in Nck1, in human metastatic melanoma cell lines compared with non-metastatic melanoma and normal melanocytes. We demonstrated the involvement of Nck2 in proliferation, migration and invasion in human melanoma cells. Moreover, we discovered that Nck2 overexpression in human primary melanoma cells correlates with higher levels of proteins phosphorylated on tyrosine residues, assembly of Nck2-dependent pY-proteins-containing molecular complexes and downregulation of cadherins and integrins. Importantly, we uncovered that injection of Nck2-overexpressing human primary melanoma cells into mice increases melanoma-derived tumor growth rate.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Collectively, our data indicate that Nck2 effectively influences human melanoma phenotype progression. At the molecular level, we propose that Nck2 in human primary melanoma promotes the formation of molecular complexes regulating proliferation and actin cytoskeleton dynamics by modulating kinases or phosphatases activities that results in increased levels of proteins phosphorylated on tyrosine residues. This study provides new insights regarding cancer progression that could impact on the therapeutic strategies targeting cancer.</p