Derek Chadee

University of the West Indies, St. Augustine | UWI · Department of Behavioral Sciences

Our attachment, love, emotions, and facial expressions, among many other factors, create a complex psychological social exchange interactive structure. The fuel of negative emotions and the complexity of relational problems and the concomitant facial expressions can ignite and inflame the emergence of negative relationships. Verbal communication wi...

Social interaction involves exchanging of feelings, and the human face emitting facial signals is essential in this process. Our skill sets to identify truth from falsehood in facial appearance allow us to intelligently interact and function adapting to our constantly changing social environment. The question that this chapter raises relates to the...

With the emergence of copycat crime as a criminal justice concern, its prevalence is of current interest. This study estimates copycat crime’s prevalence among an adult non-incarcerated population. Face-to-face guided interviews were conducted with 601 respondents with measures of copycat crime consideration and attempts collected. Comparisons with...

The central thesis of this study is that crime victims' emotional distress, influenced by the severity of the offence experienced, impacts their propensity to utilize preventive measures via its influence on perceived risk of victimization and fear of crime. Path analysis was conducted to test a model of these relationships, utilizing data from a c...

Parental behavior regulation and delinquency is well established in the literature. While the precise direction of the relationship seems elusive, delinquency remains a recurring behavioral outcome of punitive forms of discipline. Opponents of punishment propose that it leads to a greater likelihood of conduct issues in adolescence and adulthood. T...

This study explores the prerequisites to weapon desire, an underresearched area. Collectively, the literature on media influence, cultivation hypothesis, social learning, and imitation lend credibility to the hypothesis that exposure to crime-related media content will result in increased desire for weapon ownership. The specific research question...

Our view of past experiences influences our view of present and future experiences. Considering that feelings caused by memories are actually current memories, our attitudes toward past experiences can simultaneously shape and color both our present and our future. As such, it is worthwhile to consider what determines these attitudes. This chapter...

Time is an asset we all wish to possess, the value of which cannot be compared to any other asset (Zimbardo & Boyd, 2008). Time is an essential part of life, a medium in which we spend our life. At the same time, it is one of several essential dimensions of our observable world that significantly influences the shaping of our existence. It is quite...

The current study proposed general health as a predictor of fear of crime with risk perception and general fear as mediating factors. Data were collected from a randomly selected household sample using face to face interviews (n = 300) and utilizing the following scales: general health, general fear, fear of crime, and perceived risk of victimizati...

It has been a long-standing belief that exposure to media depictions of crime can influence fear of crime victimization through cultivation. However, previous research on the topic has been mixed. These issues were investigated in a sample of 3,003 adults in Trinidad. The impact of fictional media, news media, and reality TV as well as perceived cr...

This study investigates the relationship between community concerns (i.e., perceived crime, incivilities, and infrastructure) and fear of crime (FOC) while examining the mediating role of risk of victimisation and pragmatic fear. Gender and ethnic differences were also explored. Data were collected using a proportionate multistage random sample of...

Prior research on fear of crime has focused less on psychological causes than on sociological and demographic factors. This study, however, introduces time perspective (TP) as an important psychological variable in the understanding of fear of crime. Specifically, the article assesses the relationship between TP as a stable personality factor and t...

The research discussed in this chapter has by no means exhausted all the factors that influence health care students’ willingness to interact with persons living with HIV (PLHIV) in the Caribbean. It does, however, highlight some areas worthy of further investigation. The overwhelming influence of emotions on students’ reactions to PLHIV signals a...

Prior research on media and violence suggests that youths with low empathy and high sensitivity to narrative persuasion are at particular risk of criminogenic media. The motivation to copycat behavior and level of risk criminality are predictors of the likelihood to commit future criminality (LCFC). This study assesses the relationship among empath...

Nonverbal communication plays a prominent role in human social behavior. It is defined as “communication effected by means other than words” since it goes without saying that words are the principal means of verbal communication (Knapp & Hall, 2010, p. 5). In most cases, this can be a useful definition although, in some ways, it reduces the role an...

One of the most pervasive stigmatising conditions in society today is HIV/AIDS. In Trinidad and Tobago, stigma and discrimination are still pervasive especially against persons living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV) and at-risk groups. HIV stigmatisation takes place at all levels including health care institutions, and is a major obstacle to effective HIV/AI...

The Social Psychology of Nonverbal Communication gathers together leading scholars of nonverbal communication from around the world to offer insight into a range of issues within the discipline. The collection presents contemporary research and theorization of the nature, functions, and modalities of nonverbal behavior in an array of circumstances,...

Much of the literature on fear of crime (FOC) has focused on the role of risk perceptions in understanding FOC, with little consideration given to psychological factors not directly related to crime, but that can impact the levels of FOC. This study introduces general fear (GF) as an explanatory factor in understanding FOC. A proportional random sa...

Diabetes, hypertension and heart disease inflict a heavy health burden on the Caribbean Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. This study assessed the prevalence of self- reported diabetes, hypertension and heart disease in lower socioeconomically placed individuals accessing welfare grants. Data collected between July 2008 and June 2009 were analyzed fr...

The often-reported finding that religious persons are more prejudiced towards homosexual persons than non-religious persons seems paradoxical considering that most major religions purport equal opportunity and tolerance for all people. Using a correlational design, researchers analysed the self-reported attitudes of 204 male and female undergraduat...

An unresolved research question regarding crime and justice policy is the relationship between an individual’s media consumption and their support for punitive and preventive criminal justice policies. The relationship between media, crime, and justice is under-examined in countries other than the United States and Britain and the relationship betw...

There are various design factors that affect the customer's emotions in an eCommerce environment. A control diagram identifying the major elements and processes involved in an emotion-oriented eCommerce system has been created. The control structure and its components are identified and described. For supporting the simulation of emotion-oriented e...

Crime surveys typically ask respondents how 'likely' they think it is that they will become a crime victim in the future. The responses are interpreted here as 'risk' statements. An investigation of the risk literature shows the concept to be considerably more complex than at first imagined, but shows that individual risk predictions are largely ba...

In this study, Trinidadian (n = 194) and U.S. (n = 290) citizens were compared on their attitudes toward domestic violence (DV) as well as their willingness to intervene in five distinct DV contexts (when the DV involved an immediate family member, extended family member, a friend, neighbor, and a coworker). The results indicated that Trinidadians...

Crime surveys typically ask respondents how likely they think it is that they will be a crime victim in the year after questioning. A three-wave longitudinal panel survey conducted in Trinidad was no exception. This design permits an examination of both the degree to which predictions are based on past experience and of the accuracy or otherwise of...

This article reports two worldwide studies of stereotypes about liars. These studies are carried out in 75 different countries and 43 different languages. In Study 1, participants respond to the open-ended question “How can you tell when people are lying?” In Study 2, participants complete a questionnaire about lying. These two studies reveal a dom...

A review of available international evidence indicates that crime features regularly in the media. New data shows that this is also true for Trinidad. Elsewhere, it has been shown that newspaper crime news concentrates heavily on infrequently occurring crimes involving sex and/or violence. Crime news on television and radio has not been subject to...

A previous article (reporting the first two waves of the three reported here) generated from this longitudinal Trinidadian data base indicated that, for each question on general feelings of safety or on specific worry about crime, some individuals changed their response when asked the same question 12 months later, & some did not. Data in this pape...

Although a connection between media reports and dramatizations of crime and peoples' fear of crime is intuitively attractive, an actual relationship has been discovered surprisingly infrequently. This study (which analyses the quantitative responses of 167 respondents, and the qualitative responses of a sub-sample of 64 of them) is no exception. Th...

This research paper revisits Ferraro & LaGrange's (1992) fear of crime & age study, here using survey data from the Caribbean island of Trinidad but adopting similar methods & statistical analyses. A multi-stage cluster design was used with 728 randomly selected adults. The overall simple correlations for fear of crime & age are low & negative for...

The fear of crime is a politically important measure, & much is made of year-to-year changes in levels when generated by repeat cross-sectional national surveys such as the British Crime Survey. Data from the first two waves of a longitudinal survey of the fear of crime undertaken in Trinidad indicate that identical year-on-year fear levels regular...

This study examines the social background and psychological dispositions of 486 youth in three juvenile homes of a Caribbean country, Trinidad and Tobago. 38% of youths were in homes for robbery/ robbery-related crimes with the highest proportion (61%) by older boys 16 years and over. Only 2% of the young girls (YG) under 16 years of age committed...