The importance of values in predicting Turkish youth's opinions about the European Union in light of the Copenhagen Political Criteria

The enlargement process of the European Union may be regarded as one of the most important social projects of human history in that it is trying to unite several nation-states under a "European identity." As a historically and culturally "distant" candidate, Turkey has been asked to meet a set of expectations referred to as the "Copenhagen Criteria," requiring a series of large-scale reforms to the infrastructure and superstructure of the country. Taking advantage of the unique opportunity to relate Turkish people's opinions on the criteria to their values, hypotheses based on Schwartz's model of values were tested. Schwartz's Personal Values Questionnaire and a questionnaire measuring opinions on the criteria and the Union were completed by 368 Turkish university students. Factor analysis of the opinion items yielded five factors: reduction of military influence in civil life, scepticism towards Europe and the European Union, improvement of human rights and liberties, improvement of minority rights, and lack of transparency in public institutions. Regression analyses showed that values and nationalism were powerful predictors of opinions whereas the effect of religiosity was limited only to the prediction of a preference for the reduction of military influence in civil life. Preference for openness to change values were successful in predicting variance in three of the five criteria: The more the participants favoured these values, the more they supported the improvement of human rights and liberties, the improvement of minority rights, and regretted the lack of transparency. Self-transcendence values were also positively related to support for the same three criteria together with a preference for reduction of military influence. As for nationalism, the results showed that this variable was related negatively to reduction of the military influence, improvement of human rights and liberties, improvement of minority rights; and positively to scepticism.     

Performance boosts in the classroom: Stereotype endorsement and prejudice moderate stereotype lift

The present study (N = 293) examined whether stereotype endorsement and prejudice moderate stereotype lift (i.e., a performance boost caused by the salience of a negative out-group stereotype in the testing situation). The stereotype in the focus of inquiry was the belief that immigrant students have lower intellectual ability than native students. French native high school students performed an intellectual test in a condition of low stereotype salience (the test was presented as assessing individual differences) or in a condition of high stereotype salience (the test was presented as assessing group differences between African immigrants and native students). As expected, results indicated that native students high in stereotype endorsement and those high in prejudice performed better in the high than in the low stereotype salience condition, whereas those low on these constructs did not. By identifying two moderators of stereotype lift, this study sheds new light on the achievement gap between immigrant and native students in educational institutions.     

Racial Differences in Beliefs About the Effectiveness and Necessity of Mental Health Treatment

Members of racial/ethnic minority groups are less likely than Caucasians to access mental health services despite recent evidence of more favorable attitudes regarding treatment effectiveness. The present study explored this discrepancy by examining racial differences in beliefs about how the natural course and seriousness of mental illnesses relate to perceived treatment effectiveness. The analysis is based on a nationally representative sample of 583 Caucasian and 82 African American participants in a vignette experiment about people living with mental illness. While African Americans were more likely than Caucasians to believe that mental health professionals could help individuals with schizophrenia and major depression, they were also more likely to believe mental health problems would improve on their own. This belief was unrelated to beliefs about treatment effectiveness. These findings suggest that a belief in treatment effectiveness may not increase service utilization among African Americans who are more likely to believe treatment is unnecessary.     

Sowing Patriotism,But Reaping Nationalism? Consequences of Exposure to the American Flag

The American flag is a frequently displayed national symbol in the United States. Given its high visibility and importance, the present research examines the consequences of exposure to the flag on Americans' sense of national attachment. We hypothesized that the flag would increase patriotism, defined as love and commitment to one's country, and nationalism, defined as a sense of superiority over others. Two experimental studies supported the idea that the American flag increased nationalism, but not necessarily patriotism. The discussion focuses on the practices surrounding the American flag and its implications for the reproduction of American national identity.     

Bewitchment, biology, or both: the co-existence of natural and supernatural explanatory frameworks across development

Three studies examined the co-existence of natural and supernatural explanations for illness and disease transmission, from a developmental perspective. The participants (5-, 7-, 11-, and 15-year-olds and adults; N = 366) were drawn from 2 Sesotho-speaking South African communities, where Western biomedical and traditional healing frameworks were both available. Results indicated that, although biological explanations for illness were endorsed at high levels, witchcraft was also often endorsed. More important, bewitchment explanations were neither the result of ignorance nor replaced by biological explanations. Instead, both natural and supernatural explanations were used to explain the same phenomena, and bewitchment explanations were highest among adults. Taken together, these data provide insight into how diverse, culturally constructed belief systems about illness co-exist across development.     

Anxiety Symptoms and Fears in Hispanic and European American Children: Cross-Cultural Measurement Equivalence

The cross cultural equivalence of child (n = 217) and parent (n = 283) versions of the revised children’s manifest anxiety scale (RCMAS), multidimensional anxiety scale for children (MASC), and the fear survey schedule for children—revised (FSSC-R) was examined in Mexican youth in Mexico, and Hispanic and white European American youth in the USA. The RCMAS, MASC, and FSSC-R showed cross ethnic measurement equivalence. The Mexican and Hispanic youth reported more worries, and the Mexican youth reported more somatic symptoms than the European American youth. Per mother report, Mexican and Hispanic youth express more somatic symptoms than European American youth who also show the least number of fears of the unknown and fears of danger and death. The results support the validity of commonly used child anxiety measures with these populations and accrue evidence for greater anxiety and fear expression by Hispanic and Mexican youth in certain domains.

Mentoring Relationships and Programs for Youth

ABSTRACT— Mentoring is one of the most popular social interventions in American society, with an estimated three million youth in formal one-to-one relationships. Studies have revealed significant associations between youth involvement in mentoring relationships and positive developmental outcomes. These associations are modest, however, and depend on several intervening processes. Centrally important is the formation of close, enduring connections between mentors and youth that foster positive developmental change. Effects of mentoring programs likewise typically have been small in magnitude, but they increase systematically with the use of program practices likely to support relationship development. Gaps between research and practice are evident both in the indiscriminate use of the term mentoring in the prevention field and in a focus on the growth and efficiency of mentoring programs at the expense of quality. Continued expansion of effective mentoring will require a better alignment of research and practice.     

Third party assisted conception: an African perspective

The central importance of reproduction in all human cultures has given rise to many methods and techniques of assisting reproduction or overcoming infertility. Such methods and techniques have achieved spectacular successes in the Western world, where processes like in vitro fertilization (IVF) constitute a remarkable breakthrough. In this paper, the author attempts to reflect critically on assisted reproduction technologies (ART) from the background and perspective of African culture, a culture within which human reproduction is given the highest priority but which also exhibits a highly ambivalent attitude to modern technology-assisted methods of reproduction. The author considers the ethical crux of reproductive technologies to be linked to the issue of the moral status of the human embryo and argues that a morally significant line of demarcation cannot be drawn between embryos and other categories of humans.     

Developing Sexual Agency: Rethinking Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Theories for the Twenty-First Century

Neo-liberal society asserts that adults should be independent and responsible for themselves, and that children and adolescents should be dependent on their parents. The earlier construction of the concept of adolescence makes this seem obviously true. Yet if we remember that “adolescence” was part of a project of gender, race, and class construction, it becomes easier to ask whether adolescence is a meaningful concept and a stage of life or whether it continues to be a component of an ideology that relies on the construction of “others.” In this chapter, I suggest that adolescence plays the latter role, and that although the naturalization of adolescence is particularly dangerous for groups like queer youth who are at the margins of society, it is dangerous for all young people because it limits sexual agency. This is particularly important because increasingly society requires that young people consider their futures not from the assumption that they will move into well-defined roles, but with the assumption that they will need to define new ways of relating.

Mizuko kuyō in the abortion cultural wars: The rhetorical appropriation of Japanese Buddhism by non-Buddhist Americans

Mizuko kuyō, the popular Japanese Buddhist memorial service for aborted fetuses, has been increasingly appropriated by both sides of the contentious American abortion debate. In the wake of exposure to the idea of mizuko kuyō, both pro-life and pro-choice Buddhist appropriators resort to discussions of the ritual because they feel it helps them strengthen the weaknesses of their own sides and undermine the positions of their opponents. Pro-life Americans use mizuko kuyō to prove that they care about women, not just fetuses, and that their convictions do not arise simply out of private religious feelings but objective psychological and medical facts. Pro-choice Americans, on the other hand, use mizuko kuyō to demonstrate that they care about families and children, not just women, and that they are sensitive not only to the secular but also the religious aspects of life and abortion. In the process, pro-life Christians, who seem to be primarily motivated by their exclusivist and authoritarian Biblical convictions, turn for support to a non-theistic religion they otherwise oppose; pro-choice feminists, who seem to have chiefly secular reasons for supporting abortion rights, turn for support to a supernatural entity and his retinue of angry fetal ghosts.