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Prior work has demonstrated that young children in the US and the Ecuadorian Amazon preferentially remember information about the dangerousness of an animal over both its name and its diet. Here we explore if this bias is present among older children and adults in Fiji through the use of an experimental learning task. We find that a content bias favoring the preferential retention of danger and toxicity information continues to operate in older children, but that the magnitude of the bias diminishes with age and is absent in adults. We also find evidence that fitness costs likely impact the types of mistakes that participants make in their attributions of dangerousness and poisonousness. These results suggest that natural selection has shaped the way in which we learn and make inferences about unfamiliar animal species over ontogeny, and that future research is needed on how content biases may vary across the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent Canada–US ‘Beyond the Border’ negotiations have been accompanied by a highlighting of the issue of unauthorised crossings at the Canada–US border. In this paper, I offer some grounded contextualisation of this current politicisation by drawing upon press reports and interviews to document Canadian border-resident and press constructions of unauthorised crossings in one Canada–US border region in the late 1990s to mid-2000s. The evidence suggests that there is widespread local awareness of these crossings, including the dangers and sometimes death faced by would-be migrants. The analysis explores why this knowledge has not served to challenge still-dominant constructions of a ‘benign’ Canada–US border and/or ongoing projects of border securitisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates perceived danger among the nation’s confined youth. Although a number of studies have examined etiology of danger in prison, few have examined juvenile residents or focused on decomposing facility-level from individual-level effects. Addressing these limitations, this study draws on survey data at 48 juvenile institutions across the US and compares perceived danger between pooled and fixed-effects model specifications. The data showed juveniles who were younger and had prior maltreatment histories perceived more danger than others (within the same facilities). The data also showed that several variables ostensibly impacting perceptions were operating through contextual bias – including geographic background, criminal history, and race. For example, minorities perceived more danger than White adolescents overall (pooled models) but not within the same facilities (fixed effects). This may suggest minority adolescents serve time in ‘harsher’ facilities – an understudied form of disparity in the criminal justice system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since Michelle Fine's writing on the missing discourse of desire in sex education, there has been considerable prompting among sexuality educators and feminist scholars to incorporate talk of pleasure into sex education curricula. While the calls for inclusion continue, few have actually examined the curricula for a pleasure discourse or explored how it is contextualised within sex education curricula. In this paper, we analysed curricula used in the USA in the past decade. A qualitative thematic analysis revealed that the discourse around pleasurable sex was often linked to a range of dangerous or negative outcomes including not using condoms, rushing into sex without thinking, regretted sex, and pregnancy or STDs. When the discourse around pleasure was included in sections on ‘knowing one's body’, this discourse took a medicalised, scientific tone. Pleasurable sex was also presented in more positive ways, either linked to marriage in Abstinence Only Until Marriage curricula, or within a more feminist discourse about female pleasure in comprehensive sex education curricula. Our research indicates that a discourse of desire is not missing, but that this discourse was often situated as part of a discourse on safe practice and there, continues to equate pleasure with danger. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Threats of violence are not uncommon to counselors, faculty, or teachers. Each must be taken seriously, quickly analyzed, and safety procedures implemented. Yet, there exists a paucity of brief, face-to-face, assessments designed to aid threat assessment. To address this paucity, the author created The DANGERTOME Personal Risk Threat Assessment Scale. Although no scale can identify all who will act violently, this Scale can be used within a larger and more thorough threat assessment. The Scale is evidence informed and founded upon the author's 24 years of clinical experience as well as Federal Bureau of Investigation data. Neither the Scale nor the general clinical suggestions should be utilized in isolation from other assessment instruments and direct expert clinical and legal guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]