Thriving Among African‐American Adolescents: Religiosity,Religious Support,and Communalism

While research has identified some positive factors in the lives of African‐American adolescents, there is limited, yet growing, empirical research examining how positive factors foster thriving for these youth. Using a positive youth development framework, we examined naturally occurring factors that promote thriving among African‐American adolescents. This cross‐sectional study included 152 youth who were surveyed at five Black churches in a large Midwestern city. Using MPlus, the structural regression model results revealed support for a model that demonstrated religiosity, religious support, and communalism are significantly and directly related to thriving among African‐American adolescents. Implications for theory, research and practice are discussed. Moving from a deficit lens to a strengths‐based approach can facilitate understanding of developmental processes and provide a foundation for supporting and enhancing positive outcomes among African‐American adolescents.     

Shepherding Group Analysis: Shepherds Past, Present and Future

The development of group analysis in Britain and Europe following the death of the founder, S. H. Foulkes is described. Group analytic training, journal and book publications are noted. Future prospects for group analysis are envisaged.     

General and Specific Cognitive and Psychomotor Abilities in Personnel Selection: The Prediction of Training and Job Performance

Use of ability tests in personnel selection is addressed beginning with methodological issues. Studies are reviewed that show that almost all the validity of cognitive tests comes from general cognitive ability, g. Psychomotor ability is reviewed and found to have both higher- and lower-order factors, contrary to long-held beliefs. It was found that the higher-order general psychomotor factor was one source of validity of psychomotor tests. Additionally, psychomotor tests were shown to contain measures of g and to increment the validity of g-based measures very little.     

Predicting Risky Sexual Behavior: the Unique and Interactive Roles of Childhood Conduct Disorder Symptoms and Callous-Unemotional Traits

Conduct disorder (CD) symptoms and callous-unemotional (CU) traits have been shown to be uniquely associated with risky sexual behavior (RSB) in adolescence and early adulthood, yet their interactive role in predicting RSB remains largely unknown. This study aimed to investigate the predictive value of CD symptoms and CU traits, as well as their interaction, on several RSB outcomes in adolescence and early adulthood. A total of 683 participants (41.7 % female, 47.4 % African American) were followed annually and self-reported age of first sexual intercourse, frequency of condom use, pregnancy, contraction of sexually transmitted infections, and engagement in sexual solicitation from grade 7 to 2-years post-high school. CD symptoms predicted age of first sexual intercourse, condom use, and sexual solicitation. CU traits predicted age of first sexual intercourse and pregnancy. Their interaction predicted a composite score of these RSBs such that CD symptoms positively predicted the composite score among those with high levels of CU traits but not among those with low levels of CU traits. The current findings provide information regarding the importance of both CD symptoms and CU traits in understanding adolescent and early adulthood RSB, as well as the benefits of examining multiple RSB outcomes during this developmental period. These findings have implications for the development and implementation of preventive efforts to target these risky behaviors among adolescents and young adults.     

Thoughts on the inner conflict within Islamic culture: Their existential anxieties and ours

Abstract

This paper focuses on how Islamic terrorism is primarily part of a larger internal conflict within Islamic culture. Western, liberal (largely Christian) democracies evolved over centuries of their own bloody philosophical and political struggles between religious authority and what came to be defined as a modern, civil society built on individual freedom of belief, secular authority, and law. Now, Western liberal modernity represents a deep existential threat to traditional Islamic societies around gender, family relations, and individual beliefs. A ferocious internal struggle exists between those Muslims who believe Islam can absorb those tensions – creating its own version of an open, tolerant, cultural modernity – versus political Islamists, jihadists, for whom the annihilation anxiety elicited by the threatened social change is directed both internally and in violent rage at the West.