Emerging ICT for Citizens’ Veillance: Theoretical and Practical Insights

In ubiquitous surveillance societies, individuals are subjected to observation and control by authorities, institutions, and corporations. Sometimes, citizens contribute their own knowledge and other resources to their own surveillance. In addition, some of “the watched” observe “the watchers” “through” sous‐veillant activities, and various forms of self-surveillance for different purposes. However, information and communication technologies are also increasingly used for social initiatives with a bottom up structure where citizens themselves define the goals, shape the outcomes and profit from the benefits of watching activities. This model, which we define as citizens’ veillance and explore in this special issue, may present opportunities for individuals and collectives to be more prepared to meet the challenges they face in various domains including environment, health, planning and emergency response.     

Can Nanotechnology Be Just? On Nanotechnology and the Emerging Movement for Global Justice

Because of the overly market-oriented way in which technological development is carried out, there is a great amount of hubris in regard to how scientific and technological achievements are used in society. There is a tendency to exaggerate the potential commercial benefits and willfully neglect the social, cultural, and environmental consequences of most, if not all innovations, especially in new fields such as nanotechnology. At the same time, there are very few opportunities, or sites, for ensuring that nanotechnology is used justly and fairly, or for that matter, contribute to alleviating any of the wide variety of injustices that exist in the world. Most of the public authorities responsible for the development and application of science and technology are uninterested and unwilling to “assess” the implications of nanotechnology, and there are few, if any spaces in the broader culture for assessment to take place. Within the various “social movements” that are, in one way or another, concerned with issues of global justice, there is as yet little interest in nanotechnology. By examining the relations between nanotechnology and the emerging movement for global justice this article attempts to understand the enormous gap between the potential for science and technology to do good and the actual ways in science and technology get developed, and what, if anything, might be done to help close the gap in relation to nanotechnology, so that it might better be able to contribute to global justice.     

Do Social Bonds Matter for Emerging Adults?

The extent to which social bonds and turning points influence criminal activity has been the focus of much empirical research. However, there have been few empirical studies exploring social bonds and turning points and offending for those who have experienced emerging adulthood, a recently identified stage of the life course. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health we examined if indicators of social bonds and turning points were predictors of criminal offending. Several of the turning points and social bonds included in these analyses were found to influence decreases in criminal offending for a cohort of emerging adults. We extend previous research by examining the influence of social bonds and turning points on patterns of criminal offending during emerging adulthood.     

Deafness and immediate memory for pictures: dissociations between "inner speech" and the "inner ear"?

Born-deaf, orally trained youngsters were examined on two tasks of immediate memory for pictures of objects. The aim was to investigate the extent of speech coding for pictures in immediate memory in a developmental context. The deaf, unlike young hearing children, did not use picture-name rhyme spontaneously as a cue to recall in a paired association task. Nevertheless, they were just as sensitive as reading age-matched hearing controls to spoken word length in recalling pictures by name. This might mean that the deaf use articulatory rehearsal in some immediate memory tasks, but this leads to a paradoxical conclusion. What could "inner speech" in the deaf be for, if it fails to affect their "inner ear" by inducing rhyme sensitivity in the paired associate task? This paradox is discussed in relation to distinctions between covert and overt use of memory cues in the paired recall task and to possible sources of the word length effect in young hearing (8-9 years old) and deaf subjects.     

Hooking Up and Emerging Adults’ Relationship Attitudes and Expectations

The dating landscape has changed markedly in recent years, with many emerging adults taking a less committed approach to relationships and sex (e.g., “hooking up”). Delayed marital transitions and declining rates of marriage have led to concerns that the rise of the “hookup culture” is associated with a devaluing of marriage. Previous research on associations between sexual attitudes or overall sexual experience and marital attitudes has produced inconsistent findings and is not representative of modern union formation and sexual norms. Using a sample of 248 emerging adults, we examined associations between engagement in casual sexual behavior (i.e., hooking up) and expectations for future committed relationships and marriage as well as attitudes toward current relationship involvement. Contrary to concerns about the devaluation of marriage, results indicated that level of engagement in hooking up was not associated with expectations for involvement in future committed relationships, including marriage. However, hooking up was associated with less favorable attitudes toward current relationship involvement. These findings suggest that engagement in hooking up is a time-specific behavior that aligns with the self-focused nature of emerging adulthood, rather than indicating a lack of interest in future committed relationships or marriage.     

Introduction: An Emerging Consensus?

This paper is an introduction to a special issue on Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Liberal Democracy. It attempts to describe the state of the debate on issues of multiculturalism and nationalism within liberal-democratic theory. I suggest that there may be an emerging consensus on liberal culturalism – the view that certain group-specific rights or policies aimed at recognizing or accommodating ethnic and national groups are legitimate so long as they operate within certain constraints of liberal justice. I explore the possible reasons for this emerging consensus (including the lack of clear alternatives), and conclude with some suggestions about the likely avenues for future research in this area.     

Risk Regulation, EU Law and Emerging Technologies: Smother or Smooth?

Risk analysis as a regulatory driver has now become firmly entrenched in public health and environmental protection. Risk analysis at any level essentially has to accommodate two gut feelings of the constituency: whether society should be risk-prone or risk averse, and whether government and its institutions can be trusted to make the necessary decisions with a high or a low degree of discretion. The precautionary principle (or rejection thereof) arguably is the ultimate reflection of the promotion of risk to a societal value. There is no doubt that especially amongst the representatives of the Member States (as opposed to the officials at the European Commission), public (pre)caution with respect to the long-term environmental and public health implications of gene technology influenced the reluctance to allow marketing of GM foods and feeds until a strict regulatory regime had been rolled out. Industry would argue that the delay in regulation, as well as the eventual regime was of such a nature as to stifle the technology. This contribution reviews a number of features of standard EU risk analysis decisions, so as to assess its current propensity towards smothering rather than smoothing the introduction of new technology. The current development of a regulatory framework for nanotechnology serves as a case study.

Political Affiliation,Spirituality, and Religiosity: Links to Emerging Adults’ Life Satisfaction and Optimism

The goal of this study was to extend the existing literature regarding the intersection between belief systems shaping psychological processes and subjective well-being among emerging adults. A nationwide sample of 3966 college students reported on their political affiliation, spirituality, and religiosity in relation to their subjective well-being. Multivariate analyses demonstrated that politically conservative participants were significantly more optimistic and satisfied with life than their liberal counterparts and Republican emerging adults reported significantly higher life satisfaction than Democrats. Republican emerging adults also reported significantly higher rates of religiosity and spirituality than Democratic and Independent politically affiliated emerging adults. Our findings corroborate and expand upon existing literature regarding belief systems and political identity as determinants of subjective well-being in emerging adults.     

Development of the Short Version of the Individuation Test for Emerging Adults (ITEA–S) and Its Measurement Invariance Across Slovene and U.S. Emerging Adults

In this study we developed a short version of the Individuation Test for Emerging Adults (ITEA–S) and tested its measurement invariance across Slovene and U.S. samples of emerging adults. The item reduction process resulted in retaining 21 out of 36 items. The content analysis of the retained and discarded items revealed that the ITEA–S adequately measures the 5 individuation domains (support seeking, connectedness, intrusiveness, self-reliance, and fear of disappointing the parent). In our samples, the ITEA–S demonstrated evidence for construct validity and its 5 scales showed adequate internal consistency. The scale scores were also meaningfully associated with the relevant demographic variables in both countries, as well as the three scales of the Psychological Separation Inventory (Hoffman, 1984 Hoffman, J. A. (1984). Psychological separation of late adolescents from their parents. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 31, 170–178.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; the Slovene sample), and the scales of the Differentiation of Self–Revised questionnaire (Skowron &; Schmitt, 2003 Skowron, E. A., &; Schmitt, T. A. (2003). Assessing interpersonal fusion: Reliability and validity of a new DSI Fusion with Others subscale. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 29, 209–222.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; the U.S. sample). The results of multiple group confirmatory factor analyses supported the hypothesis of full metric and partial scalar invariance for both ITEA–S forms (in relation to mother and father) across the 2 country groups.     

"Ratio" and "difference" judgments for length, area, and volume: are there two classes of sensory continua?

Subjects were required to judge ratios and differences of (a) line length for pairs of lines, (b) area for pairs of squares, and (c) volume for pairs of cubes. Nonmetric analyses of these judgments indicated that all subjects were able to make consistent ratio judgments for all three continua. Many of the subjects, when asked to judge subjective differences, however, performed as if they were judging subjective ratios rather than differences. The data for the few subjects who appeared to be judging subjective differences were not consistent across subjects and conditions. Previous studies of ratio and difference judgments of loudness and heaviness, on the other hand, showed the opposite pattern, in that subjects most often behaved as if they were judging sensory differences when asked to judge sensory ratios. We propose that ratio judgments are more natural to perceptual continua along which stimuli are easily "decomposed" into a number of smaller perceptual units.     

Preferred Parenting Styles: Do Jewish and Arab–Israeli Emerging Adults Differ?

The study addressed cultural effects on Israeli emerging adults’ preferred parenting styles. Pre-parenthood preferred parenting styles in a traditional society (Arab) were compared with those in a more modern Western-oriented society (Jews). The study revealed that both groups preferred the authoritative parenting style to the authoritarian and permissive styles. Unexpectedly, it was also revealed that Arab participants indicated higher preference on the permissive style compared to Jews. Regression analysis indicated that gender is statistically significant in explaining parenting styles, with women preferring authoritative parenting and men authoritarian. Implications of the study are discussed.     

Emerging adults’ sleep patterns and attentional capture: the pivotal role of consistency

College students face consistent cognitive demands and often get insufficient and/or irregular sleep. The current study investigated associations of sleep duration and sleep variability with attentional performance. Sleep duration variability was expected to moderate the association between duration and cognitive functioning. College students’ (n = 83) natural sleep patterns were recorded via wristband actigraphy across three consecutive nights during an academic term. The association between sleep duration and attentional capture was strongest for those whose sleep was the most consistent across the three nights preceding the attentional task (i.e., low sleep duration variability). For those with low sleep duration variability, less sleep was associated (B = ?0.25) with reduced ability to ignore irrelevant cues and redirect attention to target locations. In other words, consistently low sleep duration was associated with compromises in attention. Our results indicate the importance of consistent sleep routines as well as sufficient sleep duration in order to optimize attentional performance in college students.     

Emerging Adults’ Behavior Problems and Coping Following Hurricanes

When experiencing natural disasters, coping is important. Individuals who have behavior problems may use less effective coping, however. This study sought to better understand the relationship between emerging adults’ behavior problems and coping following hurricanes. Using a sample of 193 emerging adults, correlations suggested that emerging adults who reported more behavior problems also endorsed higher levels of avoidant coping. More specifically, multivariate analyses of variance and subsequent post hoc analyses indicated that emerging adults who were experiencing relatively low levels of both internalizing and externalizing behavior problems endorsed avoidant coping significantly less often relative to those emerging adults who were experiencing relatively high levels of internalizing behavior problems only and those who were experiencing relatively high levels of both types of behavior problems. These results suggested that those who experience behavior problems following hurricanes may benefit from interventions that could improve the coping that they utilize.     

Connection Between Parent–Child Religiosity: Moderated Mediation by Perceived Maternal and Paternal Warmth and Overprotection and Emerging Adult Gender

Previous research has shown a strong connection between parental religiosity and parenting behaviors in the transmission of religion from parent to child. Our study expanded upon previous research by examining how perceived maternal and paternal warmth and overprotection mediated the relation between parental and personal religiosity in males and females. A sample of 486 emerging adults reported maternal, paternal, and personal religiosity as well as their parents’ parenting behaviors. Results indicated that perceived paternal warmth served as a mediator for males only but neither perceived maternal nor paternal overprotection mediated the relationship between parental religiosity and emerging adult religiosity. Gender moderated the paths from perceived paternal religiosity to paternal overprotection, such that the relationship was stronger for females, and perceived paternal warmth to emerging adult religiosity, such that the relationship was stronger for males. Overall, results demonstrated that mediation effects occurred for males only, suggesting moderated mediation.

     

The Emerging Role of Technology in Cognitive–Behavioral Therapy for Anxious Youth: A Review

Research documents the application of cognitive–behavioral therapy (CBT) with technology either as therapeutic adjuncts or stand-alone interventions. The literature evaluating the feasibility and efficacy of using technology with CBT for youth experiencing internalizing disorders is small though steadily emerging. Technological approaches offer cost-effective and efficient service to an increased number of anxious youth for whom a CBT treatment would be otherwise unavailable. The present article aims to review the use of two broad types of technology in CBT for anxious children and adolescents: computer- and internet-based CBT and mobile mental health applications (i.e., mobile phone, smartphone, and tablet technology). Within each section, we provide an overview of the advantages and general principles of each type of technology, and review evidence for the use of each type of technology along with examples of current applications. Finally, we discuss ethical issues, barriers, and future directions for the use of technology in facilitating dissemination of effective treatments.     

The Maternal–Foetal Interface and Gestational Chimerism: The Emerging Importance of Chimeric Bodies

The science of gestational cell transfer—research into the transfer of cells between a pregnant woman and foetus during gestation—and subsequent mingling of transferred cells, or microchimerism, is bringing new attention to the maternal/foetal interface. These findings challenge previous biological understandings of a barrier between the body of a pregnant woman and developing foetus, a barrier maintaining the identity integrity as it were, of two beings, two separate subjects. In this sense, the maternal–foetal interface is an interesting bio-political object, predicated upon understandings of individuals as discrete and bounded organisms, an understanding that has been strongly implicated in immunology, as Donna Haraway, Emily Martin and others have argued. Findings of cellular transfer across this interface raise questions about intermingling and permeability of human organism boundaries. However, these findings are important not only for insight into gestational biology, but because they are emerging in a broader biomedical context of the development of cellular therapies and regenerative medicine. These therapeutic strategies call attention to chimerism as a naturally occurring and iatrogenic biological state, highlighting the permeability and permissiveness of bodies to the intermingling of cells, an idea that runs counter to biological, political and social understandings of selves as individuated, discrete and purely self. A theoretical framework of immuno-politics raises implications of trouble at the maternal/foetal interface, and suggests that chimeric, permeable bodies are of increasing value as cellular therapeutic strategies gain in importance for human health.