| 1. |
- Sikström, Sverker, et al.
(författare)
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How bad is bad? Perceptual differences in the communication of severity in intimate partner violence
- 2023
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Ingår i: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. - 2662-9992. ; 10:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Accurate communication of the severity of violence in intimate relations is essential for the appropriate evaluation of offenders and victims in contexts such as court trials, custody cases, and the continuation of relationships. Using a new paradigm, this study quantifies discrepancies in how the severity of violence is communicated in texts written by offenders, victims, and bystanders who witness violence. The study was conducted in two phases, where participants were randomly sampled from the same population to participate in either Phase 1 or Phase 2. In the first Phase, witnesses (narrators) provided nine narratives about self-experienced intimate partner violence and rated the violence’s severity; then in the second Phase non-witnesses (recipients) read all the narratives and rated the severity of the violence. Four types of perceptual differences (calibration, accuracy, gender, and role perceptual differences) were identified when rating the severity of three types of violence (psychological, physical, and sexual) as communicated by three types of witnesses (victims, offenders, and bystanders) of violence in heterosexual, romantic relationships. Several novel findings were made related to a strong perceptual difference in calibration, i.e., a tendency for the recipient to rate the violence more severely than the narrator, where this effect was mainly found for victims and bystanders, but not for offenders. Also, the calibration effect was largely seen in the sexual and physical, but not psychological, narratives. The recipients’ accuracy was considerably lower for psychological rather than sexual violence. Finally, the validity of the method was confirmed by replicating earlier findings on perceptual differences in roles where witnesses rated violence more severely than victims or offenders and women were rated more severely than men, which was especially true for male raters. These results suggest systematic perceptual differences in severity ratings and may have substantial implications for victims and offenders in real-life settings. These findings may potentially be used to ameliorate the negative effects of perceptual differences.
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| 2. |
- Sikström, Sverker, et al.
(författare)
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Removing Biases in Communication of Severity Assessments of Intimate Partner Violence : Model Development and Evaluation
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Medical Internet Research. - : JMIR Publications Inc.. - 1438-8871. ; 25
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Background: To support a victim of violence and establish the correct penalty for the perpetrator, it is crucial to correctly evaluate and communicate the severity of the violence. Recent data have shown these communications to be biased. However, computational language models provide opportunities for automated evaluation of the severity to mitigate the biases. Objective: We investigated whether these biases can be removed with computational algorithms trained to measure the severity of violence described. Methods: In phase 1 (P1), participants (N=71) were instructed to write some text and type 5 keywords describing an event where they experienced physical violence and 1 keyword describing an event where they experienced psychological violence in an intimate partner relationship. They were also asked to rate the severity. In phase 2 (P2), another set of participants (N=40) read the texts and rated them for severity of violence on the same scale as in P1. We also quantified the text data to word embeddings. Machine learning was used to train a model to predict the severity ratings. Results: For physical violence, there was a greater accuracy bias for humans (r2=0.22) compared to the computational model (r2=0.31; t38=–2.37, P=.023). For psychological violence, the accuracy bias was greater for humans (r2=0.058) than for the computational model (r2=0.35; t38=–14.58, P<.001). Participants in P1 experienced psychological violence as more severe (mean 6.46, SD 1.69) than participants rating the same events in P2 (mean 5.84, SD 2.80; t86=–2.22, P=.029<.05), whereas no calibration bias was found for the computational model (t134=1.30, P=.195). However, no calibration bias was found for physical violence for humans between P1 (mean 6.59, SD 1.81) and P2 (mean 7.54, SD 2.62; t86=1.32, P=.19) or for the computational model (t134=0.62, P=.534). There was no difference in the severity ratings between psychological and physical violence in P1. However, the bias (ie, the ratings in P2 minus the ratings in P1) was highly negatively correlated with the severity ratings in P1 (r2=0.29) and in P2 (r2=0.37), whereas the ratings in P1 and P2 were somewhat less correlated (r2=0.11) using the psychological and physical data combined. Conclusions: The results show that the computational model mitigates accuracy bias and removes calibration biases. These results suggest that computational models can be used for debiasing the severity evaluations of violence. These findings may have application in a legal context, prioritizing resources in society and how violent events are presented in the media.
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| 3. |
- Sikström, Sverker, et al.
(författare)
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What you say and what I hear-Investigating differences in the perception of the severity of psychological and physical violence in intimate partner relationships
- 2021
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Ingår i: PLOS ONE. - San Francisco, CA, United States : PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE. - 1932-6203. ; 16:8
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The correct communication of the severity of violence is essential in the context of legal trials, custody cases, support of victims, etc., for providing fair treatment. A narrator that communicates their experiences of interpersonal violence may rate the seriousness of the incident differently than a rater reading the narrators text, suggesting that there exist perceptual differences (PD) in severity ratings between the narrator and the rater. We propose that these perceptual differences may depend on whether the narrative is based on physical or psychological violence, and on gender differences. Physical violence may be evaluated as more serious by the receiver of the narrative than by the narrator (Calibration PD), whereas the seriousness of psychological violence may be difficult to convey, leading to a discrepancy in the seriousness ratings between the narrator and the rater (Accuracy PD). In addition, gender stereotypes may influence the seriousness rating (Gender PD), resulting in violence against women being perceived as more serious than the same violence against men. These perceptual differences were investigated in 3 phases using a new experimental procedure. In Phase 1, 113 narrators provided descriptions and seriousness ratings of self-experienced physical and psychological violence in relationships. In Phase 2, 340 independent raters rated the seriousness of 10 randomly selected narrations from Phase 1. In Phase 3, the genders in the narrations were changed to the opposite gender, and seriousness ratings were collected from 340 different raters. Our results confirmed the hypothesized perceptual differences. Violence to male victims was considerably more likely to be seen as severe when the raters were misled to believe the victim was a woman. We propose that these data provide practical guidelines for how to deal with misinformation in the communication of violence. The data also show that mean values and the confidence of such severity ratings need to be adjusted for several factors, such as whether it is self-experienced or communicated, the type of violence, and the gender of the victims and raters.
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| 4. |
- Sikström, Sverker, et al.
(författare)
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The Role of Sparsely Distributed Representations in Familiarity Recognition of Verbal and Olfactory Materials
- 2018
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Ingår i: Cognitive Processing. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1612-4782 .- 1612-4790. ; 19:4, s. 481-494
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present the generalized signal detection theory (GSDT), where familiarity is described by a sparse binomial distribution of binary node activity rather than by normal distribution of familiarity. Items are presented in a distributed representation, where each node receives either noise only, or signal and noise. An old response (i.e., a ‘yes’ response) is made if at least one node receives signal plus noise that is larger than the activation threshold, and item variability is determined by the distribution of activated nodes as the threshold is varied. A distinct representation leads to better performance and a lower ratio of new to old item variability, than a more distributed and less distinct representations. Here we apply the GSDT to empirical data on verbal and olfactory memory and suggest that verbal memory relies on a distinct neural item representation whereas olfactory memory has a fuzzy neural representation leading to poorer memory and inducing a larger ratio of new to old item variability.
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