Modernity and childrearing in families of Gujarati Indian adolescents

Over the last two decades, researchers have devoted increasing attention to the role of cognitive factors in parenting. These cognitive mediational models focus on the role of attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge in influencing parenting behaviours. A cognitive factor that contributes to cultural variation in parenting is attitudinal modernity—a broad concept that refers to the “Westernization” of attitudes in such diverse areas as gender role conceptions, political attitudes, attitudes toward authority, the family, and religious beliefs. Modernity has been most useful in describing the attitudes of individuals from countries undergoing the rapid social and economic changes that accompany industrialism and urbanization. The present study focused on India—a country currently undergoing such changes. Despite the wide range of modern and traditional beliefs among contemporary Indian parents, our understanding of the determinants of these individual differences is limited. The purpose of the present study was to examine the relation between modernity and parental childrearing practices, as well as to examine the relation between adolescent modernity and parental childrearing. Mothers, fathers, and adolescents in 50 Hindu, Gujarati families completed questionnaires about the modernity of their attitudes and were interviewed about parental childrearing practices. Parental and adolescent modernity were highly correlated. Moreover, parental modernity predicted the nature of parental childrearing values and practices, and parental childrearing values predicted adolescent modernity. Although the findings varied somewhat for mothers versus fathers, parental modernity was associated with individualistic childrearing values and practices, and parents who valued individualistic characteristics in their adolescents had sons and daughters who reported the highest levels of modernity. Implications for understanding the role of mothers and fathers in the socialization of modernity are considered.     

Self-kindness when facing stress: The role of self-compassion,goal regulation,and support in college students’ well-being

This project brought together the constructs of goal and emotion regulation as a way of understanding college students’ well-being, building on previous work that identified the ability to disengage in goal pursuit and to redirect energy toward alternative goals as an important contributor to well-being. In Study 1, we assessed the amount of variance in well-being accounted for by measures of goal management, adding to the regression measures of student stress and self-compassion, the latter defined as a healthy form of self-acceptance and characterized as a tendency to treat oneself kindly in the face of perceived inadequacy. In Study 2, the stress scale was replaced by measures of perceived need and availability of support. Across studies, although factors such as goal management, stress, and need for and availability of support were important predictors of well-being, self-compassion accounted for a significant amount of additional variance in well-being.     

Psychiatry under tyranny: A report on the political abuse of Romanian psychiatry during the ceausescu years

Romanians suffered incredible deprivations of every sort during the decades of Communist dictatorship. Most of the country’s 1,000 psychiatrists, and most of their patients, were victimized by the political system. A few psychiatrists actively engaged in practices amounting to torture. Many, however, became willing or unwilling participants in the political abuse of their profession. Such political abuses were fostered by abusive legislation and abusive law enforcement by the secret police. Abuses included: mass detentions in psychiatric hospitals of dissidents and political undesirables; abusive interpretation of the laws in detaining persons not suffering from mental illness; false, politically motivated diagnoses and treatment; and detention in secret facilities.     

Obsessive-compulsive disorder: beyond segregated cortico-striatal pathways

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) affects approximately 2-3% of the population and is characterized by recurrent intrusive thoughts (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors or mental acts (compulsions), typically performed in response to obsessions or related anxiety. In the past few decades, the prevailing models of OCD pathophysiology have focused on cortico-striatal circuitry. More recent neuroimaging evidence, however, points to critical involvement of the lateral and medial orbitofrontal cortices, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and amygdalo-cortical circuitry, in addition to cortico-striatal circuitry, in the pathophysiology of the disorder. In this review, we elaborate proposed features of OCD pathophysiology beyond the classic parallel cortico-striatal pathways and argue that this evidence suggests that fear extinction, in addition to behavioral inhibition, is impaired in OCD.     

Impact of Religious Activities on Quality of Life and Cognitive Function Among Elderly

Journal of Religion and Health - Religiosity and spirituality have previously been found to have significant effects on mental and physical health. This study aimed to compare...     

Psychometric Properties of a Persian Version of the SpREUK-P Questionnaire: An Instrument for Measuring the Importance and Frequency of Spiritual/Religious Practices in Iranian Patients with Chronic Gastrointestinal Diseases

Journal of Religion and Health - Attention to spiritual and religious issues is considered an important therapeutic method for patients with chronic disorders. This study aimed to assess the...     

Negotiating Indigenous Metaphysics as Educational Philosophy in Ethiopia

In Ethiopia, the history of the use of modern philosophical categories in education is short. This is because the country’s modern education itself is barely 100 years old. What is not so short, however, is the history of the use of indigenous metaphysics in temehert (traditional education), which goes back as far as the introduction of Christianity to Ethiopia—to the fourth century A.D. Since its inception, education has had a close, if ambivalent, relationship with different philosophical tenets, with the advocates of each tenet trying to formulate educational philosophy around its own unique metaphysical narrative. While some narratives arose from indigenous legends, others were imported (and domesticated in some cases) from abroad. The recent tendency of educational philosophy in Ethiopia has a slightly ‘(post)modernist’ philosophical flavor to it, even though it might not be self-consciously postmodernist in nature. In this essay, I intend to show how a deliberate, or unwitting, de-link with indigenous metaphysics could affect the trajectory, and also the success, of the educational system in Ethiopia. After a brief paradigmatic characterization of two metaphysical categories and their underlying narratives, I critically unravel the ethno-federalist metaphysics of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). I focus on the ethno-federalist system because it is an incumbent philosophy. After discussing a nascent remedy proposed by Maimire Mennasemay, viz., the notion of ‘nostalgic memory,’ best known as tezeta, I argue for the primacy of the notion of ‘covenant thinking,’ also known as qal-kidan, as a better alternative.     

Health-Related Quality of Life in Iranian Breast Cancer Survivors: A Qualitative Study

Women play the most important role in Iranian families. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to efforts to maintain and promote their health. The diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer have significant physical and psycho-social impacts on patients, families and friends. This qualitative study was designed to analyze the role of several social and cultural factors and their relationship to health-related quality of life among Iranian breast cancer survivors. In-depth semi-structured and unstructured face-to-face interviews were conducted with 39 breast cancer survivors. The results of the present study revealed that most prevalent physical problems that were reported by Iranian breast cancer survivors were fatigue, pain and lymphedema related to the adverse effects of mastectomy. We found that most participants have a strong sense of spirituality and used this as a source of psychological support to help them accept their disease. Spirituality has been found to be a strong source of psychological support among Iranian breast cancer survivors. Religious faith has provided this community the strength and motivation to seek medical treatment and to be patient and relax. These findings can help researchers to provide a framework for the development of appropriate and effective culturally sensitive health interventions.     

A little bit transparent with one another: Constructing vulnerability in the evangelical discourse of women preachers

Using four categories of Brown’s shame resilience theory (SRT), this paper analyses two similar online videos by prominent American evangelical female preachers: Joyce Meyer and Beth Moore. As each unpacks her survivor’s story of childhood sexual abuse, SRT (and its components of vulnerability, critical awareness, reaching out and speaking shame) can provide a matrix for interpreting the narrative in which each preacher frames her self-disclosure.