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Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a pervasive public health crisis that impacts individuals across the gender spectrum. Traditionally, IPV is conceptualized through a gendered lens, with men as the perpetrators and women as the victims. The current study explored the association between perpetrator/victim sex, prosecutor gender role attitudes, and prosecutorial decision-making in a case of alleged IPV. We hypothesized that prosecutors with more traditional gender role attitudes would be more lenient, and this effect to be exacerbated in cases involving a female perpetrator. Criminal prosecutors across the United States ( N = 94) completed the Male Role Norms Inventory—Revised and read case materials describing the alleged IPV between a heterosexual couple (e.g., arrest report, medical records). The victim/perpetrator sex was manipulated to involve either a female- (male victim) or male- (female victim) perpetrated IPV case. Results indicate that gender role attitudes were not associated with prosecutorial decision-making. However, prosecutors perceived the violence as more serious and the perpetrator as more likely to reoffend when the perpetrator was male; further, they attributed more blame to the female victim. An interaction between perpetrator sex and prosecutor gender role attitudes indicates those with more traditional beliefs were more likely to blame the female (rather than male) victim. These data suggest extralegal factors related to the perpetrator (i.e., perpetrator sex), rather than prosecutor individual differences (i.e., gender role attitudes), are associated with prosecutor discretionary decision-making. In tandem with real-world disparities in the prosecution of IPV based on perpetrator sex, the current research stresses the importance of exploring a diversity of factors that account for these observed differences.

Prosecutors exercise substantial discretion within the criminal justice process, potentially allowing for discrepant treatment of criminal cases. The purpose of this research was to examine the association between prosecutorial implicit biases and victim gender and sexual orientation in an intimate partner violence (IPV) case. Participants, 201 prosecutors from across the United States, completed two Implicit Association Tests to measure implicit gender attitudes and implicit attitudes regarding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer individuals. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions (opposite-sex couple/female victim, opposite-sex couple/male victim, same-sex couple/female victim, same-sex couple/male victim) and read a case file of an alleged IPV arrest. Consistent with our hypotheses, prosecutors were 65% more likely to prosecute under the severest criminal penalty when the victim was female or included an opposite-sex couple. However, we found no evidence that implicit biases related to prosecutorial decisions.

Modern approaches to modelling cardiac perfusion now commonly describe the myocardium using the framework of poroelasticity. Cardiac tissue can be described as a saturated porous medium composed of the pore fluid (blood) and the skeleton (myocytes and collagen scaffold). In previous studies fluid–structure interaction in the heart has been treated in a variety of ways, but in most cases, the myocardium is assumed to be a hyperelastic fibre‐reinforced material. Conversely, models that treat the myocardium as a poroelastic material typically neglect interactions between the myocardium and intracardiac blood flow. This work presents a poroelastic immersed finite element framework to model left ventricular dynamics in a three‐phase poroelastic system composed of the pore blood fluid, the skeleton, and the chamber fluid. We benchmark our approach by examining a pair of prototypical poroelastic formations using a simple cubic geometry considered in the prior work by Chapelle et al (2010). This cubic model also enables us to compare the differences between system behaviour when using isotropic and anisotropic material models for the skeleton. With this framework, we also simulate the poroelastic dynamics of a three‐dimensional left ventricle, in which the myocardium is described by the Holzapfel–Ogden law. Results obtained using the poroelastic model are compared to those of a corresponding hyperelastic model studied previously. We find that the poroelastic LV behaves differently from the hyperelastic LV model. For example, accounting for perfusion results in a smaller diastolic chamber volume, agreeing well with the well‐known wall‐stiffening effect under perfusion reported previously. Meanwhile differences in systolic function, such as fibre strain in the basal and middle ventricle, are found to be comparatively minor.