Social connectedness,life satisfaction and school engagement: moderating role of ethnic minority status on resilience processes of Roma youth

Abstract

We examined the influence of connectedness on school engagement and life satisfaction among Roma (n = 121) and Bulgarian (n = 143) mainstream adolescents (mean age 15.89, SD = 1.18). A set of measures on family, peer, school and neighbourhood connectedness were administered alongside life satisfaction and school engagement scales. Multigroup path analysis indicated that while the relationship between connectedness, life satisfaction and school engagement was largely the same across groups, the strength of such relationship differed among groups. A closer inspection of the model indicated that when it comes to school engagement, there was a salient difference in the role of different forms of connectedness between Roma and mainstream adolescents. For Roma adolescents, familial connectedness was especially salient for school engagement. The practical and theoretical implications of our findings for strengths and adaptive processes among Roma adolescents in Bulgaria are discussed.     

Language Impairment and Sexual Assault of Girls and Women: Findings from a Community Sample

Both children and adults with disabilities face increased prevalence of abuse and assault, including sexual assault. Women and girls are disproportionately the victims of sexual assault in both disabled and nondisabled populations. Communication difficulties have been identified as a factor that may increase the vulnerability of individuals with disabilities to sexual assault. However, few studies have examined whether language impairment increases risk for sexual assault. This study reports on a community sample of children with speech or language impairment, followed to age 25. Sexual assault history was assessed based on two questions from the Composite International Diagnostic Interview Posttraumatic Stress Disorder module. Women with language impairment (n = 33) were more likely than women with unimpaired language (n = 59) to report sexual abuse/assault, controlled for socioeconomic status. Sexual assault was associated with higher rates of psychiatric disorders and poorer functioning. Women with neither language impairment nor a history of sexual assault had fewer psychiatric disorders and higher functioning than women with language impairment and/or a history of sexual assault.     

Assessment Criteria Indicative of Deception (ACID): an integrated system of investigative interviewing and detecting deception

This study describes the assimilation and validation of Assessment Criteria Indicative of Deception (ACID). ACID is derived from investigative interviewing, Criteria‐Based Content Analysis, Reality Monitoring, and interpersonal deception. Each component has been previously published. Thirty‐eight university undergraduates entered a professor's office and either stole an exam or replaced an exam that had been stolen previously. They were interviewed 1 week later with the Reality Interview, which is deliberately challenging and aims to enhance the detection of deception. Half responded honestly and completely; half distorted their responses to avoid incrimination. Incentives were provided. Honest responses were longer, more detailed, and contained more admissions of potential mistakes. Most importantly, honest respondents benefited from attempts to enhance recall, whereas these same attempts caused deceptive respondents to provide shorter, more repetitive statements. This is a promising technique; 33 of 38 cases were classified accurately. Discussion includes characteristics of deception, process of deception during an investigative interview, hypothetical interview strategies to facilitate the detection of deception, strengths and weaknesses of the study, and areas for future research. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Cross-Sectional Survey of Pakistani Muslims Coping with Health Anxiety through Religiosity during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Journal of Religion and Health - Investigating the role of religiosity in coping with health anxiety during the outbreak of COVID-19 assumes significance given the continued onslaught of the...     

MEDICAL MANAGEMENT OF INFANT INTERSEX: THE JURIDICO‐ETHICAL DILEMMA OF CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC LEGAL RESPONSE

Technological advances in the field of medicine and health sciences not only manipulate the normal human body and sex but also provide for surgical and hormonal management of hermaphroditism (intersexuality). Consequently, sex assignment surgery has not only become a standard care for babies born with genital abnormalities in the West but even in some Muslim states. On the positive side, it goes a long way in saving children born with abnormal genitalia from numerous legal interdictions of the pre‐sex corrective surgery. Nevertheless, the larger ethical and legal questions that medical management of genital abnormality raises to some extent have not been adequately appreciated by contemporary Muslim responses. This article, therefore, in principle argues against surgical management of intersexuality during early infancy from the Islamic legal perspective.     

My Journey from Research to Impact: Long Road and Much Traffic

In this article, Amina Memon discusses some of the highlights of her career in applied cognitive and social psychology including those who inspired her. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Effect of Non-sentential Context Prosody on Homographs’ Lexical Activation in Persian

This study examines the effect of non-sentential context prosody pattern on lexical activation in Persian. For this purpose a questionnaire including target and non-target words is used. The target words are homographs with two possible stress patterns belonging to different syntactic categories. Participants are asked to read out the words aloud and note the first word that comes to their mind. The results show that by reading the target words, both meanings of the target words are activated in mind and the prosodic pattern of the non-sentential preceding context does not affect the activation of the other stress pattern meaning. This result suggests that the metrical prosodic pattern of non-sentential context is not a strong constraint to determine which meaning of the target word must be activated. The experiment also illustrates that the stress pattern used to read the target words does not necessarily matches the stress pattern of the target word which relates to the written word. These findings confirm Swinney (Verb Learn Verb Behav 18:645–665, 1979) and Elston-Güttler and Friederici’s (J Mem Lang 52(2):256–283, 2005) finding that both meanings of an ambiguous word are accessed at the first stage. This study shows that in lack of semantic context, Persian natives behave homographs as ambiguous words and there is no bias towards preferring one meaning over another.     

Changing the criterion for memory conformity in free recall and recognition

People's responses during memory studies are affected by what other people say. This memory conformity effect has been shown in both free recall and recognition. Here we examine whether accurate, inaccurate, and suggested answers are affected similarly when the response criterion is varied. In the first study, participants saw four pictures of detailed scenes and then discussed the content of these scenes with another participant who saw the same scenes, but with a couple of details changed. Participants were either told to recall everything they could and not to worry about making mistakes (lenient), or only to recall items if they were sure that they were accurate (strict). The strict instructions reduced the amount of inaccurate information reported that the other person suggested, but also reduced the number of accurate details recalled. In the second study, participants were shown a large set of faces and then their memory recognition was tested with a confederate on these and fillers. Here also, the criterion manipulation shifted both accurate and inaccurate responses, and those suggested by the confederate. The results are largely consistent with a shift in response criterion affecting accurate, inaccurate, and suggested information. In addition we varied the level of secrecy in the participants’ responses. The effects of secrecy were complex and depended on the level of response criterion. Implications for interviewing eyewitnesses and line-ups are discussed.     

The influence of face age on identification from a video line-up: A comparison between older and younger adults

A group of young-adult (aged 18–35 years) and older-adult witnesses (aged 61–83 years) viewed films of two similar staged thefts, one that depicted a young culprit and the other an older culprit. After a short delay of 40–60 minutes participants were presented with two separate video line-ups, one for each target. In one line-up the target was present (TP) and the other the target was absent (TA). Older adults performed more poorly in target present and absent line-ups, and showed no own-age bias, however young adults showed an own age advantage for the TA line-ups.