Cynthia Janis Najdowski

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University at Albany, State University of New York

Objective: The purpose of this study was to estimate the behavioral impacts of training police officers in implicit bias awareness and management. Hypotheses: Training police in implicit bias reduces racial and ethnic disparities in stops, arrests, summonses, frisks, searches, and/or use of force. Method: A cluster randomized controlled trial using...

Considering the widespread prevalence of racist content and opinions on social media, there is a pressing need to understand how users react to such content in ways that might lead them to be drawn into echo chambers of racism, hate speech, and potentially even violence. We conducted an online study to investigate how two individual differences—pol...

In this book, eminent scholars from varied disciplines detail how developmental science and the law shape one another across the lifespan. The chapters address fundamental questions about how human development influences laws and practices in the legal system and how the law and its practices influence development. The chapters also reveal how the...

A policy's general deterrent effect requires would‐be offenders to be aware of the policy, yet many adolescents do not know they could be registered as sex offenders, and even adolescents who do know may still commit registerable sexual offenses. We tested whether peer influences shape the perceived costs/benefits of certain sexual offenses and, su...

Cultural stereotypes that link Black race to crime in the United States originated with and are perpetuated by policies that result in the disproportionate criminalization and punishment of Black people. The scientific record is replete with evidence that these stereotypes impact perceivers’ perceptions, information processing, and decision-making...

Stereotypes about people and communities of color may be limiting Fourth Amendment protections in "high crime areas."

Objectives: In October 2021, the American Psychological Association (APA) passed a resolution addressing ways psychologists could work to dismantle systemic racism in criminal legal systems. In the present report, developed to inform APA’s policy resolution, we detail the scope of the problem and offer recommendations for policy makers and psycholo...

We call for psychologists to expand their thinking on fair and just public safety by engaging with the “Abolition Democracy” framework that W. E. B. Du Bois articulated as the need to dissolve slavery while simultaneously taking affirmative steps to rid its toxic consequences from the body politic. Because the legacies of slavery continue to produc...

Lacking adequate knowledge about one's rights could inhibit the likelihood of exercising one's rights or lead one to unwittingly violate laws that place legitimate limits on these rights. Thus, the present research examines First Amendment knowledge as well as competence to apply this knowledge in relevant circumstances. Results revealed that one‐q...

Objectives We explored how relations among juror gender, confession evidence, and empathy impacted verdicts for a juvenile defendant accused of a serious crime. Methods Jury-eligible women and men (N = 132) participated in a mock trial involving a girl defendant who had either maintained her innocence, confessed voluntarily, or confessed under coe...

Despite growing recognition that misdiagnoses of child abuse can lead to wrongful convictions, little empirical work has examined how the medical community may contribute to these errors. Previous research has documented the existence and content of stereotypes that associate race with child abuse. The current study examines whether emergency medic...

Sex offender registration laws are widely implemented, increasingly restrictive, and intended to serve both specific and general deterrent functions. Most states have some form of policy mechanism to place adolescents on sex offender registries, yet it remains unclear whether adolescents possess the requisite policy awareness to be deterred from se...

This research sought to identify a potential process by which intergenerational crime occurs, focusing on the effect of parental incarceration on adolescents’ subsequent arrests. We drew from Matsueda’s work on reflected appraisals as an explanatory mechanism for this effect. Thus, the present research examined whether caregivers’ and adolescents’...

Black and poor children are overrepresentedat every stage of the child welfare system, from suspicion of abuse to substantiation. Focusing on stereotypes as a source of bias that leads to these disparities, the current study examines the content and strength of stereotypes relating race and social class to child abuse as viewed by medical professio...

The jury is often celebrated as an important symbol of American democracy. Yet much has changed since 1791 when the Sixth Amendment guaranteed all citizens the right to a jury trial in criminal prosecutions. Psychological and legal scholars have empirically evaluated many claims about the strengths and limitations of the jury system. Now, scientifi...

In this introductory chapter, we provide an overview of the goals of the present volume and a preview of the individual chapters herein. Specifically, we review research on various understudied and cutting-edge topics related to the intersection of psychological research and criminal jury decision making. We place this research in the real-world co...

Technological advances have created new avenues for the perpetration of sexual violence. The widespread availability of cameras has made it easier to take covert recordings of an individual’s intimate body parts, and whether sexually explicit images are recorded with or without an individual’s consent, growing access to the Internet has facilitated...

Sex offender registration policies have expanded rapidly, now extending to adolescent offenders across the nation. Policies mandating registration are based, in part, on arguments that registration is needed to prevent dangerous sex offenders from committing additional offenses and that risk of registration deters would-be offenders from offending...

The field of psychology and law, including forensic psychology, is an exciting concentration of research activity and student training and has grown rapidly, but to what extent have teaching and training efforts in the field been systematically catalogued and evaluated? We conducted a historical review and content analysis of the American and Canad...

We conducted 2 studies to investigate how cultural stereotypes that depict Blacks as criminals affect the way Blacks experience encounters with police officers, expecting that such encounters induce Blacks to feel stereotype threat (i.e., concern about being judged and treated unfairly by police because of the stereotype). In Study 1, we asked Blac...

Because many juvenile offenders are intellectually disabled and have their cases tried by jurors in adult criminal court, it is important to understand factors that influence jurors’ judgments in such cases. Using a mock trial methodology, we explored the relations among jurors’ gender, attitudes toward intellectual disability, and judgments in a c...

We investigated whether and how a juvenile's history of experiencing sexual abuse affects public perceptions of juvenile sex offenders in a series of 5 studies. When asked about juvenile sex offenders in an abstract manner (Studies 1 and 2), the more participants (community members and undergraduates) believed that a history of being sexually abuse...

We conducted a simulated trial study to investigate the effectiveness of a "gay-panic" provocation defense as a function of jurors' political orientation. Mock jurors read about a murder case in which a male defendant claimed a victim provoked the killing by starting a fight, which either included or did not include the male victim making an unwant...

Because juveniles can now be registered as sex offenders, we conducted a pilot study to investigate awareness of these policies and sexual behavior histories in a convenience sample of 53 young adults (ages 18 to 23, 79% women). These preliminary data revealed that 42% percent of participants were unaware that youth under the age of 18 can be regis...

Recent literature reviews and meta-analyses have supported the effectiveness of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) in helping members stop drinking and maintain sobriety. Despite the extensive body of research on AA, less attention has focused on differences in the efficacy of the program for and experiences of women as compared to men. Such a focus is warr...

A cross-sectional qualitative descriptive design was used to examine the links among expectations about, experiences with, and intentions toward mental health services. Individual face-to-face interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 32 African American youth/mothers dyads. Content analysis revealed that positive expectations were linke...

Using a retrospective survey, we studied a sample of 1,679 college women to determine whether reports of prior forgetting of childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse, and other traumas could be explained by trauma severity and individual differences in the use of defensive emotion-regulation reactions (i.e., repressive coping, dissociation, and fanta...

Juveniles are at heightened risk for falsely confessing to crimes, particularly if they are intellectually disabled. We conducted a mock trial experiment to investigate the effects of a juvenile defendant's confession and status as intellectually disabled on jurors' decision making. As expected, jurors discounted a juvenile's coerced confession: Ju...

Little is known about African American families' experiences with mental health services. A purposive sample of 40 dyads of African American youth (aged 13 to 19) and their mothers participated in a cross-sectional qualitative research design using semi-structured interviews that elicited information about their past experiences and satisfaction wi...

Little theoretical attention has been paid to evidence that Blacks are overrepresented in samples of false confessors compared to Whites. One possible explanation is that innocent Black suspects experience stereotype threat in interrogations and that this threat causes Black suspects to experience more arousal, self-regulatory efforts, and cognitiv...

The present longitudinal study examined relationships between self-blame attributions and social reactions to disclosure in a community sample of adult sexual assault victims ( N = 555). Cross-lagged panel analyses showed that neither characterological self-blame nor behavioral self-blame related to negative social reactions over the 1-year follow-...

To examine the effects of being revictimized, 555 women completed 2 mail surveys 1 year apart, reporting their experiences of sexual assault, the strategies they used to cope with those experiences, and feelings of depression. Path analyses, controlling for baseline coping and depression, revealed that those who were revictimized during the study r...

In 2002-2003 correlates of alcohol-related help-seeking were studied in women sexual assault survivors who were current problem drinkers (N = 526) in a large metropolitan area. Volunteer participants completed several valid and reliable instruments (i.e., the TWEAK, GFM, and MAST), which assessed alcohol use and misuse and related help-seeking. Dat...

Sexual assaults commonly involve alcohol use, but little is known about alcohol's effects on many aspects of assaults and their aftermath. We investigated characteristics of victims, perpetrators, and assaults as a function of whether alcohol was involved in the assault, as well as differences in women's postassault experiences. Assaults prior to w...

In three studies, we investigated support for applying sex offender registry laws to juveniles. Family law attorneys supported registry laws less for juveniles than for adults. Laypeople and prosecutors supported juvenile and adult sex offender registration equally--even though they perceived juveniles as generally less threatening than adults (Stu...

The American jury system rests on the fundamental assumption that ju-rors will engage in a thorough analysis of facts and robust debate to ensure that verdicts are reliable. Research demonstrates, however, that this expec-tation is rarely met. All jurors do not participate equally in deliberations. This may be explained in part by social loafing, o...

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and problem drinking are common and often co-occurring sequelae experienced by women survivors of adult sexual assault, yet it remains unclear whether survivors drink to cope with PTSD symptoms or whether PTSD symptoms are exacerbated by drinking. Thus, we used a cross-lagged panel design with a large (N = 555),...

This study examined the unique effects of child sexual abuse simultaneously with post-traumatic stress disorder symptom clusters, problem drinking, and illicit drug use in relation to sexual revictimization in a community sample of female adult sexual assault victims. Participants (N=555) completed two surveys a year apart. Child sexual abuse predi...

Understanding jurors' perceptions of juvenile defendants has become increasingly important as more and more juvenile cases are being tried in adult criminal court rather than family or juvenile court. Intellectual disability and child maltreatment are overrepresented among juvenile delinquents, and juveniles (particularly disabled juveniles) are at...

Relations between (a) serious suicidal ideation and attempts and (b) demographics, trauma history, assault characteristics, post-assault outcomes, and psychosocial variables were examined among female adult sexual assault survivors. Younger, minority, and bisexual survivors reported greater ideation. More traumas, drug use, and assault disclosure r...

Adult sexual assault (ASA) survivors report greater levels of problem drinking than do other women, and research suggests that their coping strategies, reactions from their social networks, and traumatic life events affect their problem drinking. The links between these factors and problem drinking may be moderated by whether survivors are revictim...

Prior research has demonstrated that self-blame is predictive of more posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and poorer recovery (Frazier, 2003; Koss, Figueredo, & Prince, 2002), and perceived control over recovery is associated with less distress (Frazier, 2003) in adult sexual assault (ASA) survivors. A structural equation model was tested...

What do forensic interviewers need to know to elicit full and accurate reports from children? How well does the legal system accommodate children's special needs and rights? How can current scientific research be applied to improve outcomes for youth involved in the justice system? Addressing these and other vitally important questions, this book b...