I found this to be very interesting because I am still up in the air about what I think about how pedophiles should be treated. I obviously think it is a crime and they should be locked up, but while reading the article they interviewed a man who had committed his crime while a teen, and it still follows him around as an adult. Which, to me if you've served your time and you were a teen it should be eliminated from your record but you should have to do mandatory check in with a probation officer, mandatory counseling, and still not be able to live with in a certain radius of children.
This article gave me a bit more incite of how it is to be in the position of someone who has served their time and their life will not and can not ever go back to how it was.
http://www.mysuncoast.com/Global/story.asp?S=12002719
In my Cognitive Psychology textbook, Cognition: Theory and Applications by Reed, there's a box that talks about why we have trouble distinguishing faces of people who are a different race from us.
People are notoriously awful at recognizing faces from other races. It's a human foible often explained by the notion that we have more experience looking at members of our own race and thus acquire "perceptual expertise" for characteristics of our own kind.
One influential version of that hypothesis argues that the so-called cross-race recognition deficit can be modeled by assuming that faces of other races are more psychologically similar than are faces of one's own race. But Daniel Level, PhD, a cognitive psychologist at Kent State University, has been unsatisfied with that argument.
"The perceptual expertise position is pretty intuitive, and it makes sense," he says. "But I'm arguing that it's not really the case. The problem is not that we can't code the details of cross-race faces - it's that we don't."
Instead, he says, people place inordinate emphasis on race categories - whether someone is white, black, or Asian - ignoring information that would help them recognize people as individuals. In recent research, Levin has shown that people can, in fact, perceive fine differences among faces of people from other races - as long as they're using those differences to make race classifications.
For example, Levin explains, "When a white person looks at another white person's nose, they're likely to think to themselves, 'That's John's nose.' When they look at a black person's nose, they're likely to think, "That's a black nose."
The results are important, Levin maintains, because they help explain the long-standing question of why people are poor at recognizing the faces of people who belong to other racial groups. Such an understanding could be useful in a variety of settings, including training police and others in the justice system to identify faces more accurately.
Source: From "Why do 'they all look alike'?" by Siri Carpenter, Monitor on Psychology, December, 2000, p. 44.
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