OBJECTIVES Physical punishment, as a means of disciplining children, may be considered a mild form of childhood adversity. Although many outcomes of physical punishment have been investigated, little attention has been given to the impact of physical punishment on later adult psychopathology. Also, it has been stated that physical punishment by a loving parent is not associated with negative ou...

Many social dilemmas exhibit nonlinearities and equilibrium outcomes in the interior of the choice space. This paper reports a laboratory experiment studying whether peer punishment promotes socially efficient behavior in such environments, which have been ignored in most experimental studies of peer punishment. It compares the effectiveness of peer punishment in a linear public good game to th...

This paper identifies and discusses the western vernacular and minimalist tendencies in Norman Mailer’s 1980 Pulitzer Prize winning “true-life story” The Executioner’s Song. Mailer’s use of a lean, often flat style of narration is read in relation to Truman Capote’s “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood to measure the extent to which Mailer moved beyond a conventional novelistic approach. The artic...

Chronic minor childhood stress in the form of corporal punishment predicts adult psychopathology in the United States but has not been demonstrated in a country where corporal punishment is normative. We tested whether adult psychopathology was predicted by recalled frequency of childhood corporal punishment and recalled controllability of punishment in Saudi Arabia. Two hundred and fifty nine ...

The adverse effect of harsh corporal punishment on mental health and psychosocial functioning in children has been repeatedly suggested by studies in industrialized countries. Nevertheless, corporal punishment has remained common practice not only in many homes, but is also regularly practiced in schools, particularly in low-income countries, as a measure to maintain discipline. Proponents of c...

Recent studies show that punishment plays a crucial role in favoring and maintaining social order. However, very little attention has been paid so far to the potential of distributed punishment. In this work we put forward the hypothesis that distributed punishment is more effective than individual punishment, because is more persuasive in conveying messages of peer condemnation and of shared n...

Previous findings on punishment have focused on environments in which the outcomes are known with certainty. In this paper, we conduct experiments to investigate how punishment affects cooperation in a two-person stochastic prisoner’s dilemma environment where each person can decide whether or not to cooperate and the outcomes of alternative strategies are specified probabilistically. In partic...

The association between corporal punishment and children's emotional and behavioral functioning was studied in a sample of 98 non-referred children with a mean age of 12.35 (SD = 1.72) recruited from two school systems in the southeastern United States. Children were divided into those who had experienced no corporal punishment over approximately a two-week period, those who had experienced mil...

This paper provides a comparative statics analysis of punishment in public-good experiments. We vary systematically the effectiveness of punishment, that is, the factor by which punishment reduces the punished player’s income, and we find that contributions to the public good increase monotonically in effectiveness. High effectiveness leads to near complete contribution rates and welfare improv...