This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments.

Officers' volunteering for Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) training—rather than being assigned—is assumed to be an important, beneficial self-selection bias. This bias remains poorly characterized, though CIT officers are more likely to be female and to have had exposure to the mental health field. We determined whether or not self-selection is beneficial with regard to knowledge, attitudes, and skills, as well as level of force used (i.e., no or low force versus any form of physical force) and disposition of subjects, in actual encounters. We compared CIT-trained officers who had volunteered with those who had been assigned using data from two prior, linked studies that compared CIT-trained and non-CIT officers on knowledge, attitudes, and skills (251 CIT-trained officers; 68% had volunteered), as well as behaviors (517 actual encounters provided by 91 CIT-trained officers; 70% had volunteered). Of 28 scores on knowledge, attitudes, and skills compared, six were statistically significantly different (p <.01) and another eight were marginally significant (.01 < p <.05). Furthermore, although CIT officers who had volunteered were more likely to report use of some form of physical force as we had defined it (which included the use of handcuffs), when they did so they were more likely to refer to treatment services and less likely to make an arrest. These effects were apparent even when taking into account effects of gender, having had exposure to the mental health field, empathy, and other covariates. In conclusion, we found evidence for benefits of self-selection/volunteering that should be further characterized, as it appears to be associated with better outcomes with regard to key attitudes, skills, and behaviors.