Parent and child causal attributions during clinical interviews

Attributions made by children and their parents for the cause of the child's clinical problem were monitored during assessment interviews. Results support previously observed differences obtained through questionnaires, with parents making more attributions than their children to characteristics of the child. This pattern was affected by variations in interview format. Parents and children differed in the locus of their attributions when interviewed individually, but these differences were not present when families were interviewed with both parents and children present. Implications for the methodology of attribution research with child-clinical populations are highlighted.     

Are high levels of religiosity inconsistent with a high valuation of science? Evidence from the United States,China and Iran

We asked whether high levels of religiosity are inconsistent with a high valuation of science. We explored this possibility in three countries that diverge markedly in the relation between the state and religion. Parents in the United States (n = 126), China (n = 234) and Iran (n = 77) completed a survey about their personal and parental stance towards science. The relation between religiosity and the valuation of science varied sharply by country. In the U.S. sample, greater religiosity was associated with a lower valuation of science. A similar but weaker negative relation was found in the Chinese sample. Parents in the Iranian sample, by contrast, valued science highly, despite high levels of religiosity. Given the small size of our United States and Iranian samples, and the non-probabilistic nature of our samples in general, we caution readers not to generalise our findings beyond the current samples. Despite this caveat, these findings qualify the assumption that religiosity is inconsistent with the valuation of science and highlight the role of sociocultural context in shaping adults' perception of the relation between religion and science.     

Racialized Religion and Judicial Injustice: How Whiteness and Biblicist Christianity Intersect to Promote a Preference for (Unjust) Punishment

America's judicial system is both exceptionally punitive and demonstrably unjust toward racial minorities. While these dual realities are structured into America's institutions, we propose they are also partially sustained by the intersection of ideologies that are both racialized and sacralized. Using multiple waves of the General Social Surveys and a unique measure that asks Americans to choose between two forms of judicial injustice (wrongful conviction or erroneous acquittal), we examine how white racial identity intersects with biblical literalism to bolster America's bent toward unjust punitiveness. In the main effects, Americans who affirm biblical literalism are more likely to show a preference for convicting the innocent, as are whites compared to Black Americans. Examining interaction effects, however, we find whiteness moderates the influence of biblical literalism such that only white biblical literalists (as opposed to non‐white biblical literalists or white non‐biblical literalists) are more likely to prefer wrongful conviction. Indeed, in our full model, being a white biblical literalist is the strongest predictor of preferring wrongful conviction. We theorize that preference for wrongful conviction over erroneous acquittal stems, at least in part, from the combination of sacralized authoritarianism and perceived racial threat.     

From the Editor

Journal of Medical Humanities -     

Mothers' resolution of their children's diagnosis: Organized patterns of caregiving representations

In this paper we examine mothers' representations of one form of trauma to the caregiving system: the experience of receiving a diagnosis of a chronic illness or disability in their child. An interview and classification system was used with 91 mothers of children ages 15–50 months with cerebral palsy or epilepsy. Mothers were classified as Resolved or Unresolved with respect to their child's diagnosis and grouped into subcategories within these major groups. Roughly half of these mothers were classified as Unresolved with respect to their child's diagnosis. Diagnosis type, severity of condition, developmental age, and time since receiving diagnosis were all unrelated to the distribution of Resolved/Unresolved classifications. Patterns of resolution in which cognitive strategies predominated were the most frequent form within the Resolved classification. Findings provide support for the organizational nature of caregiving representations as well as a number of implications for clinical practice.     

Early home intervention and socio-emotional development of preterm infants

In the present study, the effects of developmental intervention and parent-infant interaction intervention on the social competence and emotional development of preterm infants were assessed. The results suggest that early home intervention focused on the infant's development facilitates social competence and adaptation, whereas intervention focused on the parent-infant interaction resulted in greater emotional security on the part of the infant. Social competence during the second year of life was predicted by social competence at 8 months and emotional security at 12 and 16 months. These findings have implications for early identification of infants at risk of later socio-emotional difficulties and intervention with dysfunctional mother-infant dyads.