Navigating Local and Global Worlds: Opportunities and Risks for Adolescent Cultural Identity Development

This essay focuses on the opportunities and risks that adolescents face when developing cultural identities in the context of globalization. It starts by illustrating how globalization entails that adolescents increasingly have interactions with people from diverse cultures in myriad domains. Adolescents navigate local and global worlds, for example, with regard to language, diet, dating, and work. With the exposure to diverse cultures, new opportunities and risks arise. The nature of and evidence for three of these are highlighted. One is the risk of adolescent cultural identity confusion, with attendant internalizing and externalizing pathological behaviors. A second is the emergence of cultural gaps between adolescents and parents, a phenomenon that may constitute both a risk and a necessity. The third issue discussed is the way that globalization may open up more opportunities for youth civic involvement, even if such involvement sometimes aims to resist globalization.     

Mindfulness training affects attention--or is it attentional effort?

Improvements in attentional performance are at the core of proposed mechanisms for stress reduction in mindfulness meditation practices. However, this claim can be questioned because no previous studies have actively manipulated test effort in control groups and controlled for effects of stress reduction per se. In a blinded design, 48 young, healthy meditation novices were randomly assigned to a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), nonmindfulness stress reduction (NMSR), or inactive control group. At posttest, inactive controls were randomly split into nonincentive and incentive controls, the latter receiving a financial reward to improve attentional performance. Pre- and postintervention, 5 validated attention paradigms were employed along with self-report scales on mindfulness and perceived stress and saliva cortisol samples to measure physiological stress. Attentional effects of MBSR, NMSR, and the financial incentive were comparable or significantly larger in the incentive group on all reaction-time-based measures. However, selective attention in the MBSR group improved significantly more than in any other group. Similarly, only the MBSR intervention improved the threshold for conscious perception and visual working memory capacity. Furthermore, stress-reducing effects of MBSR were supported because those in the MBSR group showed significantly less perceived and physiological stress while increasing their mindfulness levels significantly. We argue that MBSR may contribute uniquely to attentional improvements but that further research focusing on non-reaction-time-based measures and outcomes less confounded by test effort is needed. Critically, our data demonstrate that previously observed improvements of attention after MBSR may be seriously confounded by test effort and nonmindfulness stress reduction.     

Social preference experiments in animals: strengthening the case for human preferences

Guala appears to take social preferences for granted in his discussion of reciprocity experiments. While he does not overtly claim that social preferences are only by-products that arise in testing environments, he does assert that whatever they are--and how they evolved--they have little value in the real world. Experiments on animals suggest that social preferences may be unique to humans, supporting the idea that they might play a prominent role in our world.     

Emotions on the move: Mobile emotions among train commuters in the South East of Denmark

The overall aim of this paper is to discuss how including, and stressing, emotions in research enables us to understand the experience of commuting as an everyday practice that has more meaning than a journey from A to B. The paper shows how emotions are practiced and produced while commuting, and how these emotions are crucial for the production of social space onboard trains. In doing so it draws on ethnographical research conducted while following various commuting communities and individual commuters. The paper concludes that the emotional practice of commuting produces an ever changing space where the practices of commuting with all their variations fill and add to lives on board and outside of the train.     

Item analysis and differential item functioning of a brief conduct problem screen

Research has shown that boys display higher levels of childhood conduct problems than girls, and Black children display higher levels than White children, but few studies have tested for scalar equivalence of conduct problems across gender and race. The authors conducted a 2-parameter item response theory (IRT) model to examine item characteristics of the Authority Acceptance scale from the Teacher Observation of Classroom Adaptation-Revised (AA-TOCA-R; L. Larsson-Werthamer, S. G. Kellam, & L. Wheeler, 1991) in 8,820 kindergarten children and estimated the degree of differential item functioning (DIF) by gender and race/urban status. The mean level of latent conduct problems was best represented by behaviors such as being stubborn, breaking rules, and being disobedient, whereas breaking things and taking others' property best represented the construct at one standard deviation above the mean. DIF by gender was detected, such that at equivalent levels of latent conduct problems, males received more endorsements of overt behaviors from teachers, whereas females received more endorsements of nonphysical behaviors. Moreover, overt behaviors were better discriminators of latent conduct problems for males, and nonphysical behaviors were better discriminators of latent conduct problems for females. Differences across race/urban status were not found to be conceptually meaningful. The authors' analyses also suggest that the item scaling of the AA-TOCA-R may be best represented by 5e categories instead of 6. These findings provide support for the use of IRT modeling to examine item characteristics of conduct problem scales and DIF to test for scalar equivalence across diverse subpopulations.     

Parenting After a Natural Disaster: A Qualitative Study of Norwegian Families Surviving the 2004 Tsunami in Southeast Asia

How do parents support their children after a high-impact disaster? To answer this question, face-to-face interviews were conducted with 51 Norwegian parents. These parents and children were all severely exposed to the trauma of the tsunami disaster. The analyses show how parents interpret their children’s signs of distress, as well as their own strategies of support in the aftermath. The main strategies described by the parents were watchful waiting, careful monitoring of the children’s reactions and a sensitive timing when providing support. Such monitoring, and interpretation of signs of distress, served as an aid for the parents in determining what needs their children had and what support they therefore needed to provide. A range of support strategies were employed, including re-establishing a sense of safety, resuming normal roles and routines, and talking to their children. Parents who were themselves severely impacted by the disaster reported a reduced ability to assess their children’s reactions and thereby were unable to provide optimal care in the aftermath. Interestingly, the parents’ support strategies mirror the early intervention recommendations put forward in the NICE guidelines and in the Psychological First Aid guidelines which is a well accepted and promising practice for helping children after disasters.     

Spatial learning in the rat: impairment induced by the thiol-proteinase inhibitor, leupeptin, and an analysis of [3H]glutamate receptor binding in relation to learning

Rats were given continuous intraventricular infusion of saline or the thiol-proteinase inhibitor leupeptin, via subcutaneously implanted osmotic minipumps, while being trained on a spatial learning water task using spaced trials. Leupeptin caused overnight forgetting during training, but performance eventually reached asymptote in both groups. A retention test conducted 48 h later to assess spatial memory revealed no significant group differences, but did cause, in saline-treated rats only, a disruption of subsequent retraining back to the correct spatial location. The groups showed no differences in Cl-dependent [3H]glutamate receptor binding to hippocampal or entorhinal cortex membranes subsequent to training. In a second experiment, normal rats trained on the same task also showed no differences in Cl-dependent [3H]glutamate binding relative to rats exposed to the water task but given random spatial position training and handled controls. The results are discussed in relation to the hypothesis of Lynch and Baudry (Science (1984) 224, 1057-1063) that a calcium-dependent thiol proteinase is involved in memory formation through its ability to modify glutamate receptor distribution and dendritic spine shape.     

The effects of naloxone and cage size on social play and activity in isolated young rats

The effects of large and small housing environments as well as naloxone on social play (as defined by pinning behavior) in isolated postweanling male rats were investigated. Animals housed in small cages played significantly more than those housed in larger cages. This effect was not observed when cage size was reversed. Administration of 0.5, 1.0, and 5.0 mg/kg of naloxone resulted in significant decreases in play behavior as compared to saline controls, both before housing environments were switched, and after. Animals in both isolation conditions were also compared to animals that were socially housed. Isolation was found to increase social play as well as the time spent in active social interaction, but had no effect on locomotor activity. While housing in a small cage increases play behavior, it had no effect on the amount of time spent in active social interaction or on activity. While administration of 0.5, 1.0, and 5.0 mg/kg naloxone to habituated animals differentially housed did not result in an overall decrease in activity, when compared with saline controls, only those animals housed in small cages and injected with the high dose of naloxone differed significantly from controls. In animals having no prior play experience, the activity of animals housed in the large and small cages differed significantly from each other only in the saline and 5.0 mg/kg naloxone conditions. Since naloxone's effect on play behavior was strong, but its effect on activity was not profound, our data suggest that naloxone primarily affects the affective component of play rather than altering activity levels.