The mosque and social control in Edinburgh's Muslim community

The present paper is based on an ethnographic study of the social organisation of one of the main mosques (Markazi Jamia Masjid‐i‐Anwar‐i‐Madina) in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. The main focus of the paper is the ways the mosque operates as an agency of social control among the Muslim population of Edinburgh. This study identifies sabaq—mosque‐based religious education of young Muslims—and the Jom'a (Friday) congregational prayer as the two main mechanisms of social control within the mosque. It is argued that while the social organisation of the mosque is, in some important ways, a response to and shaped by exclusionary practices in the wider society, it plays a central role in the maintenance of order in the Muslim community of Edinburgh.     

Distinct Visual Cues Mediate Aperture Shaping for Grasping and Pantomime-Grasping Tasks

The authors examined whether the top-down requirements of dissociating the spatial relations between stimulus and response in a goal-directed grasping task renders the mediation of aperture trajectories via relative visual information. To address that issue, participants grasped differently sized target objects (i.e., grasping condition) and also grasped to a location that was dissociated from the target object (i.e., pantomime-grasping condition). Just noticeable difference (JND) values associated with the early through late stages of aperture shaping were computed to examine the extent to which motor output adhered to, or violated, the psychophysical principles of Weber's law. As expected, JNDs during the late stages of the grasping condition violated Weber's law: a result evincing the use of absolute visual information. In contrast, JNDs for the pantomime-grasping condition produced a continuous adherence to Weber's law. Such a result indicates that dissociating a stimulus from a response is a perception-based task and results in aperture shaping via relative visual information.     

Pro- and Antisaccades: Dissociating Stimulus and Response Influences the Online Control of Saccade Trajectories

The authors examined whether the diminished online control of antisaccades is related to a trade-off between movement planning and control or the remapping of target properties to a mirror-symmetrical location (i.e., vector inversion). Pro- and antisaccades were examined in a standard no-delay schedule wherein target onset served as the movement imperative and a delay cuing schedule wherein responses were initiated 2,000 ms following target onset. Importantly, the delay cuing schedule was employed to equate pro- and antisaccade reaction times. Online control was evaluated by indexing the strength of trajectory amendments at normalized increments of movement time. Antisaccades exhibited fewer online corrections than prosaccades, and this result was consistent across cuing schedules. Thus, the diminished online control of antisaccades cannot be tied to a trade-off between movement planning and control. Rather, the authors propose that the intentional nature of dissociating stimulus and response (i.e., vector inversion) engenders a slow mode of cognitive control that is not optimized for fast oculomotor corrections.     

Development and Validation of the Counterfactual Thinking for Negative Events Scale

We examined the psychometric properties of the newly created Counterfactual Thinking for Negative Events Scale (CTNES) in two studies involving university undergraduates. In Study 1 (N = 634), factor analysis revealed four subscales that correspond with various types of counterfactual thinking: Nonreferent Downward, Other-Referent Upward, Self-Referent Upward, and Nonreferent Upward. The subscales were largely orthogonal and had adequate internal consistency and test–retest reliability. The CTNES subscales were positively correlated with a traditional method of assessing counterfactual thinking and were related as expected to contextual aspects of the negative event, negative affect, and cognitive style. In Study 2 (N = 208), we further examined the validity of the scale and demonstrated that the subscales were sensitive to an experimental manipulation concerning the type of negative event participants recalled. Moreover, the CTNES subscales correlated in the expected direction with measures of coping and cognitive style.     

Expatriate and Indigenous Managers' Work Loyalty and Attitude Toward Risk

Work loyalty and attitude toward risk of expatriate and indigenous managers in the United Arab Emirates were investigated. The results indicated that foreign expatriates scored relatively higher than Arab expatriates and indigenous managers on personal loyalty and attitude toward risk. Foreign expatriates did show less attachment than their counterparts to organizational loyalty.     

Role interference and subjective well-being among expatriate families

The present study examined the relation of demands and social support, and positive and negative Work-Home (WHI) and Home-Work interference (HWI) with the subjective well-being of expatriates. Moreover, we were also interested in crossover effects of expatriate interference to the subjective well-being of their spouses. In a questionnaire study among expatriate couples (N?=?72), we found that particularly home demands, and the negative spillover effects of expatriate roles at home on their work roles were related to expatriate and spouse subjective well-being. Crossover effects from one partner to the other seemed to run via subjective well-being in one partner to subjective well-being in the other, supporting the idea of emotional contagion among couples in times of stress.     

Wilāyah (authority and governance) and its implications for Islamic bioethics: a Sunni Māturīdi perspective

Juridical councils that render rulings on bioethical issues for Muslims living in non-Muslim lands may have limited familiarity with the foundational concept of wilāyah (authority and governance) and its implications for their authority and functioning. This paper delineates a Sunni Māturīdi perspective on the concept of wilāyah, describes how levels of wilāyah correlate to levels of responsibility and enforceability, and describes the implications of wilāyah when applied to Islamic bioethical decision making. Muslim health practitioners and patients living in the absence of political wilāyah may be tempted to apply pragmatic and context-focused approaches to address bioethical dilemmas without a full appreciation of significant implications in the afterlife. Academic wilāyah requires believers to seek authentication of uncertain actions through scholarly opinions. Fulfilling this academic obligation naturally leads to additional mutually beneficial discussions between Islamic scholars, healthcare professionals, and patients. Furthermore, an understanding derived from a Māturīdi perspective provides a framework for Islamic scholars and Muslim health care professionals to generate original contributions to mainstream bioethics and public policy discussions.     

Measurement of Creative Teaching in Mathematics Class

The current study serves two main purposes: (1) proposing a framework suggesting several conditions that mathematics teachers should establish to increase student creativity, and (2) developing and validating a scale based on the framework, aimed at measuring to what extent mathematics teachers establish a learning environment for their students to foster creativity. The analysis benefited from Sternberg’s Investment Theory of Creativity and Cropley’s framework in addition to other studies on creativity when developing the scale. The participants consisted of two groups of mathematics teachers. Data from the first group (n = 423) were used for exploratory factor analysis. The second group (n = 410) were used for confirmatory factor analysis. Based on results of the exploratory factor analysis, 5 items were removed from the scale. Results of confirmatory factor analysis supported the construct validity of the trimmed scale. Based on these results, there is evidence that the scale can be employed confidently to measure different dimensions of creativity-fostering behaviors of mathematics teachers.     

Canonical Categories in Flashbulb Memories

Recall of canonical categories has been widely used to measure flashbulb memory performance. However, these canonical categories are based on a single study and have been inconsistently used in the literature making comparisons across studies potentially problematic. The purpose of the present study was to provide further data toward determining the generality of canonical categories. We asked 135 participants to provide open‐ended narratives of how they first learned about three public events, one of which was also a personal event for some of the participants. Results showed that seven categories of information consisting of two new categories (others present and thought) in addition to the five identified by Brown and Kulik (place, informant, activity, own affect, and aftermath) accounted for most of the information in flashbulb memory narratives. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.