Global Mental Health: A Call for Increased Awareness and Action for Family Therapists

Global mental health (GMH) is an emerging field that focuses on the need for culturally sensitive mental health services in low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs). While many new initiatives have been established worldwide to understand GMH needs and to provide care in LMICs, family therapists have primarily worked with families in high‐income countries. The few existing family‐based initiatives in GMH focus on psychoeducation and are typically not based on general systems theory. However, emerging trends in family therapy may enable family therapists to impact mental health issues in LMICs. These trends, which are shared interests of both family therapy and GMH, include collaborative care, a growing emphasis on the importance of culture in understanding and treating mental health issues, recognition of the ability of families to support or impede recovery from mental illness, and the use of strength‐based and evidence‐based treatments. This paper describes ways for family therapists to become active in the GMH community.     

Global dot integration in typically developing children and in Williams Syndrome

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that results in deficits in visuospatial perception and cognition. The dorsal stream vulnerability hypothesis in WS predicts that visual motion processes are more susceptible to damage than visual form processes. We asked WS participants and typically developing children to detect the global structure Glass patterns, under “static” and “dynamic” conditions in order to evaluate this hypothesis. Sequentially presented Glass patterns are coined as dynamic because they induce illusory motion, which is modeled after the interaction between orientation (form) and direction (motion) mechanisms. If the dorsal stream vulnerability holds in WS participants, then they should process real and illusory motion atypically. However, results are consistent with the idea that form and motion integration mechanisms are functionally delayed or attenuated in WS. Form coherence thresholds for both static and dynamic Glass patterns in WS were similar to those of 4–5 year old children, younger than what is predicted by mental age. Dynamic presentation of Glass patterns improved thresholds to the same degree as typical participants. Motion coherence thresholds in WS were similar to those of mental age matches. These data pose constraints on the dorsal vulnerability hypothesis, and refine our understanding of the relationship between form and motion processing in development.     

Cosmopolitan ethics and global legalism

This article analyses the legal and ethical dimensions of the wide gap between commitments to universal human rights and the reality of their widespread and systematic abuse, particularly as related to poverty and inequality. The argument put forward is that, properly conceived, global legalism, that is, the quest to apply the rule of law across and among states and societies, and cosmopolitan ethics, both support restricting harms imposed on weak and vulnerable individuals worldwide by an unjust institutional order. Therefore, those who have tended to value either a global rule of law or cosmopolitan ethics independently have good reason to pursue their requirements together. The article also considers the problem of legalism and cosmopolitanism being used by powerful agents in global politics to enhance their prerogatives and their freedoms from legal and ethical restraints.     

Carry-over effects in face recognition: Processing mode or attentional window?

This study investigates whether or not the dominant processing mode (global or local) in a Navon task is carried over to a face recognition task when the dominant processing mode (configural or featural) in an encoding phase is manipulated. In Experiment 1, Navon figures that were equal in size to a facial photograph were prepared. Participants performed better on the face recognition task after reading large letters in the Navon figures than after reading small letters when configural processing was required in the encoding phase. In Experiment 2, Navon figures that were equal in size to the parts of a face were prepared. The performance after reading large letters did not differ from that after reading small letters. This suggests that both the dominant processing mode in Navon tasks and the size of Navon figures should be considered when discussing the effects of Navon tasks in face recognition.     

The physical environment and child development: An international review

A growing body of research in the United States and Western Europe documents significant effects of the physical environment (toxins, pollutants, noise, crowding, chaos, and housing, school and neighborhood quality) on children and adolescents' cognitive and socioemotional development. Much less is known about these relations in other contexts, particularly the global South. We thus briefly review the evidence for relations between child development and the physical environment in Western contexts, and discuss some of the known mechanisms behind these relations. We then provide a more extensive review of the research to date outside of Western contexts, with a specific emphasis on research in the global South. Where the research is limited, we highlight relevant data documenting the physical environment conditions experienced by children, and make recommendations for future work. In these recommendations, we highlight the limitations of employing research methodologies developed in Western contexts (Ferguson & Lee, 2013). Finally, we propose a holistic, multidisciplinary, and multilevel approach based on Bronfenbrenner's (1979) bioecological model to better understand and reduce the aversive effects of multiple environmental risk factors on the cognitive and socioemotional development of children across the globe.     

The State,Democracy, and Development in Southern Africa

Development cannot be left to the “magic wand” of market forces alone. This observation has been vindicated by the dismal failure of the IMF/World Bank policies in Africa since the 1970s/80s. That development needs an active state participation and some deliberately dirigiste policies brooks no controversy. Interestingly, even the World Bank has begrudgingly come to accept the centrality of the state in development after peddling policies premised on market fundamentalism for decades. Consensus is now emerging in development discourses in Africa that both states and markets do play an important complimentary role in the development process. The idea that this article canvasses is that both democracy and development need a robust, capable, democratic developmental state. A democratic developmental state operates in such a way that it leaves ample room for other key non-state actors to make their critical input in the development agenda and the democratization process. The article revisits the debate on the post-colonial state; interrogates challenges for democratic governance and sustainable human development; revisits the nexus between democracy and development in the context of Southern Africa. It further investigates the impact of the current process of accelerated globalization on the state, democratization, and development project in the SADC region.     

Pleasant emotional induction broadens the visual world of young children

These experiments aimed at studying the influence of emotional context on global/local visual processing in children. Children 5 years old, known to present an immature global visual bias, and 8 years old, known to pay attention predominantly to global information, were placed in either a neutral or pleasant emotional context and subsequently presented with a global/local visual judgement task. As with previous findings for adults, both age groups presented a pronounced perceptual bias toward global information following exposure to emotionally pleasant pictures. Interestingly, younger children, who do not present a global bias during the neutral exposure, presented the same preference for global information as older children when exposed to the pleasant context. These findings indicate that emotion may strongly affect visual perception in children, with important implications for educational practice and models of cognition.     

Separating global and specific factors in developmental dyslexia

The general goal of the study was to identify global and specific components in developmental dyslexia using various manipulations based on the rapid automatization paradigm (RAN). In two experiments, we used both factor analysis and the Rate-and-Amount Model to verify if one (or more) global factor(s) and a variety of specific effects contribute to the naming (and visual search) deficits in children with dyslexia.

Results of Experiment 1 indicated the presence of three global components: pictorial naming, detailed orthographic analysis, and visual search. Pictorial naming is predicated by typical RAN tasks (such as naming colors or objects), independent of set size, but also from a variety of other tasks including Stroop interference conditions. The detailed orthographic analysis factor accounts for naming of orthographic stimuli at high set size. Visual search marked tasks requiring the scanning of visual targets.

Results of Experiment 2 confirmed the separation between the pictorial naming and detailed orthographic analysis factors both in the original sample and in a new group of children. Furthermore, specific effects of frequency, lexicality, and length were shown to contribute to the reading deficit.

Overall, it is proposed that focusing on the profile of both global and specific effects provides a more effective and, at the same time, simpler account of the dyslexics' impairment.     

De/geneticizing Caste: Population Genetic Research in South Asia

Recent years have witnessed a number of population genetics studies aiming to explore the ‘genetic profile’ of the South Asian population and of the caste system. This paper examines four genetic studies and their mass media representations, and discusses interviews with leading historians and social scientists whose work has focused on issues of the caste system. Similar to earlier commentators—from colonial scholars and administrators to Hindu reformers and nationalists—who provided different explanations for the origin of the caste system, recent genetic studies have offered conflicting inferences on the nature of castes and tribes of the subcontinent. These studies, the way they were received on the subcontinent, and assayed by historians of caste, tell a story about agendas of geneticization competing with forces of resistance. On the one hand, they signal a new interest in the debate about the relationship between caste and ‘ethnicity’; on the other hand, they are used selectively by different social groups to strengthen their own political agendas, are denied cognitive validity by historians of caste, and never reach a consensus about the history of caste formation.     

Switching between global and local scopes of attention is resisted near the hands

Recently, several changes in perception, attention, and visual working memory have been reported when stimuli are near to compared to far from the hands, suggesting that such stimuli receive enhanced scrutiny. A mechanism that inhibits the disengagement of attention from objects near the hands, thus forcing a more thorough inspection, has been proposed to underlie such effects. Up until now, this possibility has been tested only in a limited number of tasks. In the present study we examined whether changes in one's global or local attentional scope are similarly affected by hand proximity. Participants analysed stimuli according to either their global shape or the shape of their constituent local elements while holding their hands near to or far from the stimuli. Switches between global and local processing were markedly slower near the hands, reflecting an attentional mechanism that compels an observer to more fully evaluate objects near their hands by inhibiting changes in attentional scope. Such a mechanism may be responsible for some of the changes observed in other tasks, and reveals the special status conferred to objects near the hands.