Gender norms in Portuguese college sudents' judgments in familial homicides: bad men and mad women

The gender of the offender has been proved to be an important factor in judicial sentencing. In this study, we analyze the judgments of College students regarding perpetrators of familial homicides to evaluate the presence of these gender norms and biases in the larger society. The sample included 303 college students (54.8% female) enrolled in several social sciences and engineering courses. Participants were asked to read 12 vignettes based on real crimes taken from Portuguese newspapers. Half were related to infanticide, and half were related to intimate partner homicide. The sex of the offender was orthogonally manipulated to the type of crime. The results show that gender had an important impact on sentences, with males being more harshly penalized by reasons of perversity and women less penalized by reason of mental disorders. In addition, filicide was more heavily penalized than was intimate partner homicide. The results also revealed a tendency toward a retributive conception of punishment. We discuss how gender norms in justice seem to be embedded in society as well as the need for intervention against the punitive tendency of this population

Measurement of the B0^0 and B+^+ meson lifetimes with fully reconstructed hadronic final states

The B0 and B+ meson lifetimes have been measured in e+e- annihilation data collected in 1999 and 2000 with the BABAR detector at center-of-mass energies near the Upsilon(4S) resonance. Events are selected in which one B meson is fully reconstructed in a hadronic final state while the second B meson is reconstructed inclusively. A combined fit to the B0 and the B+ decay time difference distributions yields tau_{B0} = 1.546 +/- 0.032 (stat) +/- 0.022(syst) ps, tau_{B+} = 1.673 +/- 0.032 (stat) +/- 0.023 (syst) ps and tau_{B+} / tau_{B0} = 1.082 +/- 0.026 (stat) +/- 0.012 (syst

Deconstructing idealized motherhood: the extreme case of neonaticidal women

First Published January 29, 2017.In this article, we provide a feminist perspective on neonaticidal women while critically examining the mainstream literature. We analyze 26 cases reported between 2003 and 2013 in a Portuguese online newspaper. We conclude that neonaticide must be framed by two main lines of thought: Motherhood is a social construction that imposes difficult-to-achieve norms, and it is a complex experience, intercepted by age, social class, marital status, and having other children. This approach should encourage a shift from the present focus on palliative and punitive measures to a more preemptive one including new policies on sexual education and pregnancy termination.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was conducted at Psychology Research Centre (UID/PSI/01662/2013), University of Minho, and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education through national funds and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio