Terrorist violence and the contextual,facilitative and causal qualities of group-based behaviors

Recent debates have re-emerged in the field of terrorism studies concerning the role of group-based behaviors in the causation of violence and whether suicide bombers display distinct personality traits. This article contributes to both debates through a review of pertinent social psychology supplemented by illustrative examples of successful, failed, and foiled suicide bombing plots that emerged within the United Kingdom over the past decade. The findings suggest that the contextual, facilitative and causal dynamics of group-based behaviors differ dependent upon how the ‘group’ is defined. The narrower the definition, the more causality we can interpret in group-based behaviors. The more broadly defined, the more contextual and facilitative, group-based behaviors appear to be in relation to suicide terrorism.     

Shaftesbury on life as a work of art

ABSTRACT

This paper explicates Shaftesbury’s idea that we ought to live our lives as though they are works of art. I show that this idea is central to many of Shaftesbury’s most important claims, and that an understanding of this idea enables us to answer some of the most contested questions in the scholarship on Characteristics.     

Altruism in social networks: Evidence for a ‘kinship premium’

Why and under what conditions are individuals altruistic to family and friends in their social networks? Evolutionary psychology suggests that such behaviour is primarily the product of adaptations for kin‐ and reciprocal altruism, dependent on the degree of genetic relatedness and exchange of benefits, respectively. For this reason, individuals are expected to be more altruistic to family members than to friends: whereas family members can be the recipients of kin and reciprocal altruism, friends can be the recipients of reciprocal altruism only. However, there is a question about how the effect of kinship is implemented at the proximate psychological level. One possibility is that kinship contributes to some general measure of relationship quality (such as ‘emotional closeness’), which in turn explains altruism. Another possibility is that the effect of kinship is independent of relationship quality. The present study tests between these two possibilities. Participants (N= 111) completed a self‐report questionnaire about their willingness to be altruistic, and their emotional closeness, to 12 family members and friends at different positions in their extended social networks. As expected, altruism was greater for family than friends, and greater for more central layers of the network. Crucially, the results showed that kinship made a significant unique contribution to altruism, even when controlling for the effects of emotional closeness. Thus, participants were more altruistic towards kin than would be expected if altruism was dependent on emotional closeness alone – a phenomenon we label a ‘kinship premium’. These results have implications for the ongoing debate about the extent to which kin relations and friendships are distinct kinds of social relationships, and how to measure the ‘strength of ties’ in social networks.     

Three DIBELS Tasks vs. Three Informal Reading/Spelling Tasks: A Comparison of Predictive Validity

Within a developmental framework, this study compared the predictive validity of three DIBELS tasks (phoneme segmentation fluency [PSF], nonsense word fluency [NWF], and oral reading fluency [ORF]) with that of three alternative tasks drawn from the field of reading (phonemic spelling [phSPEL], word recognition-timed [WR-t], and graded passage reading [grPASS), an oral reading fluency measure). Two cohorts of students (n = 319) were assessed with the aforementioned tasks multiple times across a four-year period—middle of kindergarten through end of third grade. The results were clear and closely replicated in the two cohorts: (a) phSPEL (moderate) outperformed DIBELS PSF (weak to moderate) in predicting future orthographic-unit processing; (b) WR-t (very strong) outperformed DIBELS NWF (moderate) in predicting future oral reading fluency; and (c) DIBELS ORF and grPASS were equally good predictors (moderately strong) of future reading comprehension.     

Living with Ill-Health in Older Age: The Role of a Resilient Personality

This paper tests the hypothesis that a resilient personality moderates the impact of ill-health on subjective well-being. A cross-sectional survey drew a random sample of 1,847 people from England, Wales and Scotland aged between 50 and 90. Participants were interviewed face-to-face in their own homes. This paper examines demographic data, life satisfaction, psychological resources and ill-health. The direct and moderating effects were analysed using the method of multiple regression. Significant main effects of resilience and ill-health on life satisfaction were found in all of the age-groups. In three of these (60–69, 70–79 and 80–90) the addition of the interaction term was associated with a significant increase in the size of the effect, indicating a resilient self moderated the negative effect of ill-health on subjective well-being. Resilient resources can be a valuable mechanism for maintaining well-being and understanding differential resistance to, and recovery from ill-health in later life.     

Multi‐agency collaboration,multiple levels of meaning: social constructionism and the CMM model as tools to further our understanding

This study explores the discourse emerging when professionals from a child and adolescent mental health service meet with professionals from other agencies to discuss cases. The study is timely, given the current political contextual forces pushing agencies to work together which run alongside an expanding literature acknowledging the obstacles to achieving this. A thematic analysis identified nine themes, defined according to their discourse type, including single agency discourse, case complexity discourse and multi‐agency discourse. In this paper, the usefulness of the coordinated management of meaning model (CMM) is examined as an additional tool which may be used in data analysis to help understand the discourse within multi‐agency meetings. The two approaches to data analysis are complementary to each other, with both allowing for different layers of context and complexity to emerge from the data.     

Morality is Not Like Mathematics: The Weakness of the Math‐Moral Analogy

In both the early modern period and in contemporary debates, philosophers have argued that there are analogies between mathematics and morality that imply that the ontology and epistemology of morality are crucially similar to the ontology and epistemology of mathematics. I describe arguments for the math‐moral analogy in four early modern philosophers (Locke, Cudworth, Clarke, and Balguy) and in three contemporary philosophers (Clarke‐Doane, Peacocke, and Roberts). I argue that these arguments fail to establish important ontological and epistemological similarities between morality and mathematics. There are analogies between the two areas, but the disanalogies are more significant, undermining the attempt to confer on morality the same ontological and epistemological status that mathematics possesses.     

Psychological Type and Attitude towards Celtic Christianity among Committed Churchgoers in the United Kingdom: An Empirical Study

This article takes the burgeoning interest in Celtic Christianity as a key example of the way in which churches may be responding to the changing spiritual and religious landscape in the United Kingdom today and examines the power of psychological type theory to account for variation in the attitude of committed churchgoers to this innovation. Data provided by a sample of 248 Anglican clergy and lay church officers (who completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales together with the Attitude toward Celtic Christianity Scale) demonstrated that intuitive types, feeling types, and perceiving types reported a more positive attitude towards Celtic Christianity than sensing types, thinking types, and judging types. These findings are interpreted to analyse the appeal of Celtic Christianity and to suggest why some committed churchgoers may find this innovation less attractive.