Sibling Maltreatment: The Forgotten Abuse

Great advances have been made in the study of family violence in the past 30 years. However, sibling abuse and its prevalence in the family have largely been overlooked. In this article, the major issues associated with sibling maltreatment are highlighted, and strategies for helping the victims and perpetrators of sibling abuse and their families are described.     

Why are women more religious than men? Testing the explanatory power of personality theory among undergraduate students in Wales

This study tests the explanatory power of personality-based psychologically grounded theories to account for the well-established finding within the psychology of religion that within Christian and post-Christian contexts women are more religious than men. A sample of 1682 undergraduate students in Wales completed the short form of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire Revised together with the adult form of the Francis Scale of Attitude towards Christianity and measures of frequency of church attendance, and frequency of personal prayer. These data confirm that women record higher levels of religiosity and lower levels of psychoticism, and demonstrate that psychoticism is the strongest predictor of individual differences in religiosity. Multiple-regression analyses show that, when individual differences in personality are taken into account, biological sex adds no further impact on religiosity. This finding suggests that higher levels of religiosity among women may be interpreted as a function of basic psychological differences in levels of psychoticism rather than as a sociological function of being female.     

Training Public School Special Educators to Implement Two Functional Analysis Models

The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy and efficiency of a training package to teach public school special educators to conduct functional analyses of challenging behavior. Six public school educators were divided into two cohorts of three and were taught two models of functional analysis of challenging behavior: traditional and trial-based functional analysis. The effect of the training package on functional analysis implementation was evaluated using multiple-baseline designs across participants for each functional analysis model. The sequence of functional analysis models taught was counterbalanced across cohorts. Following the training package, all participants reached 100 % implementation fidelity during role-plays and classroom sessions with students, and maintained high fidelity at follow-up role-play sessions. Data on training duration, trials to criterion, and social validity revealed that trial-based functional analysis training had a shorter duration and was rated as the more favorable functional analysis model.     

Gender and Military Contextual Risk Factors for Intimate Partner Aggression

This study explored individual and military risk factors for intimate partner aggression (IPA) perpetration among Navy personnel in their second year of service. We found some evidence that job stress was related to higher perpetration among men. Contrary to expectations, ship duty was related to lower perpetration rates, even though it involves more military operational stress and more frequent deployments than does shore duty. Premilitary alcohol problems were a stronger risk factor for men than for women, whereas premilitary patterns of aggressive behavior were a stronger risk factor for women. Recommendations for future research and public health interventions are discussed.     

Religion,Personality, and Well-being: The Relationship Between Church Attendance and Purpose in Life

A sample of 517 first-year, undergraduate students attending an Anglican College in Wales completed the Purpose-in-Life Scale (PILS) together with the short-form Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQR) and a measure of church attendance. After controlling for individual differences in personality, the data demonstrate a significant positive correlation between church attendance and scores on the PILS. A growing body of evidence indicates that attendance at religious services tends to promote the psychological wellbeing of college students.     

Cultural differences in self‐recognition: the early development of autonomous and related selves?

Fifteen‐ to 18‐month‐old infants from three nationalities were observed interacting with their mothers and during two self‐recognition tasks. Scottish interactions were characterized by distal contact, Zambian interactions by proximal contact, and Turkish interactions by a mixture of contact strategies. These culturally distinct experiences may scaffold different perspectives on self. In support, Scottish infants performed best in a task requiring recognition of the self in an individualistic context (mirror self‐recognition), whereas Zambian infants performed best in a task requiring recognition of the self in a less individualistic context (body‐as‐obstacle task). Turkish infants performed similarly to Zambian infants on the body‐as‐obstacle task, but outperformed Zambians on the mirror self‐recognition task. Verbal contact (a distal strategy) was positively related to mirror self‐recognition and negatively related to passing the body‐as‐obstacle task. Directive action and speech (proximal strategies) were negatively related to mirror self‐recognition. Self‐awareness performance was best predicted by cultural context; autonomous settings predicted success in mirror self‐recognition, and related settings predicted success in the body‐as‐obstacle task. These novel data substantiate the idea that cultural factors may play a role in the early expression of self‐awareness. More broadly, the results highlight the importance of moving beyond the mark test, and designing culturally sensitive tests of self‐awareness.