DSM-defined anxiety disorders symptoms in South African youths: Their assessment and relationship with perceived parental rearing behaviors

This study investigated DSM-defined anxiety symptoms in South African youths. Children and adolescents (N = 701) from various cultural groups completed the SCARED and a questionnaire measuring perceived parental rearing behaviors. Results indicated that the psychometric properties of the SCARED were satisfactory in the total sample of South African youths, and acceptable in colored and black children and adolescents. Further, colored and black youths displayed higher SCARED scores than white youths, and there were also differences in the perceived parental rearing behaviors of the cultural groups. White youths generally rated their parents' rearing behaviors as less anxious, overprotective, and rejective, but more emotionally warm than colored and black youths. Finally, positive correlations were found between anxious rearing, overprotection, and rejection and anxiety symptoms. The clinical and research implications of these findings are briefly discussed.     

Age differences in the sixth personality factor: age differences in interpersonal relatedness among Canadians and Hong Kong Chinese

Cross-cultural studies on personality in which a combined etic-emic approach has been used have found a 6th personality factor--Interpersonal Relatedness--in addition to the usual Big Five. The authors examined age differences in Interpersonal Relatedness among Canadians and Hong Kong Chinese after statistically controlling for the Big Five. Age differences in some aspects of Interpersonal Relatedness were found among Hong Kong Chinese but not among Canadians, suggesting that development of some personality characteristics may differ across cultures.     

Why professional athletes need a prolonged period of warm-up and other peculiarities of human motor learning

Professional athletes involved in sports that require the execution of fine motor skills must practice for a considerable length of time before competing in an event. Why is such practice necessary? Is it merely to warm-up the muscles, tendons, and ligaments, or does the athlete's sensorimotor network need to be constantly recalibrated? In this article, the authors present a point of view in which the human sensorimotor system is characterized by: (a) a high noise level and (b) a high learning rate at the synaptic level (which, because of the noise, does not equate to a high learning rate at the behavioral level). They argue that many heuristics of human skill learning, including the need for a prolonged period of warm-up in experts, follow from these assumptions.     

Effet d’entraînements bimodaux à la connaissance des lettres. Étude transversale chez des enfants de trois et cinq ans

The aim was to test the effect of two-mode trainings on letter knowledge, pseudowords spelling and reading with 3-year- and 5-year-old children. A classical pretest/training/post-design was used. Trainings differed on the letter sensory exploration (auditory/visual [V], auditory/ haptic [H] and auditory/graphomotor [G]). Results indicated that performance on letter-sound knowledge and spelling was globally better with H training with 3-year-old. Five-year-old children improved in all tasks after all trainings. In reading, G group obtained better performance. These results suggest that tactilo-kinesthesic informations in H and G forms contribute to the elaboration of visual and phonological representations of the letter.     

Reading the writing on the wall: a textual analysis of Łódź graffiti

Abstract

This article traces the history of the involvement of the American Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) with Russian-language publishing from its beginnings to the end of the twentieth century. During the period between the two world wars this was the primary source of Russian Orthodox theological and philosophical literature. In addition, it served as a catalyst for ferment within Orthodoxy by providing a forum for heated debate, especially in the pages of Put’, a unique interdisciplinary journal of Christian thought. The unique role of the YMCA Press in the Russian emigration has been noted in a variety of studies. However, such evaluations usually do not pay attention to the original Protestant leadership of this remarkable Orthodox publishing house, the political impact of its avowedly non-political efforts, and the recent activities of the YMCA Press in Russia and Ukraine after the end of communism. The Press played a major role in preserving an important aspect of prerevolutionary Russian culture in Western Europe during the Soviet period until the repatriation of this culture following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this way, the Press contributed to the expansion and enrichment of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

This publishing house for all these years has been giving to Russians living in Russia the real bread of life. … I really have to testify that the hunger for books is really a much greater hunger than the hunger for food. … The greatest help that we can receive is precisely the kind of help that was given to us by Paul Anderson. (Anderson, n.d.a, preface)     

Book reviews

Nietzsche and Buddhism: a study in nihilism and ironic affinities. Robert G. Morrison, 1997, Oxford, Oxford University Press x + 250 pp., hb ISBN 0 19 823556 9, £32.50

Chong Yagyong: Korea's challenge to orthodox neo‐Confucianism. Mark Sftton, 1997, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, >xv + 232 pp., pb ISBN 0 7914 3174 6, US$15.95

Fatalism in Ancient India. Sukumari Bhattacharji, 1995, Calcutta, Sarmistha Roy for Baulmon Prakashan xxviii + 356 pp., hb Rs250, ISBN 81 86552 02 2

The Vimalakirti Sutra (from the Chinese version by Kumarajiva). Burton Watson (Trans.), 1997, New York, Columbia University Press xii+ 168 pp., hb £18.00 ISBN 0 231 10656 4

Zhouyi, the Book of Changes‐a new translation with commentary. Richard Rutt, 1996, Richmond, Curzon Press xii + 498 pp., hb (Price not given), ISBN 0 70007 0467 1     

A Conceptual Structure of Justice - Providing a Tool to Analyse Conceptions of Justice

Justice is a contested concept. There are many different and competing conceptions, i.e. interpretations of the concept. Different domains of justice deal with different fields of application of justice claims, such as structural justice, distributive justice, participatory justice or recognition. We present a formal conceptual structure of justice applicable to all these domains. We show that conceptions of justice can be described by specifying the following conceptual elements: the judicandum (that which is to be judged as just or unjust), the community of justice including claim holders and claim addressees, their claims (and obligations), the informational base for the assessment, the principles of justice, and on a more practical level, the instruments of justice. By specifying these conceptual elements of justice, it is possible to analyse and compare different conceptions of justice, to assess their internal consistency, to explore new definitions of justice in an analytical way, and to explicate an idea of justice in a manner that provides concrete links to the relevant context.     

Cyber- and face-to-face bullying: who crosses over?

A total of 3956 children aged 12–13 years who completed the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC Wave 5) were studied about their experiences of traditional face-to-face bullying and cyberbullying in the last month. In terms of prevalence, sixty percent of the sample had been involved in traditional bullying as the victim and/or the offender whereas eight percent had been involved in cyberbullying as victim and/or offender. The vast majority (95 %) of those involved in cyberbullying were also involved in traditional bullying. Children involved in both traditional bullying and cyberbullying were compared with those involved in only traditional bullying. Boys were more likely to be involved in both types of bullying than girls. Children with friends involved in delinquent activities and who did not have trustworthy and supportive friends were more likely to bully both traditionally and in cyberspace. Computer proficiency and use did not differentiate children who had crossed over from those who had not, although computer use for socializing purposes had some predictive value in identifying those children who crossed over. The study reflects the value of school interventions for children as they approach adolescence, covering both traditional bullying and cyberbullying, and targeting social relationships in order to teach children how to manage them safely and intelligently.     

The Swedish National Adult Reading Test (NART-SWE): a test of premorbid IQ

The purpose of this study was to construct a Swedish version of the National Adult Reading Test (NART-SWE), a test for assessment of premorbid IQ, and to investigate its validity and reliability on healthy controls and patients with mild Alzheimer's disease. As Swedish pronunciation rules are fixed, NART-SWE was constructed using loan words. NART-SWE has satisfactory psychometric properties: Inter-rater and retest reliability as well as internal consistency are very high. The NART-SWE demonstrates face validity. In addition, high correlation with IQ was obtained. A significant model emerged when using NART-SWE to predict IQ. Furthermore, no significant differences were observed when comparing performance for healthy controls' with that of patients with Alzheimer's disease on NART-SWE. It does appear that reading of irregular words is intact in mild Alzheimer's disease.     

Severity Indices of Personality Problems (SIPP-118): development, factor structure, reliability, and validity

This article describes a series of studies involving 2,730 participants on the development and validity testing of the Severity Indices of Personality Problems (SIPP), a self-report questionnaire covering important core components of (mal)adaptive personality functioning. Results show that the 16 facets constituted homogeneous item clusters (i.e., unidimensional and internally consistent parcels) that fit well into 5 clinically interpretable, higher order domains: self-control, identity integration, relational capacities, social concordance, and responsibility. These domains appeared to have good concurrent validity across various populations, good convergent validity in terms of associations with interview ratings of the severity of personality pathology, and good discriminant validity in terms of associations with trait-based personality disorder dimensions. Furthermore, results suggest that the domain scores are stable over a time interval of 14-21 days in a student sample but are sensitive to change over a 2-year follow-up interval in a treated patient population. Taken together, the final instrument, the SIPP-118, provides a set of 5 reliable, valid, and efficient indices of the core components of (mal)adaptive personality functioning.