Parenting Interventions for Refugees and Forcibly Displaced Families: A Systematic Review

Globally, an estimated 79.5 million individuals have been displaced, nearly 40% of whom are children. Parenting interventions may have the potential to improve outcomes for displaced families. To investigate this, we conducted a systematic review to identify the types of caregiver or parenting interventions that have been evaluated among displaced families, to assess their efficacy across a range of contexts, and to describe their cultural and contextual adaptations. The review followed PRISMA guidelines. At stage one, all articles describing caregiver/parenting interventions for forcibly displaced families were included to provide a scoping review of the state of the literature. At stage two, only randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-experimental designs were included, allowing for quantitative analysis of program effects. A total of 30 articles (24 studies) were identified in stage one. 95.8% of these articles were published in the past 10 years. Of these, 14 articles (10 studies) used an RCT or quasi-experimental design to assess program efficacy or effectiveness. Relative to control groups, those assigned to caregiving programs showed significant, beneficial effects across the domains of parenting behaviors and attitudes, child psychosocial and developmental outcomes, and parent mental health. Cultural adaptations and recruitment and engagement strategies are described. The evidence base for caregiving programs for displaced families has expanded in recent years but remains limited. Caregiving/parenting programs show promise for reducing the negative effects of forced displacement on families, but future studies are needed to understand which programs show the greatest potential for scalability.

     

Depictions of Gender Across Eight Decades of Disney Animated Film: The Role of Film Producer,Director, and Writer Gender

Depictions of gender in media are often scrutinized for stereotypical patterns. Disney films are of particular interest, as they are often watched by children and may play a role in children’s gender socialization. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to assess gender depictions of characters in animated Disney films (released between 1937 and 2019; 61 films with 323 characters total), and second, to explore depictions of gender in Disney animated films coupled with an analysis of the gender of those involved in the production of these films (producers, directors, and writers). We found a significant difference in the number of male and female characters (roughly 60% male, 40% female), which did not significantly differ by decade. Female characters were more consistently depicted as attractive compared to male characters, although character’s intelligence, ability, popularity, activity level, family role, story role, and romantic engagement did not differ by gender. Male characters were more often represented as parents or children in films written by women, and female characters were more often represented as the antagonist in films written by men. Male characters were over-represented as overly active in films produced by women, and female characters were over-represented as grandparents in films produced by women. These findings revealed few stereotypical gendered depictions of characters in Disney films over nine decades and that the inclusion of women in the production process resulted in more nuanced depictions of both male and female characters.

     

Examining Links Between Infant Parasympathetic Regulation during the Still-Face Paradigm and Later Callous-Unemotional Traits

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Although research suggests that callous-unemotional (CU) traits are underpinned by deficits in social affiliation and reduced sensitivity to...     

The Protective Effect of Neighbourhood Collective Efficacy On Family Violence and Youth Antisocial Behaviour in Two South Korean Prospective Longitudinal Cohorts

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Neighbourhood collective efficacy has been proposed as a protective factor against family violence and youth antisocial behaviour. However, little...     

Relational Spending in Funerals: Caring for Others Loved and Lost

Funeral rituals perform important social functions for families and communities, but little is known about the motives of people planning funerals. Using mixed methods, we examine funeral planning as end-of-life relational spending. We identify how relational motives drive and manifest in funeral planning, even when the primary recipient of goods and services is dead. Qualitative interviews with consumers who had planned pre-COVID funerals (N = 15) reveal a caring orientation drives funeral decision-making for loved ones and for self-planned funerals. Caring practices manifest in three forms: (a) balancing preferences between the planner, deceased, and surviving family; (b) making personal sacrifices; and (c) spending amount (Study 1). Archival funeral contract data (N = 385) reveal supporting quantitative evidence of caring-driven funeral spending. Planners spend more on funerals for others and underspend on their own funerals (Study 2). Preregistered experiments (N = 1,906) addressing selection bias replicate these results and find generalization across different funding sources (planner-funded, other-funded, and insurance; Studies 3A–3C). The findings elucidate a ubiquitous, emotional, and financially consequential decision process at the end of life.     

Sexual differences in responses of meadow voles to environmental cues in the presence of mink odor

Animal Cognition - In rodents, defensive behaviors increase the chances of survival during a predator encounter. Observable rodent defensive behaviors have been shown to be influenced by the...     

Changes in Politics and Religiosity Among Students at a Protestant University

College is a setting and time of profound change in the lives of emerging adults. This change can include shifts in identity related to politics and religion. Given widespread attention to the alignment of religious people with conservative politics and less religious people with liberal politics (i.e., the “God Gap”), we ask: do college students who become politically liberal lose their religion in the process? Using longitudinal panel data, this study examines changes in political identity and religiosity among students at a Protestant university. Findings reveal changes in students’ politics align with changes in public and private religious behaviors, certainty in belief, agreement with core tenets of the Christian faith, faith maturity, and closeness to God. Whereas students who become more politically conservative increase their religiosity, the inverse is true for those whose politics become more liberal in college.     

A preliminary exploration of predictors of outcome and cognitive mechanisms of change in cognitive behaviour therapy for psychosis in people not taking antipsychotic medication

BackgroundCognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) has been shown to be effective in an open trial for people with psychotic disorders who have not been taking antipsychotic medication. There is little known about predictors of outcome in CBT for psychosis and even less about hypothesised mechanisms of change.Method20 participants with schizophrenia spectrum disorders received CBT in an exploratory trial. Our primary outcome was psychiatric symptoms measured using the PANSS. Secondary outcomes were dimensions of hallucinations and delusions, self-rated recovery and social functioning, and hypothesised mechanisms of change included appraisals of psychotic experiences, dysfunctional attitudes and cognitive insight. We also measured patient characteristics that may be associated with outcome.ResultsT-tests revealed that several of the hypothesised mechanisms did significantly change over the treatment and follow-up periods. Correlational analyses showed that reductions in negative appraisals of psychotic experiences were related to improvements on outcome measures and that shorter duration of psychosis and younger age were associated with greater changes in symptoms.ConclusionsCBT based on a specific cognitive model appears to change the hypothesised cognitive mechanisms, and these changes are associated with good outcomes. CBT may be more effective for those who are younger with shorter histories of psychosis.     

A claw is like my hand: comparison supports goal analysis in infants

Understanding the intentional relations in others' actions is critical to human social life. Origins of this knowledge exist in the first year and are a function of both acting as an intentional agent and observing movement cues in actions. We explore a new mechanism we believe plays an important role in infants' understanding of new actions: comparison. We examine how the opportunity to compare a familiar action with a novel, tool use action helps 7- and 10-month-old infants extract and imitate the goal of a tool use action. Infants given the chance to compare their own reach for a toy with an experimenter's reach using a claw later imitated the goal of an experimenter's tool use action. Infants who engaged with the claw, were familiarized with the claw's causal properties, or learned the associations between claw and toys (but did not align their reaches with the claw's) did not imitate. Further, active participation in the familiar action to be compared was more beneficial than observing a familiar and novel action aligned for 10-month-olds. Infants' ability to extract the goal-relation of a novel action through comparison with a familiar action could have a broad impact on the development of action knowledge and social learning more generally.     

Emotion, directed forgetting, and source memory

We investigated the role of emotion on item and source memory using the item method of directed forgetting (DF) paradigm. We predicted that emotion would produce source memory impairment because emotion would make it more difficult to distinguish between to-be-remembered (R items) and to-be-forgotten items (F items) by making memory strength of R and F items similar to each other. Participants were presented with negatively arousing, positively arousing, and neutral pictures. After each picture, they received an instruction to remember or forget the picture. At retrieval, participants were asked to recall both R and F items and indicate whether each item was an R or F item. Recall was higher for the negatively arousing than for the positively arousing or neutral pictures. Further, DF occurred for the positively arousing and neutral pictures, whereas DF was not significant for the negatively arousing pictures. More importantly, the negatively arousing pictures, particularly the ones with violent content, showed a higher tendency of producing misattribution errors than the other picture types, supporting the notion that negative emotion may produce source memory impairment, even though it is still not clear whether the impairment occurs at encoding or retrieval.