CrimePsych

As some of you likely know, i am now the only contributor to this website (and the original owner/operator) and as such i conduct a vast amount of research and write articles when i can – unfortunately i recently started my post graduate study (working towards a Masters in Forensic Mental Health) and subsequently i have had very little time to write articles for this website. I assure you that very shortly you will start to see additional articles on the website (once i have received marks for work submitted as part of my course) but until then, unfortunately, it is very difficult for me to find the time to add anything new (40 – 60 hours a week work, 20 hours a week university study, time with the family etc.).

I do assure you however that the website has not been abandoned, and that this website as well as others in my ‘Blogroll’ at the bottom of the page are being added to and updated when possible. Any questions or comments please feel free to email or comment on any page, i would especially love to hear from anybody living in Melbourne, Australia (as i moved there recently) and anybody interested in forensic psychology or forensic related fields.

Need we say more? Currently we are re-designing the site, and unfortunately that means a lot of stuff doesnt work… rest assured we will have things 100% operational again in the next week and any problems you are currently experiencing will disappear – we appreciate your patience. Any questions or comments can be forwarded to ewan@crimepsych.com or if you would prefer a vocal conversation send us an email and we will gladly provide you with a phone number to call – emails show up instantly courtesy of technology

Danny Harold Rolling was born on May 26th, 1954 in Shreveport, Louisiana he was the eldest of two boys to father James Rolling and his wife Claudia. His father was a police officer who quite obviously should not have been; he regularly beat both his sons and supplemented these beatings with bondage and blindfolds as punishment for indiscretions.

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Grief is a complex emotion felt by most of us at sometime during our lives, yet there are major individual differences, some appear to be untouched by the loss of a loved one while others become chronically affected to the point where normal day-to-day functioning becomes impossible, while others still experience a delayed onset. Still the question remains; what factors determine the level of grief experienced by a person? The past decades have spawned an immense amount of empirical research and as one would expect with a complicated feeling such as grief, a large number of factors have been proposed in the literature. From the multiple papers examined, all appear to conform to those put forward by James W. Worden.

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William MacDonald was originally born in England and migrated to Australia. He committed his first murder in Brisbane sometime in 1961 when he befriended a man by the name of Amos Hurst outside the Roma Street Transit Centre. They headed to one of the local pubs and after a lengthy drinking session headed back to the soon to be victims apartment where they drank more. Eventually MacDonald straddled Hurst and began strangling him; Hurst was so intoxicated he never even realised what was happening to him. Hurst’s cause of death was actually listed as accidental and had MacDonald not confessed to the crime he would not have been charged with it.

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For those of you who are unfamiliar with some of the better known serial killers, John Wayne Gacy was one of the most prolific and infamous serial killers in the history of the United States. He was sentenced to death in the electric chair, which was carried out back in 1994, for the murder of 33 people. As the story goes, he could have continued for a lot longer – he was an organised killer and a sexual sadist who disposed of the bodies of his victims in the crawl space of his house. It was only when he ran out of room under his house that he started to dispose of the bodies in the local rivers, which ultimately led to his capture.

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While searching for adequate theories of mind one is likely to come across the connectionist version of the computational theory of mind, and it appears that, this particular theory, provides us with working models effortlessly for such cognitive capacities as rapid recognition, associative memory and categorical generalization.

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You would be correct, of a fashion; technically the broad definition of anthropology is simply the study of people everywhere and throughout all of time. More specifically though there are a few variations or specialties within the field. In our case, forensic anthropology is comprised of biological or physical anthropology (this includes human and biological evolution) and human osteology (studying the human skeleton). In a legal setting, one of the most common things that a forensic anthropologist will do is examine human skeletal remains.

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This has to be my favourite discipline within the forensic field, and one that i am personally very involved with (i am currently working towards my Master of Forensic Psychology degree). But for the ‘newbies’ the role a forensic psychologist actually plays in the real world can be somewhat confusing – partly due to Hollywood’s version of what a forensic psychologist does. Forensic psychologists are classed as scientist-practitioners as they are constantly applying their skills and psychological knowledge to the understanding and functioning of the criminal justice system as a whole.

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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine differences in change detection between viewings of a short edited film as well as the affect of sound on these change detections. A total of 306 participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions, one with sound and one without sound, where they watched a short edited film on two consecutive occasions approximately five minutes apart. The results support previous research in the field of change blindness with significant results obtained for both of the conditions within this study. Not only do participants fail to notice large changes to centre of attention as well as arbitrarily placed objects, unless told to watch for changes, but also whether or not sound is present has an affect on participants ability to detect said changes. In this case, participants without the presence of sound detected more changes than those with sound.

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