No abstract

According to recent research on laypersons' punitive attitudes people's sentencing decisions are primarily driven by a desire for retribution. The research designed to test this notion, however, can be criticized for suffering from several limitations. Three online-based studies were conducted with samples from Western Europe with the aim of replicating the findings of Carlsmith (J Exp Soc Psychol 42:437-451, 2006) in which participants' punishment motives were inferred from their behavior in a process tracing task. In the present research, this approach was adopted and modified in order to provide a more conservative test for the notion that people mainly care about retribution. Although these modifications strongly influenced the overall pattern of results, retribution still was the most important punishment motive in all three studies.

Although myofascial pain has often been described as being associated with psychosocial stress, detailed evidence in support of this assumption, either from standardized clinical examination or from validated chronic stress questionnaires, is absent. The hypothesis of the present study was that some stressors lead to higher scores in patients suffering from chronic myofascial pain than in pain-free controls and in patients suffering from chronic facial pain. One hundred and fifty subjects were included in the study, and depending on clinical findings, divided into three groups: exclusively chronic myofascial pain group, controls with chronic facial pain but without temporomandibular disorders (TMD), and controls without pain or TMD. Chronic stress was assessed on nine subscales by use of a validated questionnaire. Myofascial pain patients have a significantly higher stress score for "social isolation" than pain-free controls (t-test, p = 0.003). However, they do not have higher scores than patients suffering from facial pain (t test, p = 0.169). Thus, the hypothesis of this study could not be completely rejected.

Research has demonstrated that repeat offenders are generally punished more severely than first-time offenders. In the present article, we argue that this should particularly be true if the offender is a member of one’s own social category. A group of 86 students were told about a fellow student who hid books from the university library. The student was either an ingroup or an outgroup member and was either a first-time or a repeat offender. As expected, repeat ingroup offenders were more severely punished than first-time ingroup offenders; this effect was mediated by anger/outrage and societal concerns. If the offender was an outgroup member, however, criminal history did not influence punitive reactions.

No abstract