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Stress and Prison Workers in Nigeria
J. Okoza, H.O. Imhonde and O. Aluede
Department of Psychology, Ambrose Ali University, PMB 14, Ekpoma 310001, Nigeria
Current Research Journal of Social Sciences 2(2): 65-68, 2010
Abstract: This study examined the sources of stress among prison workers in Nigeria. A total of 150 (110 male
and 40 females) Prison staff drawn from the Oko and Benin Prisons in Edo state, Nigeria participated in the
study. A questionnaire was used in collecting data that were analyzed in this study. The questionnaire was
constructed by current researchers and was made up of four sections. Results revealed that riots in prisons
(96%) were the highest source of stress to prison staff and the least source of stress was dilapidating building
(50%). Results also revealed that gender and length of service have significant main effect on stress experienced
by prison workers, while age has no significant main effect. The combinations of gender, age and length of
service had a significant interaction effect on stress as experienced by prison workers. The results of the
research prompted the recommendation that the Federal Government of Nigeria should have a good political
will to provide solutions to problems facing the service and make the job less stressful.
Key words: Nigeria, penitentiary, prison officers, prison worker, reformation, rehabilitation, retribution,
stress, stressors Continue reading The Jailer and the Jailed
Richards J. Heuer, Jr.
Author’s Preface 
This volume pulls together and republishes, with some editing, updating, and additions, articles written during 1978–86 for internal use within the CIA Directorate of Intelligence. Four of the articles also appeared in the Intelligence Community journal Studies in Intelligence during that time frame. The information is relatively timeless and still relevant to the never-ending quest for better analysis. The articles are based on reviewing cognitive psychology literature concerning how people process information to make judgments on incomplete and ambiguous information. I selected the experiments and findings that seem most relevant to intelligence analysis and most in need of communication to intelligence analysts. I then translated the technical reports into language that intelligence analysts can understand and interpreted the relevance of these findings to the problems intelligence analysts face. Continue reading Psychology of Intelligence Analysis
Stephen Monsell Jon Driver
One of the most challenging problems facing cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience is to explain how mental processes are voluntarily controlled, allowing the computational resources of the brain to be selected flexibly and deployed to achieve changing goals. The eighteenth of the celebrated international symposia on Attention and Performance focused on this problem, seeking to banish or at least deconstruct the “homunculus”: that conveniently intelligent but opaque agent still lurking within many theories, under the guise of a central executive or supervisory attentional system assumed to direct processes that are not “automatic.”
The thirty-two contributions discuss evidence from psychological experiments with healthy and brain-damaged subjects, functional imaging, electrophysiology, and computational modeling. Four sections focus on specific forms of control: of visual attention, of perception-action coupling, of task-switching and dual-task performance, and of multistep tasks. The other three sections extend the interdisciplinary approach, with chapters on the neural substrate of control, studies of control disorders, and computational simulations. The progress achieved in fractionating, localizing, and modeling control functions, and in understanding the interaction between stimulus-driven and
voluntary control, takes research on control in the mind/brain to a new level of sophistication. Continue reading Control of Cognitive Processes
BY ROBERT H. THOULESS.
(From the Department of Psychology, Glasgow University.)
Ordinary observation of the strength of beliefs leads one to the conclusion that most people have a strong tendency to feel much much certain than the evidence warrants. Particularly is this to be noticed when opposite opinions are held, and we find. that some people are certain that a proposition is true and some are certain that it is false, while relatively few persons adopt the attitude of partial belief, that is, of regarding it as more or less probable. This is
particularly striking with respect to religious and political beliefs, although I think common observation would also lead us to suppose that it was not confined to them. There seems to be a general tendency for our reaction to be that of certainly accepting or certainly rejecting a proposition rather than either the attitude of partial belief, which we may call ‘scepticism’, or that of oscillation between two opposed beliefs, which we may call ‘doubt’… Continue reading THE TENDENCY TO CERTAINTY IN RELIGIOUS BELIEF
Sigmund Freud The medical profession is justly conservative. Human life should not be considered as the proper material for wild experiments. Conservatism, however, is too often a welcome excuse for lazy minds, loath to adapt themselves to fast changing conditions. Remember the scornful reception which first was accorded to Freud’s discoveries in the domain [...]
Stephen Monsell Jon Driver One of the most challenging problems facing cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience is to explain how mental processes are voluntarily controlled, allowing the computational resources of the brain to be selected flexibly and deployed to achieve changing goals. The eighteenth of the celebrated international symposia on Attention and Performance focused [...]
BY ROBERT H. THOULESS. (From the Department of Psychology, Glasgow University.) First published in British Journal of Psychology, XXVI, pp. 16-31, 1935. I. Introduction (p. 16). II. The scope of the enquiry (pp. 16-17). III. The results of the enquiry (pp. 18-23). IV. Discussion of the results (pp. 23-29). (a) The law of belief [...]
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