Quantitative Empirical Studies on Women’s Issues in Islamic Cultures: Introduction to Special Issue

The special issue aimed to focus on quantitative research articles covering gender and women’s issues in Islamic cultures which have not received sufficient attention. The present issue of gender and women’s issues in these cultures adds important information about topics such as the roles of honor, religiosity, and sexism as they interact with gender. In the special issue there are six quantitative research articles focusing on various topics relevant to honor, sexism, economic, and health issues. A study from Turkey examines the associations among benevolent sexism, hostile sexism, religiosity, and the endorsement of honor beliefs in Turkey. Another explores the effects of religious affiliation, patriarchy, and gender on the perception of honor-related crimes in Morocco, Cameroon, and Italy. Views about family issues are explored in a paper from North Cyprus that explores the associations among hostile sexism, benevolent sexism, religiosity, and attitudes toward childlessness. In another paper, researchers from Turkey investigate job-relevant gender issues such as work engagement, job insecurity, and turnover intentions. Finally, women’s health in Muslim cultures is the focus of papers on health screening behaviors in Turkey and on factors relevant to menopausal symptoms of women in Pakistan. In the introduction, the main purposes of the special issue articles are introduced. Then, the importance of studying honor, sexism, religiosity, the economic situation of women, and women’s health issues in Islamic cultures are covered. Some suggestions for future studies and implication and applications of the research findings also are discussed. Finally, limitations of the special issue are presented.     

Cross‐cultural Generalizability of the Alternative Five‐factor Model Using the Zuckerman–Kuhlman–Aluja Personality Questionnaire

Several personality models are known for being replicable across cultures, such as the Five‐Factor Model (FFM) or Eysenck's Psychoticism–Extraversion–Neuroticism (PEN) model, and are for this reason considered universal. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the cross‐cultural replicability of the recently revised Alternative FFM (AFFM). A total of 15 048 participants from 23 cultures completed the Zuckerman–Kuhlman–Aluja Personality Questionnaire (ZKA‐PQ) aimed at assessing personality according to this revised AFFM. Internal consistencies, gender differences and correlations with age were similar across cultures for all five factors and facet scales. The AFFM structure was very similar across samples and can be considered as highly replicable with total congruence coefficients ranging from .94 to .99. Measurement invariance across cultures was assessed using multi‐group confirmatory factor analyses, and each higher‐order personality factor did reach configural and metric invariance. Scalar invariance was never reached, which implies that culture‐specific norms should be considered. The underlying structure of the ZKA‐PQ replicates well across cultures, suggesting that this questionnaire can be used in a large diversity of cultures and that the AFFM might be as universal as the FFM or the PEN model. This suggests that more research is needed to identify and define an integrative framework underlying these personality models. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Collateral Reports and Cross-Informant Agreement about Adult Psychopathology in 14 Societies

To advance international mental health assessment, instruments that have been internationally validated are needed. To this end, we analyzed ratings from 14 societies on the Adult Behavior Checklist (ABCL), a collateral-report form parallel to the Adult Self-Report (ASR; Achenbach and Rescorla 2003) for ages 18 to 59. Both the ABCL and the ASR assess problems, personal strengths, and adaptive functioning. For a sample of 8322 see note below collaterals, we found strong consistency across societies regarding which ABCL problem items tended to obtain relatively low, medium, or high ratings. Most societal effect sizes (ESs) for problem scale scores were small to medium (< 13.9 %), but the ES for the ABCL Personal Strengths scale was 25 %. For most of the same participants (N = 8,302), we analyzed cross-informant agreement between self-reports on the ASR and collateral reports on the ABCL. Cross-informant correlations for problem scale scores averaged .47, with considerable societal variation. Problem score means were higher on the ASR than the ABCL in every society, but the size of the difference varied across societies. Mean item ratings on the ABCL and ASR were highly correlated within every society (mean r = .92), but within-dyad item rating agreement varied widely in every society (mean r = .39). In all societies, non-corroboration of self-reported deviance and of collateral-reported deviance was common. Overall findings indicated considerable similarity but also some important differences in collateral-reported problems and adaptive functioning across 14 societies.     

Logically Incorrect Arguments

What do we learn when we find out that an argument is logically incorrect? If logically incorrect means the same as not logically correct, which in turn means not having a valid logical form, it seems that we do not learn anything too useful—an argument which is logically incorrect can still be conclusive. Thus, it seems that it makes sense to fix a stronger interpretation of the term under which a logically incorrect argument is guaranteed to be wrong (and is such for purely logical reasons). In this paper, we show that pinpointing this stronger sense is much trickier than one would expect; but eventually we reach an explication of the notion of (strong) logical incorrectness which we find non-trivial and viable.     

The spatiotopic representation of visual objects across time

Each eye movement introduces changes in the retinal location of objects. How a stable spatiotopic representation emerges from such variable input is an important question for the study of vision. Researchers have classically probed human observers' performance in a task requiring a location judgment about an object presented at different locations across a saccade. Correct performance on this task requires realigning or remapping retinal locations to compensate for the saccade. A recent study showed that performance improved with longer presaccadic viewing time, suggesting that accurate spatiotopic representations take time to build up. The first goal of the study was to replicate that finding. Two experiments, one an exact replication and the second a modified version, failed to replicate improved performance with longer presaccadic viewing time. The second goal of this study was to examine the role of attention in constructing spatiotopic representations, as theoretical and neurophysiological accounts of remapping have proposed that only attended targets are remapped. A third experiment thus manipulated attention with a spatial cueing paradigm and compared transsaccadic location performance of attended versus unattended targets. No difference in spatiotopic performance was found between attended and unattended targets. Although only negative results are reported, they might nevertheless suggest that spatiotopic representations are relatively stable over time.     

Tool use in left brain damage and Alzheimer's disease: What about function and manipulation knowledge?

Tool use disorders are usually associated with difficulties in retrieving function and manipulation knowledge. Here, we investigate tool use (Real Tool Use, RTU), function (Functional Association, FA) and manipulation knowledge (Gesture Recognition, GR) in 17 left‐brain‐damaged (LBD) patients and 14 AD patients (Alzheimer disease). LBD group exhibited predicted deficit on RTU but not on FA and GR while AD patients showed deficits on GR and FA with preserved tool use skills. These findings question the role played by function and manipulation knowledge in actual tool use.     

Don’t Ever Do That! Long-term Duties in <Emphasis Type="Italic">PD</Emphasis><Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">e</Emphasis></Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">L</Emphasis>

This paper studies long-term norms concerning actions. In Meyer’s Propositional Deontic Logic (PD _e L), only immediate duties can be expressed, however, often one has duties of longer durations such as: “Never do that”, or “Do this someday”. In this paper, we will investigate how to amend PD _e L so that such long-term duties can be expressed. This leads to the interesting and suprising consequence that the long-term prohibition and obligation are not interdefinable in our semantics, while there is a duality between these two notions. As a consequence, we have provided a new analysis of the long-term obligation by introducing a new atomic proposition I (indebtedness) to represent the condition that an agent has some unfulfilled obligation. Presented by Jacek Malinowski     

Is the mystery an illusion? Papineau on the problem of consciousness

A number of philosophers have recently argued that (i) consciousness properties are identical with some set of physical or functional properties and that (ii) we can explain away the frequently felt puzzlement about this claim as a delusion or confusion generated by our different ways of apprehending or thinking about consciousness. This paper examines David Papineau’s influential version of this view. According to Papineau, the difference between our “phenomenal” and “material” concepts of consciousness produces an instinctive but erroneous intuition that these concepts can’t co-refer. I claim that this account fails. To begin with, it is arguable that we are mystified about physicalism even when the account predicts that we shouldn’t be. Further, and worse, the account predicts that an “intuition of distinctness” will arise in cases where it clearly does not. In conclusion, I make some remarks on the prospects for, constraints on, and (physicalist) alternatives to, a successful defence of the claim (ii).