Active school travel is associated with fewer suicide attempts among adolescents from low-and middle-income countries

Background/Objective: This study explored the association between active school travel (AST) and suicide attempts among adolescents in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Method: We used the data from the Global School-based Health Survey, including 127,097 adolescents aged 13-17 years from 34 LMICs. A self-reported survey was used to collect data on AST and suicide attempts as well as some variables. Multivariable logistic regression was performed to assess the association between AST and suicide attempts. A meta-analysis with random effects was undertaken to identify the difference in the association between AST and suicide attempts. Results: Across all the adolescents, the prevalence of AST was 37% and the prevalence of suicide attempts was 11.60%. Adolescents who engaged in AST were less likely to have suicide attempts irrespective of gender. The country-wise analysis indicated a large inconsistency in the association between AST and suicide attempt across the countries. Conclusions: AST would appear to be a protective factor for reducing suicide attempts among adolescents. However, the association between AST and suicide attempts varied greatly across the countries. Future studies should confirm the association between AST and suicide attempts.     

Support for Self‐Censorship Among Israelis as a Barrier to Resolving the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict

Self‐censorship, defined as an “act of intentionally and voluntarily withholding information from others in the absence of formal obstacles” often serves as a barrier to resolving intractable conflicts. Specifically, in order to protect the group, and in absence of objective constraints such as institutionalized censorship, individuals practice self‐censorship and support its practice by other society members. This prevents free flow and transparency of information, within a society, regarding the conflict and the adversary. In an attempt to investigate the factors that contribute to the functioning of self‐censorship as a sociopsychological barrier to conflict resolution, a longitudinal study was conducted among a large sample of Jews in Israel. The survey was administered in three waves: a few months before, during, and a few months after Israel's Operation Pillar of Defense in the Gaza Strip. The findings showed that armed confrontation can increase support for self‐censorship. In addition, the findings revealed that personal characteristics (e.g., authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, siege mentality) predicted support for self‐censorship, which, in turn, mediated the effect of personal characteristics on support for negotiations and for providing humanitarian aid. The theoretical as well as the applied implications of the findings are discussed.     

Moving Beyond Self‐Report: Implicit Associations about Death/Life Prospectively Predict Suicidal Behavior among Veterans

Reliance on self‐report limits clinicians' ability to accurately predict suicidal behavior. In this study the predictive validity of an objective measure, the death/suicide Implicit Association Test (d/sIAT), was tested among psychiatrically hospitalized veterans. Following acute stabilization, 176 participants completed the d/sIAT and traditional suicide risk assessments. Participants had similar d/sIAT scores regardless of whether they had recently attempted suicide. However, d/sIAT scores significantly predicted suicide attempts during the 6‐month follow‐up above and beyond other known risk factors for suicidal behavior (OR = 1.89; 95% CI: 1.15–3.12; based on 1SD increase). The d/sIAT may augment the accuracy of suicide risk assessment.     

It is written all over your face: Socially rejected people display microexpressions that are detectable after training in the Micro Expression Training Tool (METT)

Social rejection is a powerful negative emotional experience, yet rejected people often appear stoic and unmoved. That is, their macroexpressions of emotion are not accurate reflections of their emotional states. Yet, there is reason to believe that rejected people exhibit involuntary microexpressions of negative emotion. We contrasted people's macroexpressions of emotion with their microexpressions subsequent to an acceptance or rejection experience. Observers coded microexpressions after being trained with the Micro Expression Training Tool. Rejected participants expressed more sad and angry microexpressions than did accepted participants. This research demonstrates that socially rejected people display negative microexpressions that are detectable by observers trained in the Micro Expression Training Tool.     

Dynamic Creative Interaction Networks and Team Creativity Evolution: A Longitudinal Study

To assess the dynamical effects of creative interaction networks on team creativity evolution, this paper elaborates a theoretical framework that links the key elements of creative interaction networks, including node, edge and network structure, to creativity in teams. The process of team creativity evolution is divided into four phases, including formation, growth, maturity and decline/restart. The importance of domain‐relevant knowledge, creativity‐relevant skill, interaction frequency, interaction length, network density and closeness centrality are emphasized in specific phases of team creativity evolution in a complex creative context. To test our assumptions, a longitudinal study of creative teams in a “Challenge Cup” Creative Business Plan Competition for university students is performed and the full networks of 17 creative entrepreneur teams are mapped. Both static comparison and dynamic analysis are conducted to analyze the relationship between creative interaction networks and team creativity evolution. For specific phases of team creativity evolution, we find confirmation of our predictions. The implications of dynamic creative interaction networks for all the phases of creative teams from formation to decline/restart are discussed.     

What makes a meaningful life? Examining the effects of interpersonal harmony,dialectical coping,and nonattachment

Past cross‐cultural research on well‐being has tended to base Eastern construction of well‐being on the interdependent self‐construal, mainly as an offshoot of Confucius relationalism. However, other influential philosophical traditions in East Asian societies (i.e., Taoism and Buddhism) that portray a different picture of well‐being have received scant scholarly attention. We aim to foreground the distinctiveness of three well‐being constructs salient to Chinese culture, namely, interpersonal harmony, dialectical coping, and nonattachment, by providing experimental evidence on their differential effects on perceived meaning in life. Participants were 173 Taiwanese college students. Using priming procedures, participants primed with interpersonal harmony and dialectical coping reported higher levels of meaning in life as compared to those in the nonattachment and neutral control conditions. In addition, comparisons among the three well‐being constructs revealed that although the effects of interpersonal harmony and dialectical coping on meaning in life were similar in strength, they were both significantly stronger than that of nonattachment. The findings attest to the importance of recognizing within‐culture differences when conducting research on well‐being. Results were considered in terms of their methodological and theoretical implications.     

Are Words Easier to Learn From Infant‐ Than Adult‐Directed Speech? A Quantitative Corpus‐Based Investigation

We investigate whether infant‐directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult‐directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, the realizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than in ADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction: The IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias) than the ADS counterpart. Combining the acoustic and phonological metrics together in a global discriminability score reveals that the bigger separation of lexical categories in the phonological space does not compensate for the opposite effect observed at the acoustic level. As a result, IDS word forms are still globally less discriminable than ADS word forms, even though the effect is numerically small. We discuss the implication of these findings for the view that the functional role of IDS is to improve language learnability.