Character Attacks and Their Effects on Perceptions of Male and Female Political Candidates

The study examined the perceptions of political candidates (male and female) who make negative statements about the personality and integrity of their political opponents. Male and female participants (Sex of Participant factor) indicated their impressions of a male or female political candidate (Sex of Candidate factor) who either attacked or did not attack the character of his/her opponent (Attack factor) in a political leadership debate. Participants who read a speech given by a candidate of their own gender tended to rate the candidate as having greater integrity when the candidate attacked his/her opponent than when he/she did not. When judging a candidate of the opposite gender, participants tended to rate the candidate who attacked his/her opponent as having less integrity than a candidate who did not attack his/her opponent. Results are discussed with regard to the impact that aggressive campaign tactics can have on voter perceptions, and how similarity between voters and candidates may affect perceptions of such tactics.     

Victims,Their Stories,and Our Rights

Diana Meyers argues that breaking the silence of victims and attending to their stories are necessary steps towards realizing human rights. Yet using highly personal victims' stories to promote human rights raises significant moral concerns, hence Meyers suggests that before victims' stories can be accessed and used, it is morally imperative that requirements of informed consent and non‐retraumatization are secured. This article argues that while Meyers' proviso is important, and necessary, it may not be sufficient. First, one potential problem with seeking to secure “informed consent” is that one has to ask for the consent, and in the act of asking one is potentially retraumatizing the victim. Secondly, the assumption that victims have ownership right over their stories, which is a key premise in Meyers's argument, is much more problematic than may appear.     

Use of a reference group in researching children’s views of psychotherapy in Malta

This paper explores the process and outcomes of a children’s reference group within the context of child psychotherapy research in residential care. The reference group was set up to consult children about the design of a research project which seeks to evoke, represent and understand children’s views of psychotherapy. No work to date has explored the experience of reference groups in the context of child psychotherapy in residential care in Malta. The paper contextualises the research within the literature on reference groups in child research, which identifies the potential of reference groups as a participative and co-reflexive activity which can inform research design. The paper critically examines the nature and conduct of the reference group by acknowledging the specific context of this work rather than assuming this is necessarily positive. It does so by specifying and evaluating the outcomes of the reference group in line with its aims. The paper draws on the recordings of the reference group meetings and reference group field notes taken by the researcher as key data which were thematically analysed. The main outcomes of the reference group include children’s contribution to the design of data collection methods especially in terms of not relying only on words during data collection. Children also identified key ethical issues from the point of view of young psychotherapy service users, especially in relation to issues of trust within a residential care context. Children also reviewed and appraised research information material. The reference group process drew from the researcher’s and participants’ contexts and contributed significantly to the researcher’s reflexive process especially in terms of acknowledging his power and positioning as an adult and his dual role as a practitioner/researcher.     

Post-Discharge Experiences of People with Psychosis Following Partial Hospital Program Completion

Partial hospital programs are day programs which act as a bridge between inpatient and outpatient care for people with severe and persistent mental illness. This study explored the gap that exists in understanding the post-discharge experiences of people who have experienced psychosis. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 8 participants with psychosis, at least 4 weeks after completing partial hospital program. Identified themes included improved sense of wellness, changes in structure/routine, accessing community resources, social support and engagement, engagement in leisure, and impact of medication. Occupational therapists can use these findings to enhance programming at partial hospital programs and other similar programs.     

Maya Moral and Ritual Discourse: Dialogical Groundings for Consuetudinary Law

Toward the end of the twentieth century, Highland Maya intellectuals and activists in Guatemala began to argue for the recognition of indigenous customary law, rooted in traditional Maya moral and ritual discourse. Such law is often in tension with the Western notion of rights (grounded in the idea of universal reason) that undergirds national and international treatises regarding indigenous peoples. This essay identifies three distinct but mutually engaged pairs of moral concepts—hot/cold, left/right (or positive/negative), and favorable/not favorable—articulated through K'iche' Maya quotidian and ceremonial practices and speech. It also identifies the extent to which they do not necessarily align with Western (Abrahamic and religious) notions of good and bad. These three pairs of moral terms, specifically as conserved through the high‐register of Maya discourse used by traditional ceremonial specialists, illustrate a normative means by which Highland Maya discern understandings of justice, and ground their advocacy for restorative (rather than retributive or punitive) justice.     

Theosis and Baptist–Orthodox Discussions

Baptist–Orthodox discussions could take the shape of a continuous and constructive dialogue if their historical understandings of the Bible are investigated based on their specific perspectives on doctrine. Concretely, the idea of theosis, present in Greek Patristics and later used by the Eastern Orthodox Church as deification, can be investigated by Baptists in at least three distinct ways: as Christification, as participation, or as perichoresis. All these are prevalent in the works of contemporary Baptist theologians such as Dongsun Cho (United States), Paul Fiddes (United Kingdom), and Emil Barto? (Romania). Based on the foundation provided by theosis and its range of interpretations, the Baptist–Orthodox dialogue can be further strengthened by a series of common concerns such as apologetics, evangelism, politics, economics, social work, and education.     

Creative Actions Scale: A Spanish Scale of Creativity in Different Domains

This article introduces the Creative Actions Scale (CAS), a Spanish self‐report assessment of individual differences in creative actions. The CAS consists of independent scales that assess the frequency of engagement in everyday creative actions across seven domains: Literature, Plastic Arts and Crafts, Science and Technology, Scenic Arts, Music, Social Participation, and Everyday Creativity. The sample included 1604 men and women who lived in different provinces in Argentina. The participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 94 years. All of the participants spoke Spanish and had an average socioeconomic level. People with different levels of education were included in the sample. We applied the following data collection instruments: CAS, Biographical Inventory of Creative Behaviors, and Domains of Creativity Scale. The analysis provided evidence of internal consistency and validity of the CAS. The confirmatory factor analysis showed an adequate fit of the seven‐domain model. The results also showed significant differences according to gender in some CAS domains. Inclusion of the Social Participation and Everyday Creativity domains is novel and useful for assessing creativity in the Spanish‐speaking population.     

Political participation and basic values in Europe: Replication and extension of Vecchione et al. (2015)

Vecchione et al. (Br J Psychol, 106 , 2015, 84) demonstrated the effects of four higher-order values on political participation across 20 European countries. In their Study 1, they found that political participation was related to three higher-order basic values and that these associations were stronger in more democratic countries. The present study attempted a replication using a more rigorous modelling approach. Multilevel structural equation models with latent variables for both participation and basic values replicated the main effects of Self-Transcendence and Conservation values but demonstrated negative effects of Openness values (vs. positive in the original study) and positive effects of Self-Enhancement values (vs. ambiguous or insignificant in the original study), while cross-level interactions indicated weaker effects of values in more democratic countries (vs. the opposite in the original study). These discrepancies appeared mostly due to the original study’s implicit assumption that basic values’ measurement errors were zero. The new results indicated a counter-intuitive similarity of effects of supposedly opposite values. Self-Transcendence–Self-Enhancement is suggested to be a politically motivating value dimension, whereas Openness to Change–Conservation is a dimension that discourages political participation regardless of the preferred extreme.     

Decolonizing Feminism Through Intersectional Praxis

Transnational feminism should have normative force and be anti-imperialist. This article addresses the possibility of an anti-imperialist transnational feminism in conversation with Serene Khader’s Decolonizing Universalism. Khader argues that the key to an anti-imperialist feminism is separating universalism from the features that result in imperialism, such as ethnocentrism and justice monism. This article shares Khader’s commitment to anti-imperialist feminism and further explores three relevant issues: human rights, the definition of feminism, and economic justice. It proposes a decolonizing view of rights that advocates a critical examination of their uses, applications, and origins. It argues that transnational feminism should engage with issues of economic justice. And it proposes that feminism as an intersectional praxis should include normative dimensions in addition to antisexism, such as antiracism and economic justice.     

Assessing Community Participation: Comparing Self‐Reported Participation Data with Organizational Attendance Records

How well do self‐reported levels of community and organizational participation align with recorded acts of community and organizational participation? This study explores this question among participants in social action community organizing initiatives by comparing responses on a community participation scale designed to retrospectively assess community participation (T1, n = 482; T2, n = 220) with individual participants' attendance records in various social action organizing activities over two 1‐year periods. By testing the self‐reported measure's overall and item‐by‐item association with documented participation in various types of organizing activities, we find that the self‐report measure is positively, but weakly correlated with actual participation levels in community organizing activities. Moreover, associations between self‐report and recorded acts of participation differ by types of activity. Examining this unique source of data raises important questions about how community participation is conceptualized and measured in our field. Implications are explored for theory and measurement of participation in community and organizational contexts.