Does Money Buy Immigrant Happiness?

The relationship between income and happiness for international immigrants has been relatively unexplored. A handful of cross-sectional studies has shown that income and happiness are positively correlated after migration, and that wealthier immigrants are more satisfied with their post-migration lives than are their less privileged peers. What is unclear is if the link between income and happiness remains positive as immigrants assimilate to life in a new country. This question is the focus of our study. Using longitudinal data from over 10,000 immigrants tracked up to 30 years in the German Socio-Economic Panel Survey, we set out to provide some insight into the long-term relationship between immigrants’ self-reported life satisfaction and the level of their income in its absolute form. Longitudinal analyses revealed that immigrants who experienced increases in income over time reported greater satisfaction with life and that the income-happiness link remained relatively stable over time. The effect of absolute income on immigrants’ happiness was, nevertheless, small. We also observed that country of origin played an important role in the post-migration association between income and happiness. Income was a stronger predictor of the life satisfaction of immigrants from poorer origins than it was for their wealthier counterparts.     

Lonely Adolescents and Their Best Friend: An Examination of Loneliness and Friendship Quality in Best Friendship Dyads

Friendship experiences have been shown to be important predictors of adolescents’ loneliness. The current study examined selection and socialization effects of loneliness within reciprocal best friendships, while controlling for friendship quality. Analyses were conducted on a sample of 884 adolescents (42.08% boys), making up 442 dyads, who were on average 13.51 years old (SD?=?1.37). Adolescents completed the peer-related loneliness subscale of the Loneliness and Aloneness Scale for Children and Adolescents as well as the Friendship Qualities Scale. A longitudinal actor-partner interdependence model, which accounts for the interdependencies in the data of best friends, suggested the presence of a selection effect for loneliness but no socialization effect. This finding within best friendships contrasts with studies on friendship networks where both selection and socialization were established.     

Changing Identities to Change the World: Identity Motives in Lifestyle Politics and Its Link to Collective Action

In this article, we assume an interdisciplinary approach to the study of why and how people transpose political considerations to their lifestyles. Our aims are threefold: to understand the meanings and perceptions of people engaged in lifestyle politics and collective action; to examine the motives guiding individual change; and to explore the linkage processes between lifestyle politics and collective action. Identity process theory is considered as a lens to examine the processes and the motives of identity via a thematic analysis of 22 interviews. This study combined interviews with people seeking social change through their lifestyles with interviews with members of action groups and social movements. We found that each participant's identity is guided by identity motives such as distinctiveness, continuity, and psychological coherence. Besides, lifestyle politics is evaluated as an effective way to bring about social change, depending on the individual experience of perceived power to bring about change through collective action. Overall, lifestyle politics states the way in which the participants decided to live, to construct their identities, and to represent their beliefs about the right thing to do. Lifestyle politics complements collective action as a strategy to increase the potential of bringing about social change. The implications of this research are discussed in relation to the importance of understanding the processes of identity and lifestyle change in the context of social, environmental, and political change.     

Validation of the Visual Analogue Scale for Anxiety-Revised and school refusal across anxiety profiles

Background/Objectives

This paper aimed to validate the Spanish version of scores of the Visual Analogue Scale for Anxiety-Revised (VAA-R) in child population, and to verify the existence of anxiety profiles and to relate them to school refusal.

Nanotechnology and Risk Governance in the European Union: the Constitution of Safety in Highly Promoted and Contested Innovation Areas

The European Union (EU) is strategically committed to the development of nanotechnology and its industrial exploitation. However, nanotechnology also has the potential to disrupt human health and the environment. The EU claims to be committed to the safe and responsible development of nanotechnology. In this sense, the EU has become the first governing body in the world to develop nanospecific regulations, largely due to legislative action taken by the European Parliament, which has compensated for the European Commission’s reluctance to develop special regulations for nanomaterials. Nevertheless, divergences aside, political bodies in the EU assume that nanotechnology development is controllable and take for granted that both the massive industrial use of nanomaterials and a high level of environmental and health protection are compatible. However, experiences such as the European controversy over agri-food biotechnology, which somewhat delegitimized the regulatory authority of the EU over technological safety and acceptability, arguably show that controllability assumptions are contestable on the grounds of alternative socio-economic and cultural preferences and values. Recently developed inclusive governance models on safety and innovation, such as “Responsible Research and Innovation” (RRI), widely claim that a diversity of considerations and issues are integrated into R&D processes. Even so, the possibility of more radically alternative constitutions of socio-technical safety seems to be seriously limited by the current ideology of innovation and economic imperatives of the global, knowledge-based, capitalist economy.     

Language-mediated object categorization: A longitudinal study with 16- to 20-month-old Serbian-speaking children

This study addressed the development of language-mediated categorization longitudinally, on a sample of Serbian-speaking children aged 16–20 months. Twenty four children were tested 3 consecutive times on: categorization of unknown objects with a shared label and a similar shape; and categorization of unknown objects with a shared label, but no visual similarity. The task was embedded in a game-like activity which included real object manipulation, categorization of novel objects labeled with made-up names, and socio-pragmatic cues provided by the experimenter. Our results indicate that an average child develops the ability to categorize novel objects with a similar shape and a shared label around 16 months of age, whereas for novel objects with a shared label, but no visual similarity, this ability is acquired sometime between 18 and 20 months of age. Our results partly confirm research findings obtained in other languages, thus emphasizing the need for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural validation of all language-related developmental studies.     

Sexting as a predictor of sexual behavior in a sample of Czech adolescents

The purpose of this longitudinal study is to examine the relationship between teen sexting and offline sexual behavior. Using a sample of 1134 Czech adolescents aged 10–18 (M_age = 13.84, SD = 1.94, girls = 58.8%) from 55 schools, the latent growth model of offline sexual behavior with sexting as a time-varying covariate was employed. Participants differed at baseline for offline sexual behavior at both individual and school levels, and they varied in the growth rate of offline sexual behavior at the individual level. Only age and sensation seeking explained the variability at baseline of offline sexual behavior. The positive association between sexting and offline sexual behavior was not constant across time. However, sexting at baseline predicted offline sexual behavior a half year and one year later. Sexting may be treated as a precursor of offline sexual behavior.     

Action‐semantic and syntactic deficits in subjects at risk for Huntington's disease

Frontostriatal networks play critical roles in grounding action semantics and syntactic skills. Indeed, their atrophy distinctively disrupts both domains, as observed in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and Parkinson's disease, even during early disease stages. However, frontostriatal degeneration in these conditions may begin up to 15 years before the onset of clinical symptoms, opening avenues for pre‐clinical detection via sensitive tasks. Such a mission is particularly critical in HD, given that patients’ children have 50% chances of inheriting the disease. Against this background, we assessed whether deficits in the above‐mentioned domains emerge in subjects at risk to develop HD. We administered tasks tapping action semantics, object semantics, and two forms of syntactic processing to 18 patients with HD, 19 asymptomatic first‐degree relatives, and sociodemographically matched controls for each group. The patients evinced significant deficits in all tasks, but only those in the two target domains were independent of overall cognitive state. More crucially, relative to controls, the asymptomatic relatives were selectively impaired in action semantics and in the more complex syntactic task, with both patterns emerging irrespective of the subjects’ overall cognitive state. Our findings highlight the relevance of these dysfunctions as potential prodromal biomarkers of HD. Moreover, they offer theoretical insights into the differential contributions of frontostriatal hubs to both domains while paving the way for innovations in diagnostic procedures.     

Knowledge and Concern about STIs/HIV and Sociodemographic Variables Associated with Getting Tested for HIV Among the General Population in Spain

HIV testing is important in terms of prevention and treatment. However, HIV testing rates in the Spanish general population remains low. Therefore, HIV testing promotion constitutes a key issue. A high level of knowledge about HIV/AIDS is associated with having been tested for HIV. The general aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of people who had ever been tested for HIV in Spain. The sample consisted of 1,106 participants from the general population — 60.0% females and 40.0% males — aged between 17 and 55 years old. The assessment instruments were a questionnaire on sociodemographic data and HIV testing, a scale of knowledge about STIs and HIV/AIDS, and a scale of concern about STIs/HIV. Results showed that greater knowledge about STIs and HIV was associated with a greater likelihood of being tested for HIV (OR = .77; 95.0% CI = .73–.82; p < .05). In addition, higher concern about HIV/AIDS decreased the likelihood of not having been tested for HIV (OR = .87; 95.0% CI = .83–.92; p < .05). In fact, the higher participants concern about STIs was, the lower their likelihood of not having been tested for HIV was (OR = .87; 95.0% CI = .83–.91; p < .05). It is necessary to promote HIV testing in the general population as well as to consider their socio-demographic and psychological characteristics.