Parole in Western Australia: an analysis of parole cancellations of female offenders

Foreword The number of prisoners in Australian prisons has been increasing over the past decade. In Western Australia the number of female offenders has increased by 40 percent over the past five years. One contributing factor to this increase may be the re incarceration of parolees who have violated parole. This research used the publicly available decision documents from the Prisoners Review Board in Western Australia to investigate the background details of offences, and the details of the parole violations of 41 women released in 2013–14. Data revealed that a high proportion of women returned to prison after a very short time in the community as a result of illicit drug use. The high cost of re-incarceration is considered against a background of rehabilitation and extra support in the community that might assist released women negotiate their complex lives on release without resorting to further drug use. The paper includes a number of recommendations to consider in an effort to reduce the recidivism of female offenders

HAWAII PUBLIC OPINION ON AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS DERIVED FROM GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISM (GMO) TECHNOLOGY

This article studied Hawaii public opinion on agricultural products and processes using GMO technology. We used telephone to interview the people in each island of Hawaii. We found out that the favorability rating toward the attributes of GMO technological application differ based on the nature of GMO benefits. And sociodemographic variables played a significant difference in the preference of using GMO technology on producing agricultural products and process. Most significant associations were gender and island of residence. Age, education and ethnic background significantly also influenced the attitude of respondents toward some of GMO attributes. The fewest significant associations were heard of GMO and income.Consumer/Household Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

An investigation into the emotion-cognition interaction and sub-clinical anxiety

This thesis combines behavioural and electrophysiological approaches in the study of the emotion-cognition interaction and sub-clinical anxiety. The research questions addressed in this thesis concern, specifically: the impact of emotion on attention; the interplay between attention and emotion in anxiety;and the cognitive construct of affect. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to emotion research, cognitive models of anxiety and motivates the thesis. Chapter 2 investigates whether affective processing is automatic. More specifically, to elucidate whether facilitated processing of threat in anxiety, evidenced by emotion-related ERP modulations, requires attentional resources. It was previously reported that emotional expression effects on ERP waveforms were completely eliminated when attention was directed away from emotional faces to other task-relevant locations (Eimer et al., 2003). However, Bishop et al. (2004) reported that threat-related stimuli can evoke amygdala activity without attentional engagement or conscious awareness in high-anxious but not low-anxious participants. Spatial attention was manipulated using a similar paradigm as Vuilleumier et al. (2001) and Holmes et al. (2003), to investigate the mechanism underlying the threat-related processing bias in anxiety by examining the influence of spatial attention and trait anxiety levels on established ERP modulations by emotional stimuli. Participants were instructed to match two peripheral faces or two peripheral Landolt squares. The Landolt squares task was selected since this is an attentionally demanding task and would likely consume most, if not all, attention resources. The ERP data did not offer support to the claim that affective stimuli are processed during unattended conditions in high-anxious but not low-anxious participants. Rather, it questions whether a preattentive processing bias for emotional faces is specific to heightened anxiety. This is based on the finding of an enhanced LPP response for threat/happy versus neutral faces and an enhanced slow wave for threat versus neutral faces, neither modulated by the focus of attention for both high and low anxiety groups. Chapter 3 investigated the delayed disengagement hypothesis proposed by Fox and colleagues (2001) as the mechanism underlying the threat-related attentional bias in anxiety. This was done by measuring N2pc and LRP latencies while participants performed an adapted version of the spatial cueing task.Stimuli consisted of a central affective image (either a face or IAPS picture, depending on condition) flanked to the left and right by a letter/number pair. Participants had to direct their attention to the left or right of a central affective image to make an orientation judgement of the letter stimulus. It was hypothesised that if threat-related stimuli are able to prolong attentional processing, N2pc onset should be delayed relative to the neutral condition. However, N2pc latency was not modulated by emotional valence of the central image, for either high or low anxiety groups. Thus, this finding does not provide support for the locus of the threat-related bias to the disengage component of attention. Chapter 4 further investigated the pattern of attentional deployment in the threat-related bias in anxiety. This was done by measuring task-switching ability between neutral and emotional tasks using an adapted version of Johnson’s (in press) attentional control capacity for emotional representations (ACCE) task. Participants performed either an emotional judgement or a neutral judgement task on a compound stimulus that consisted of an affective image (either happy versus fearful faces in the faces condition, or positive versus negative IAPS pictures in the IAPS condition) with a word located centrally across the image (real word versus pseudo-word). Participants scoring higher in trait anxiety were faster to switch from a neutral to a threatening mental set. This improved ability to switch attention to the emotional judgement task when threatening faces are presented is in accordance with a hypervigilance theory of anxiety. However, this processing bias for threat in anxiety was only apparent for emotional faces and not affective scenes, despite the fact that pictures depicting aversive threat scenes were used (e.g., violence, mutilation). This is discussed in more detail with respect to the social significance of salient stimuli. Chapter 5 in a pair of experiments sought to investigate how affect is mentally represented and specifically questions whether affect is represented on the basis of a conceptual metaphor linking direction and affect. The data suggest that the vertical position metaphor underlies our understanding of the relatively abstract concept of affect and is implicitly active, where positive equates with ‘upwards’ and negative with ‘downwards’. Metaphor-compatible directional movements were demonstrated to facilitate response latencies, such that participants were relatively faster to make upward responses to positively-evaluated words and downward responses to negatively-evaluated words than to metaphorincompatible stimulus-response mappings. The finding suggests that popular use of linguistic metaphors depicting spatial representation of affect may reflect our underlying cognitive construct of the abstract concept of valence. Chapter 6 summarises the research in the thesis and implications of the present results are discussed, in particular in relation to cognitive models of anxiety. Areas of possible future research are provided

Guangzhou Buyers Preference for Premium Hawaiian Grown Product Gift Baskets

Guangzhou buyers' preference for premium Hawaiian grown product gift baskets with conjoint analysis was examined. Relative importance of three gift basket attributes: container type, products origin, and price were examined. Expenditure equivalent index to evaluate how much more each of the gift basket attributes is worth to the buyer was estimated. Main conclusions are: products have to be 'made in Hawaii' to receive the premium price; business buyers are generally less willing to pay a high price; and individual buyers are more willing to pay the higher priced Koa gift basket.Chinese survey data, conjoint analysis, buyer preference, Hawaii gift baskets, Demand and Price Analysis,

Communications in the time of a pandemic: The readability of documents for public consumption

© 2021 The Authors Objective: Government communications in a crisis can influence public health outcomes. This research aimed to investigate if written communications of the most commonly sought sources of COVID-19 information available on the internet have readability levels commensurate with those of the general public. Methods: Online documents from the World Health Organization (WHO), and the governments of Australia, the UK and the US were assessed for readability using an online instrument that calculated scores for the Flesch Reading Ease Score, the SMOG Index and the Readability Consensus Grade Level. Results: Similar to the previous research, most documents assessed had a readability standard that was at or above the recommended grade level, and as such inaccessible to substantial portions of the general public. A one-way ANOVA with post hoc tests revealed significant differences among the data, with Australian documents significantly more difficult to read than those from the UK and US. Conclusions: Government departments need to consider their audience and monitor readability of the documents they produce to ensure that readers can understand them. Implications for public health: Health communications need to be written at a level appropriate for the targeted population in order to be fit for purpose