Abstracts and Abstracting in Knowledge Discovery

published or submitted for publicatio

Are Hispanics Discriminated Against in the US Criminal Justice System?

Recent publications have contributed to increase the perception among Hispanics of an unfair and unequal treatment of this community by the US Criminal Justice System. One of the major concerns was the claim that Hispanics are incarcerated before conviction nearly twice as often as Whites. Unfair treatment perception by the population reduces legitimacy of police and government, and thus, it is imperative to analyze these uninvestigated allegations. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to address said allegations of discrimination against Hispanics and analyze with updated and reliable statistics whether Hispanics are incarcerated before conviction more often than Whites. There has been much research exploring the effects of race and ethnicity in the US criminal justice system, however most of it is focused on African Americans but not Hispanics although it is the largest and fastest growing minority in the United States. The present study is based on data collected in the Annual Survey of Jails, 2014 prepared by the Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, US Department of Justice. Starting in 2010, the Bureau of Justice Statistics improved the Annual Survey of Jails survey instruments to address certain topics, among others, the number of inmates that are unsentenced. Therefore this allows for the first time to obtain such information with reliable data and not based on a sample survey estimation. From the regression analysis of the data of this study, it resulted that the model accounted for 77% of the explanation of the relationship between the possibility of being incarcerated without conviction in a US jail and the fact of being Hispanic. However, this relationship was not statistically significant when controlling for age and gender. The Level of confidence in this study was 95%.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/gradposters/1019/thumbnail.jp

Novel metaphors comprehension in a child with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders. A study on assessment and treatment

Until the first decade of the current millennium, the literature on metaphor comprehension highlighted typical difficulties in children with high-functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). More recently, some scholars have devised special programs for enhancing the capability of understanding metaphors in these children. This article presents a case study based on a treatment aiming at enhancing novel metaphor comprehension in a high-functioning child with ASD. M.M., a pseudoacronym for an 8;10 year-old boy, diagnosed with high-functioning ASD, was first assessed with a metaphor comprehension test. This testing (at time TO) highlighted a rigid refusal of metaphors and a marked tendency toward literal interpretation. A baseline treatment (8 sessions of 45-60 min each, twice a week) was implemented, based on a series of recognition, denomination and emotion comprehension activities. M. M.'s metaphor comprehension was assessed a second time (Ti), followed by the experimental treatment (same duration and frequency as the first one), specifically focused on metaphor comprehension. Finally, a third assessment of metaphor comprehension took place (T2), followed by a last assessment 4 months later (follow-up, T3). The comparison between the performances at the metaphor comprehension test across the four assessments, from TO to T3, showed that the baseline treatment produced no effect at all, whereas a significant improvement appeared at T2, just after the experimental treatment, later confirmed at the follow up. Both quantitative and qualitative results showed an evident improvement in the way M.M. handled the semantic issues posed by the metaphors of the test, in line with the strategies he was taught during the treatmen

Sensitizing a Gifted Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder towards Social Cognition: From Assessment to Treatment

Social cognition difficulties are well documented in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This clinical case study reports on social cognition assessment and treatment of a gifted child, SC (9 years), with ASD and an extraordinarily high verbal IQ (146). The assessment of theory of mind, emotion recognition and pragmatic abilities showed some weaknesses in these areas. The 4- month treatment was divided into 14 sessions and was aimed at helping SC to improve his abilities to recognize emotions and comprehend mental states. The main technique used in the intervention was “social reading” with video clips. The initial assessment was repeated after the treatment and in a follow up session. The results of this case study suggest that “social reading” can be considered as a beneficial technique for children with high-functioning ASD, and especially in giftedness conditions

Beyond the literal meaning of words in children with klinefelter syndrome: two case studies

Literature on children with Klinefelter Syndrome (KS) points to general linguistic difficulties in both comprehension and production among other cognitive functions, and in the majority of cases, these coexist with an intellectual level within the norms. In these conditions, children having language delay generally engage in language therapy and are systematically monitored across ages. In this article, we present the profiles of two children with KS (47, XXY), aged 9.1 (Child S) and 13 (Child D), whose language development was assessed as adequate at age 3, and for this reason, did not receive any language treatment. At the present stage, their IQ, as measured by Wechsler Scales (Child S: 92; Child D: 101), is within the norm, but they both present marked weaknesses in pragmatic skills such as figurative language comprehension. The analysis of these two cases points to the need to go beyond global indexes of verbal abilities, as the same global index may mask a wide diversification of individual profiles. In addition, this study underlines the importance of monitoring the developmental trajectories of children like Child D and Child S, because weaknesses in pragmatic skills that are relevant for both academic achievement and social adaptation could emerge at later stages