Gliding Body – Sitting Body. From Bodily Movement to Cultural Identity*

Bodily movement has a deeper meaning than modern sport science might recognize. It can have religious undertones, and in modern societies, it is sometimes related to the building of national identity. In the study, two cases of bodily practice are compared. Norwegian ski has a relation to friluftsliv (outdoor activities) and is highly significant for modern Norwegian identity. Indian yoga is related to the traditional ayurveda medicine and to Hindu spirituality, and obtained an important place in the process of anti-colonial nationalism. The aim is to demonstrate how Norwegian skiing and Indian yoga as national body and movement cultures in different ways, show a complex connection between ‘ancient roots’ and modern transformations of cultural identity. Gliding on skis, sitting, and breathing in yoga make up the basis on which people have built identities of their collective ‘we’.     

Childhood sexual abuse trauma-causing dynamics experienced by women survivors: A scoping literature review

This scoping literature review reports on the major themes to emerge from 23 retrospective studies on the trauma-causing dynamics experienced by women survivors of a historical childhood sexual abuse (CSA) trauma. We identified the studies from searching the following data bases for the period 1983–2016: EbscoHost (Academic Search Premiere, Africa-Wide Information, E-Journals, ERIC, PsycARTICLES, PsycINFO, SocINDEX), SAePublications, Science Direct, CrossRef (APA PsycNET), Google scholar (ResearchGate), PubMed Central, and Cochrane Reviews. For the selection criteria, we included empirical studies on self-reported trauma-causing dynamics experienced by women survivors, without restriction on method of study. Results from the thematic analysis of findings suggest the women survivors appear to be living with historical traumatic sexualisation, betrayal of trust, social stigmatisation, powerlessness, developmental arrest, and revictimisation. Historical traumas should be considered in counselling support interventions with women self-reporting CSA.     

Timed written picture naming in 14 European languages

We describe the Multilanguage Written Picture Naming Dataset. This gives trial-level data and time and agreement norms for written naming of the 260 pictures of everyday objects that compose the colorized Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois in Perception, 33, 217–236, 2004). Adult participants gave keyboarded responses in their first language under controlled experimental conditions (N = 1,274, with subsamples responding in Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). We measured the time to initiate a response (RT) and interkeypress intervals, and calculated measures of name and spelling agreement. There was a tendency across all languages for quicker RTs to pictures with higher familiarity, image agreement, and name frequency, and with higher name agreement. Effects of spelling agreement and effects on output rates after writing onset were present in some, but not all, languages. Written naming therefore shows name retrieval effects that are similar to those found in speech, but our findings suggest the need for cross-language comparisons as we seek to understand the orthographic retrieval and/or assembly processes that are specific to written output.     

Developing a Revised Cross-Cultural Academic Integrity Questionnaire (CCAIQ-2)

Understanding and measuring levels of academic integrity within higher education institutions across the world is an important area of study in the era of educational internationalization. Developing a cross-cultural measure will undoubtedly assist in creating standardization processes and add to the discourse on cross-cultural understanding on what constitutes honest and dishonest action in the higher education context. This study has used a combination of exploratory and confirmatory factor analytical procedures to validate a previously published questionnaire, namely the cross-cultural academic integrity questionnaire (CCAIQ). Inspection of response distributions was also undertaken. Primary participants in this study were from Iran (n?=?216), and secondary reference participants were from New Zealand (n?=?366) and Nigeria (n?=?330). The findings indicate that a revised questionnaire (CCAIQ-2) better represents the data obtained from all three regions. Three CCAIQ-2 domains are proposed: cheating, collusion and complying. However, the response distributions (skewness and kurtosis) indicated differences among the three groups, further suggesting that the theoretical constructs developed through factors analysis may not represent equivalence in terms of cross-cultural understanding. This research will inevitably create international debate on the measurement of integrity and how this measurement process can be used to establish internationally recognized and accountable educational regulations.     

How heritable is empathy? Differential effects of measurement and subcomponents

Empathy is an important psychological concept influencing social interaction. However, knowledge about its etiological components is still scarce. Estimates for the heritability of empathy range between 0 and 70 % depending on the sample, method of measurement, and level of aggregation. In this study, we investigated the heritability of empathy using an extended twin design. We employed the self-report questionnaire Interpersonal Reactivity Index and an emotion recognition task (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test). N = 742 twins and non-twin siblings were investigated. For affective empathy and the behavioral paradigm, we found heritability estimates between 52 and 57 %. For cognitive empathy, genetic variance was smaller (27 %), indicating that the heritability of empathy depends on the measured subcomponent, which could be relevant for intervention programs like empathy or compassion trainings. Environmental influences on empathy are mainly effects of non-shared environment, which is an important finding for our understanding of the development of empathy.     

Who shall be Allowed to Give? Living Organ Donors and the Concept of Autonomy

Free and informed consent is generally acknowledged as the legal andethical basis for living organ donation, but assessments of livingdonors are not always an easy matter. Sometimes it is necessary toinvolve psychosomatics or ethics consultation to evaluate a prospectivedonor to make certain that the requirements for a voluntary andautonomous decision are met. The paper focuses on the conceptualquestions underlying this evaluation process. In order to illustrate howdifferent views of autonomy influence the decision if a donor's offer isethically acceptable, three cases are presented – from Germany, theUnited States, and India. Each case features a person with questionabledecision-making capacity who offered to donate a kidney for a siblingwith severe renal insufficiency. Although the normative framework issimilar in the three countries, different or sometimes even contraryarguments for and against accepting the offer were brought forward. Thesubsequent analysis offers two explanations for the differences inargumentation and outcome in spite of the shared reference to autonomyas the guiding principle: (1) Decisions on the acceptability of a livingdonor cannot simply be deducted from the principle of autonomy but needto integrate contextual information; (2) understandings of the wayautonomy should be contextualized have an important influence on theevaluation of individual cases. Conclusion: Analyzing the conceptualassumptions about autonomy and its relationship to contextual factorscan help in working towards more transparent and better justifieddecisions in the assessment of living organ donors.     

Antidiscrimination Laws and Social Research on Disability: The Minority Group Perspective

In recent years, assessments of the difficulties confronting disabled persons have been altered both by the passage of antidiscrimination laws and by an emerging minority group model, based on a sociopolitical definition of disability, that has challenged studies shaped by the functional limitations paradigm. Unlike the latter orientation, the sociopolitical definition indicates that stigmatizing attitudes are the primary source of discrimination against disabled individuals. Both legal scholars and behavioral scientists also have neglected attitudinal research that seems at least comparable to the evidence cited by the Supreme Court to support the Brown decision. Further investigations based on the postulates of the minority group model and the concept of aesthetic anxiety may provide a means of combatting the effects of unconscious aversion toward disabled people in the courts.     

Transformation and alignment in similarity

This paper contrasts two structural accounts of psychological similarity: structural alignment (SA) and Representational Distortion (RD). SA proposes that similarity is determined by how readily the structures of two objects can be brought into alignment; RD measures similarity by the complexity of the transformation that “distorts” one representation into the other. We assess RD by defining a simple coding scheme of psychological transformations for the experimental materials. In two experiments, this “concrete” version of RD provides compelling fits of the data and compares favourably with SA. Finally, stepping back from particular models, we argue that perceptual theory suggests that transformations and alignment processes should generally be viewed as complementary, in contrast to the current distinction in the literature.