Moral (dis)engagement with anthropogenic climate change in online comments on newspaper articles

Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is widely acknowledged to be morally significant, but little is known about everyday moralising around ACC. We addressed this gap via quantified thematic analysis of 300 online comments to British newspaper articles on ACC, drawing on Bandura's moral disengagement theory. Moral disengagement through denial of ACC was widespread. Other disengagement strategies, such as palliative comparison and diminishing agency, occurred less often. There was also some moral engagement, most often through assertions of the existence of ACC and/or its harmful effects. Moral disengagement was significantly more common in comments on right wing than left wing newspapers, whereas the opposite was true of moral engagement. Although Bandura's framework provided a useful starting point to make sense of ACC moralising, it did not capture moral concerns that extended beyond its “harm/care” remit. In particular, many “denial” comments included a “dishonesty” discourse, whereby ACC proponents were accused of deception for ulterior motives. To classify this discourse as moral disengagement obscures its engagement with a different set of moral issues around trust and honesty. We suggest that Bandura's theory represents one possible “moral landscape” around ACC and could be extended to encompass a broader range of moral concerns.     

Hybridized Indigenous Healing in the Kyrgyz Republic: Helping Survivors of Violence

ABSTRACT

Harmful consequences of civil unrest in 2010, in the Southern region of the Kyrgyz Republic in Osh, continue to have an impact on communities to the present day. One of the most significant effects has been numerous undiagnosed cases of rape and other types of gender-based violence (GBV) that occurred during the interethnic conflict. The true prevalence rate of GBV cases is still unknown. For example, according to official data from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (2011), there were only seven cases of rape during the conflict; however, crisis center reports documented 322 rapes (Molchanova, 2016 Molchanova, E. (2016). Okazanie psihologicheskoi pomoshci licam, postradavshim ot genderno-gonasiliya vo vremya krizisov i chrezvichainih situacii. Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic: AltynPrint Publishing House.  [Google Scholar]). Cultural norms dictate that women who experience GBV hide their “shame,” which is why only a small percentage of victims with PTSD symptoms resulting from GBV seek out services from professionals, such as from crisis centers, psychologists and psychiatrists, and police. Indigenous healers are often the first and only stop for help-seeking. However, the influences of diverse religious beliefs and practices as well as the development of Western-style helping methods in the Kyrgyz Republic have shaped the practice of traditional healing. This hybridization, which is a process of including religious and even medical practices into traditional healing, started in the middle of the 1990s, and now, the extensive networks of traditional healers in the Kyrgyz Republic often combine traditional rituals with Islamic prayer, herbal treatment, massage, and other techniques. This article explores the hybridization of indigenous healing in the Kyrgyz Republic as a consequence of a variety of social transformations, and, as a result of polymorphism, the complexity and clinical variability of posttraumatic symptoms in Kyrgyz cultural settings.     

Fluctuating confidence: the dynamic consequences of true/false affirmatives and denials on how a listener appraises their personal past

The present study examined the mnemonic consequences of true/false denials and affirmatives on how a listener appraises their personal past. To this end, participants (listeners) rated the extent to which they were confident certain events occurred during their childhood. They rated these events both before and after a confederate (speaker) denied or affirmed the occurrence of four different childhood events each, for a total of eight “rehearsed” events. For each set (denials and affirmatives) of events, half were true and half were false. In turn, this created four types of events (two each): true denials, true affirmatives, false denials, and false affirmatives. Additionally, half of the participants were told that the speaker was provided independent information about the veracity of the event’s occurrence (“expert” condition). Overall, listeners were less confident in the occurrence of false denial events, but more so when they believed the speaker to be more knowledgeable of the listeners memories, more confident in false affirmative events and, counter intuitively, more confident in the occurrence of true denial events. These results underscore the importance of a nuanced approach to the mnemonic consequences of true and false denials and affirmations in the course of social interactions.     

Disentangling Child-Specific and Family-Wide Processes Underlying Negative Mother-Child Transactions

The current study examines the transactional processes between maternal negativity and child disruptive behavior during early childhood, using a sibling comparison design. This design allows for a more sophisticated test of the behavioral training hypothesis than is possible when only one child per family is included in the analysis as it excludes two confounders (passive gene-environment correlation and family-wide environmental influence). Three hundred and ninety-seven families were visited on three occasions when the target child was 1.5, 3 and 4.5 years old (920 children, 51.5% female). The target child and up to three older siblings per family were included in data collection and analysis. Mothers and fathers reported on children’s disruptive behavior and mothers reported on their negativity to children. Within-family cross-lag pathways, as well as a significant indirect effect through which children increased their own disruptive behavior via maternal negativity confirmed a behavioral training effect. Family level maternal negativity and sibling disruptive behavior showed high levels of stability over three to four years and no context effect for maternal negativity or sibling disruptive behavior was seen. The theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Mimicry and Investigative Interviewing: Using Deliberate Mimicry to Elicit Information and Cues to Deceit

We examined the effect of deliberate mimicry on eliciting (accurate) information and cues to deceit. Mimicry is considered to facilitate cooperation and compliance in truth tellers, whereas liars are constrained to provide detail. We therefore expected truth tellers to be more detailed than liars, particularly after being mimicked. A total of 165 participants told the truth or lied about a meeting they attended. During the interview, an interviewer mimicked half of the participants. Truth tellers were more detailed than liars, but only in the ‘mimicry present’ condition. Truth tellers also gave more accurate units of information than liars, and the difference was most pronounced in the ‘mimicry present’ condition. Mimicry as a tool for eliciting information and cues to deceit fits well with the emerging ‘interviewing to detect deception’ literature, particularly in the ‘encouraging interviewees to say more’ approach. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perceptions of Private Market Landlords Who Rent to Tenants of a Housing First Program

The rental of housing units by landlords to participants in Housing First (HF) programs is critical to the success of these programs. Therefore, it is important to understand the experiences of landlords with having these individuals as tenants. The paper presents findings of qualitative interviews with 23 landlords who rented to tenants from a HF program located in a small city and adjoining rural area in eastern Canada and in which approximately 75 % of tenants had been housed for at least six consecutive months at 2 years in the program. Findings showed that landlords are motivated to rent to HF tenants for financial and pro‐social reasons. They reported holding a range of positive, neutral, and negative perceptions of these tenants. They identified problems encountered with some HF tenants that included disruptive visitors, conflict with other tenants, constant presence in their apartments, and poor upkeep of units. On the other hand, landlords perceived HF tenants as being mostly good tenants who are similar to their other tenants. Implications for practice in the context of HF programs are discussed.     

Non‐Bayesian Noun Generalization in 3‐ to 5‐Year‐Old Children: Probing the Role of Prior Knowledge in the Suspicious Coincidence Effect

It is unclear how children learn labels for multiple overlapping categories such as “Labrador,” “dog,” and “animal.” Xu and Tenenbaum (2007a) suggested that learners infer correct meanings with the help of Bayesian inference. They instantiated these claims in a Bayesian model, which they tested with preschoolers and adults. Here, we report data testing a developmental prediction of the Bayesian model—that more knowledge should lead to narrower category inferences when presented with multiple subordinate exemplars. Two experiments did not support this prediction. Children with more category knowledge showed broader generalization when presented with multiple subordinate exemplars, compared to less knowledgeable children and adults. This implies a U‐shaped developmental trend. The Bayesian model was not able to account for these data, even with inputs that reflected the similarity judgments of children. We discuss implications for the Bayesian model, including a combined Bayesian/morphological knowledge account that could explain the demonstrated U‐shaped trend.