Reading set #1

Question 1

Regret as an example of what?

Answer 1

Conter-factual emotion

Question 2

Regret and related emotions

Answer 2

♠ Disappointment 
♠ Sadness
♠ Shame
♠ Guilt
♠ Remorse
♠ Repentance

Question 3

How does regret function

Answer 3

Rests directly on acknowledged personal culpability. Recognition that the cause of an event was one’s own volition, thereby placing the moral responsibility squarely at one’s own feet.

Question 4

Criminal behaviour as a best example of what?

Answer 4

Gamble

Question 5

Altruistic fear

Answer 5

More common and frequently more intense than personal fear. Husbands were more likely to worry about their wives than vice versa (especially at younger ages) and often exhibited greater concern for their wives than for themselves.

Question 6

Fear and the mass media

Answer 6

How do these forms of media distortion affect the public, if at all? The evidence on this question is indirect and limited, but it is highly suggestive. In the early 1980s, Warr (1980; see also Bordley, 1982) presented evidence that the objective and perceived incidence of offenses are related by a power function (y = aXb). That is, people tend to systematically overestimate the frequency of rare offenses while underestimating the fre- quency of common ones.

Question 7

Power function

Answer 7

y = aXb - people tend to systematically overestimate the frequency of rare offenses while underestimating the fre- quency of common ones.

Question 8

Criminal behaviour = surreptitious behaviour

Answer 8

Those who engage in it actively seek to hide their identity and their behaviour from public and law enforcement scrutiny. This, along with other problems, makes the measurement of crime particularly difficult and, at times, impossible or unethical.

Question 9

The mass communication of violence

Answer 9

♠ Newspaper - The first truly mass medium to turn to crime for its subject matter - “penny press”.

Question 10

Mystery literature

Answer 10

• Edgar Allan Poe
• Conan Doyle
• Christie

Question 11

Surette study

Answer 11

“the proportion of television time devoted to crime and violence makes crime the largest single subject matter on television.”

Question 12

Why such a preoccupation with crime and violence in the mass media?

Answer 12

• Dramatic value
• Intrinsic human interest
• Stories of crime – real or fictional – speak to citizens’ sense of personal safety, and social psychological research suggests that “fear appeals increase attention.

Question 13

Crime has been attractive to the entertainment media - WHY?

Answer 13

By nature and necessity, most crime is private, secretive, and hidden, surreptitiously committed and studiously concealed. To the degree that entertainment involves escapism and novelty, the backstage nature of crime inherently increases its entertainment value and popularity

Question 14

Citizens are far more likely to hear about, read about, or watch violent events than to experience them - IMPLICATIONS

Answer 14

• “indirect victimization” (Conklin, 1975), the most pervasive of which is fear of crime.
• Unreliable foundations and beliefs about violence

Question 15

Survey research on fear of crime

Answer 15

♠ Gallup Organization and the National Opin- ion Research Center (NORC) (est. 1960)
- Hypothetical (how afraid would you be),
- Limited to nighttime
- Does not mention crime, and only crudely measures intensity.
♠ By their nature, surveys are better suited to measuring anxiety about crime rather than fear, strictly defined.

Question 16

Availability heuristic

Answer 16

The tendency to judge the frequency of events by the ease with which they can be recalled or imagined.

Question 17

Risk communication

Answer 17

Concerned with the problems, methods, and efficacy of communicating risk to the general public

Question 18

Most common regret expressed by Americans

Answer 18

A failure to achieve as much education as they would have wished

Question 19

Zeigarnik effect

Answer 19

the fact that people tend to remember inactions more often than completed actions

Question 20

Gaol

Answer 20

Was in fact a prison— a house of punishment rather than a holding institution—and it is generally regarded as the first prison in the world.

Question 21

Freud on guilt

Answer 21

Freud argued nearly a century ago that guilt is the foundation of civilization, providing resist- ance to the aggressive and destructive tendencies of humankind.

Question 22

City of joy

Answer 22

a six-month residential program for rape survivors that combines group therapy with literacy classes, leadership training, self-defense courses and lessons in human-rights law. Ninety women attend each semester. The focus is on empowerment, says Ensler. “City of Joy is not a refuge. It is a center for transformation. We are literally saying that the violence which was done to you, through a process of love, healing therapy and education, can be turned into a motor that makes you a leader.”

Question 23

The U.S.’s Helms Amendment

Answer 23

enacted in 1973, prevents American assistance funds from going to programs that also provide abortions.