Purpose in Life and Prayer Among Catholic and Protestant Adolescents in Northern Ireland

Data are provided from a sample of 2,670 young people aged between 13 and 15 years from Northern Ireland. This article compares the replies of 1,206 young people who attend a Catholic school and 1,464 young people who attend a Protestant school. The data examine the relationship between frequency of personal prayer, perceived purpose in life, sex, age, church attendance, and personality (extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism). These data demonstrate a clear relationship between frequency of prayer and perceived purpose in life among the young people from the Protestant and Catholic communities.     

Innocence Lost: A Gender-Based Study of Parricide Offender,Victim, and Incident Characteristics in a National Sample, 1976–2003

ABSTRACT

The act of parricide is one of the least understood and most underresearched acts of family violence. Work to date suggests adolescent parricide is often an extreme response to intolerable abuse. Drawing on Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR) from 1976 to 2003, this work examines a large national sample of reported parricide incidents (N?=?2,599) with an offender 21 years of age or younger. A gender-based study of offender, victim, and incident characteristics was undertaken using bivariate and multivariate techniques. Results suggest that incidents of parricide are decreasing over time. Offenses are predominantly intraracial with white male offenders peaking in late adolescence and white females peaking in mid-adolescence. White biological fathers are at greatest risk of victimization with girls significantly more likely than boys to kill a stepfather. Results both corroborate and contrast extant works, providing new baseline data and insight into this complex and dynamic crime.     

Reply to Letter to the Editor

The current policy of the National Institute of Health designed to increase the participation of women and minorities is radically different from previous policies designed to protect minorities from abuses in research studies. The principal arguments to support this policy are twofold: 1) Increased representation of minorities and women in research would increase the generalizability of research data and allow for valid analyses of differences in subpopulations; and 2) being in a clinical research study is advantageous to participants regardless of the final research study results. It remains unclear whether minorities find these arguments compelling. Instead of telling minorities that participation in research is good for them, the research community should focus on understanding what minority communities want from clinical research and then tailoring the message to meet this need. Persuasive arguments to promote long-term increased representation of minorities in clinical research must come from within minority communities.     

Predictors of Externalizing Behavior Problems in Early Elementary-Aged Children: The Role of Family and Home Environments

As children enter elementary school they display behavioral orientations that reveal potential developmental trajectories. Developmental transitions offer unique opportunities for examining developmental pathways and the factors that influence emerging pathways. The primary goal of this investigation was to examine characteristics of family and home contexts in predicting externalizing behavior problems among children transitioning into elementary school. Dimensions of the family and home environments of maltreated and nonmaltreated children (N = 177) were examined and used to predict externalizing behavior problems. Maltreatment was assessed using case file information, characteristics of the family and home environment were rated by interviewers, and externalizing behavior was assessed by mother's ratings on the Child Behavior Checklist. Relative to nonmaltreated children, the family environments of physically abused children were characterized by higher levels of negative social interactions. Also, in comparison to nonmaltreated children, the home environments of children who experienced neglect were characterized as less organized and clean. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that physical abuse was the strongest predictor of externalizing behavior. After controlling for the contribution of physical abuse, mother's negative behavior toward the focal child, aggression between siblings, and the lack of an organized and clean home were each predictive of externalizing behavior.     

The Greensboro Child Response Initiative: A Trauma-Informed,Mental Health–Law Enforcement Model for Children Exposed to Violence

This article evaluates a trauma-informed, mental health–law enforcement intervention model called the Greensboro Child Response Initiative (CRI). CRI is a community-coordinated response to mitigate the development of traumatic stress symptoms in children exposed to violence, with the goals of decreasing mental health symptoms and other negative outcomes. Results from a quasi-experimental study indicated that caregivers appreciate the quick follow-up and support by CRI advocates and police reported seeing CRI as a critical component of their responses to calls for service related to families and children. Police line-ups and training provided by CRI increased levels of empathy and awareness of child trauma. Monthly stakeholder meetings promoted an informed victim response and increased communication and networking opportunities among community providers and law enforcement. Results suggest that CRI is a promising community-based early intervention, and implications and suggestions are provided for replicability.     

Childhood Sexual Abuse and the Perpetration of Violence: The Moderating Role of Gender

This study sought to increase specificity in our knowledge of links among child sexual abuse (CSA), aggression, and physical intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration by criminal offenders, with particular interest in gender. Participants were 202 men and 72 women (N = 274), who were recruited from an urban pretrial supervision program. Women reported higher rates of CSA than men. After controlling for relevant covariates, CSA was associated with general aggression and severe IPV. We found a gender by CSA interaction; CSA was associated with aggression and severe IPV for women, but not men. Findings provide preliminary evidence that CSA impacts aggression and IPV perpetration differently for female offenders compared to male offenders and gender-specific treatment might be warranted in pretrial settings.     

The cortical representation of centrally presented words: A magnetic stimulation study

The right and left visual fields each project to the contralateral cerebral hemispheres. The current study aimed to investigate the extent of the functional overlap of the two hemifields along the vertical meridian. We applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the left and right occipital cortex to investigate whether the foveal representation of words is bilaterally represented or is split between the two hemispheres. Employing a lateralized lexical decision task, we first showed a double dissociation between the stimulated cortical site and performance; right visual field (RVF) but not left visual field (LVF) performance was impaired when the left visual cortex was stimulated, and LVF but not RVF performance was impairred when the right visual cortex was stimulated. Unilateral stimulation also significantly impaired lexical decision latencies to centrally presented words. These findings support the suggestion that foveal representation of words is split. We discuss future strategies for the use of TMS in further tests of the split representation account.     

Change management: Time for a change!

We discuss some core issues in the field of change management. We use these topics to identify some mindsets that dominate the practice of change management, and argue that these should be replaced by some alternatives. The alternatives are drawn largely from operations management and sociotechnical thinking. We characterize existing approaches as partial, and speculate that this may be one of the reasons why so many change initiatives are ineffective at meeting their goals. We identify some of the reasons why existing mindsets are sustained. We also point to some ways forward, focusing on changes in the mindsets and language we use. We speculate that these would improve the effectiveness of change initiatives.     

Religion and mental health among Hindu young people in England

The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between mental health and attitude toward their religious tradition among a sample of 330 young people attending the Hindu Youth Festival in London. The participants completed the Santosh–Francis Scale of Attitude toward Hinduism together with the abbreviated form of the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire which provides measures of neuroticism and psychoticism. The data indicated that a more positive attitude toward Hinduism was associated with lower psychoticism scores but unrelated to neuroticism scores. There is no evidence, therefore, to associate higher levels of religiosity with poorer mental health among young people within the Hindu community.     

Empowerment and Advocacy for Domestic Violence Victims

Empowering women victims of domestic violence has been a goal of advocacy since its inception. The concept of empowerment is also widely shared in social science disciplines where the goal of applied research is to address the lived effects of social injustice. While in some fields, such as community psychology, there has been a long history of engaging theoretically with the concept of empowerment, elsewhere theory has received less attention. In the case of addressing domestic violence, victim advocacy has often been assumed to be empowering. Advocates worked to establish support services for individual women and participate in coordinating community responses to domestic violence that included the criminal justice system so as to improve women's safety. The question of whether this kind of social action is empowering domestic violence victims has been discussed in the literature for almost a decade. In this paper, we consider a proposed theory of empowerment and recommendations of advocacy practices by Kasturirangan (2008) to consider how her conceptualisation of empowerment processes has influenced the field and whether it provides a scaffold for bridging the theoretical gaps that have been identified.