Social Safeness and Psychological Vulnerability in Turkish Youth: The Mediating Role of Life Satisfaction

The present study examined whether life satisfaction mediated social safeness and psychological vulnerability in Turkish youth. The participants included 261 university students who completed a questionnaire package that included the Turkish versions of the Social Safeness and Pleasure Scale, the Satisfaction with Life Scale, and the Psychological Vulnerability Scale. To test the proposed mediation model, authors employed hierarchical regressions. Furthermore, the authors tested mediation model using the Sobel Z-test and bootstrapping method to examine any indirect effects. Consistent with our hypotheses, the results indicated that there was a positive relationship between social safeness and life satisfaction, and a negative relationship between social safeness and psychological vulnerability. The results of the Sobel Z-test and bootstrapping revealed that life satisfaction significantly, yet partially, mediated the relationship between social safeness and psychological vulnerability. The findings highlight the importance of life satisfaction in enhancing perceptions of social safeness and decreasing psychological vulnerability among Turkish college students.     

The Effect of Listening to the Recitation of the Surah Al-Inshirah on Labor Pain,Anxiety and Comfort in Muslim Women: A Randomized Controlled Study

Journal of Religion and Health - This study aimed to identify whether listening to the recitation of the Surah Al-Inshirah (94th Chapter of the Holy Qur’an) during labor had any effect on...     

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.     

Knowledge and Attitudes of the Faculty of Theology Students on Organ Transplantation

Journal of Religion and Health - The objective in this study is to determine the knowledge and attitudes of the Faculty of Theology students on organ transplantation. The study that was planned as...     

Loneliness and Negative Affective Conditions in Adults: Is There Any Room for Hope in Predicting Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms?

This study examined the role of hope in understanding the link between loneliness and negative affective conditions (viz., anxiety and depressive symptoms) in a sample of 318 adults. As expected, loneliness was found to be a significant predictor of both anxiety and depressive symptoms. Noteworthy, hope was found to significantly augment the prediction of depressive symptoms, even after accounting for loneliness. Furthermore, we found evidence for a significant Loneliness × Hope interaction effect in predicting anxiety. A plot of the interaction confirmed that the association between loneliness and anxiety was weaker among high, compared to low, hope adults. Some implications of the present findings are discussed.     

Hydrothermal growth of ZnO nanoparticles under different conditions

In this study, a simple low-temperature hydrothermal method was used to synthesize ZnO nanoparticles. The structural, morphological and optical characterizations of the nanoparticles were evaluated with regard to the zinc content. To achieve this, the molar ratios of the precursors were changed from 0.05 to 0.1 M. The structural and morphological analyses showed that all samples had a polycrystalline hexangular wurtzite crystal structure and the shape of the ZnO nanoparticles changed with increasing zinc content. A possible growth mechanism of the ZnO nanoparticles is explained in terms of the zinc content. Optical measurement revealed that the shape of the nanoparticles affects the position of the band-edge emission as well as the shape of the luminescence spectrum.     

A comparative study on undergraduate students' academic motivation and academic self-concept

The purpose of this study was to investigate Turkish and American undergraduate students' academic motivation and academic self-concept scores regarding the years that they spent in university. The analysis was based on 566 (284 Turkish, 282 American) undergraduate students where, Academic Motivation Scale and Academic Self-Concept Scale were used as measuring instruments. The results showed that there was a statistical significant effect of nationality and number of years spent in university on undergraduate students' intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and self-concept scores. Turkish students had higher intrinsic scores whereas American students had higher extrinsic scores and more positive academic-self concept compared to Turkish partners. Regarding grade level, senior students from both cultures had higher intrinsic motivation and academic self-concept scores compared to other grade levels. In terms of extrinsic motivation, there is steady decline in American students' scores as grade level increases. On the other hand, Turkish undergraduates' extrinsic scores decrease in the second year but increase in the third and fourth year of university education. Results were discussed by taking into consideration the social and cultural differences between two nations.     

Relationship Between Miscarriage and Dysfunctional Cognitions About Trauma,Coping Mechanisms,and Posttraumatic Growth

Many studies have described grief and psychiatric symptomatology as a typical feature following miscarriage. How women who had a miscarriage (MG) respond to trauma in terms of negative cognitions about their selves and the world, the coping strategies they employ to overcome the effects of the trauma, and what factors might be indicative of posttraumatic growth (PTG) in this population have not been extensively studied so far. We aimed to identify whether women who had a miscarriage (N = 74 vs. N = 82 control subjects) exhibited higher levels of psychological distress symptoms, dysfunctional cognitions, and maladaptive coping strategies, and whether women with lower PTG employed more maladaptive coping strategies, and reported higher levels of dysfunctional cognitions. Group comparisons according to the diagnostic groups based on self-report measures for depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder and according to the level of PTG, and stepwise linear regression analyses with PTG as the outcome were performed. Our study demonstrated that the MG does not necessarily differ from the control group on some measures of psychopathology, coping mechanisms, dysfunctional cognitions, or PTG. Yet, the MG who exhibited higher levels of PTG had specific predictors, and women with a psychiatric diagnosis differed from participants with no diagnoses on some measures of dysfunctional cognitions, coping mechanisms, and PTG. Further studies with a prospective design could further clarify the needs of the MG requiring psychotherapeutic interventions.     

Different Types of Religiosity and Lay Intuitions About Free Will/Determinism in Turkey

Religiosity has been found to be positively associated with belief in free will (FW) in the Western world. In the Muslim world, however, religiosity exhibits several characteristics that set it apart from the Western world, including an overemphasis on fate or divine predestination. We, therefore, investigated FW/determinism beliefs and different types of religiosity and conservatism in two samples in Turkey, a predominantly Muslim country (N = 1,690). In Study 1, a confirmatory factor analysis showed that FAD-Plus provided good fit to the data. Study 2 revealed that FW belief is not related to any of the religiosity measures (intrinsic, extrinsic, quest), whereas fatalistic determinism is consistently related to religiosity. The unique predictor of free will turned out to be belief in a just world. Overall, these findings indicate that FW belief is not inherently related to religiosity in Turkey, whereas fatalistic determinism is central to Turkish people’s belief systems.     

Event components in autobiographical memories

Autobiographical memories contain activity, location, temporal, and participant information (Lancaster & Barsalou, 1997). Our study analysed potential dominance of activity information in autobiographical memories. The results indicated stability in dominance of the activity component, defined as similar occurrence in first and subsequent reports, and a relative absence of the temporal component in these verbal reports. Activity dominance also occurred when activity information from the verbal reports was used as a retrieval cue for a subsequent report. Temporal information demonstrated a greater lack of facilitation as a retrieval cue. These findings can be explained from the perspective of embodied cognition in which underlying perceptual states that contain activity, location, and other participant information are reconstructed during retrieval, whereas temporal information, as a more abstract component, is not.