Religiosity, values, and horizontal and vertical individualism-collectivism: a study of Turkey, the United States, and the Philippines

The authors examined the links between two dimensions that have been useful in understanding cross-cultural differences and similarities, namely, individualism-collectivism (I-C) and value orientations. The authors examined the relations and parallels between the two variables by directly relating them and examining the patterns of relations that both have with a third variable, religiosity. Participants were 475 college students from the Philippines, the United States, and Turkey who responded to measures of horizontal and vertical I-C, value orientations, and religiosity. The authors found partial support for the parallels between I-C and value types, particularly for collectivism and conservative values. Moreover, religiosity was associated positively with conservative values and collectivism, across all three cultures. The authors found individualism to also relate to openness-to-change values, though the patterns were not as consistent as those that they found between collectivism and conservation. Differences and similarities emerged in links of I-C-values to religiosity across the three samples.     

The relationship between productive and counterproductive work behaviour across four European countries

Research suggesting a similar but different relationship between Organizational Citizenship Behaviour (OCB) and Counterproductive Work Behaviour (CWB) is dominated by North American samples. Little evidence exists on whether these findings are replicated in other countries. To assess if a similar pattern emerged, we used the Social Axioms model (Bond et al., 2004) as a cultural framework and surveyed employees in the UK (105), The Netherlands (203), Turkey (185), and Greece (70) on the relationship between OCB and CWB, and the relationship between these behaviours and personality, justice, and commitment. Analysis supported a multidimensional structure to OCB and CWB and indicated a nonbipolar relationship between these behaviours. Culturally, somewhat different to OCB research in general, we find support for a convergence perspective across countries. Conceptually, linguistically and structurally the scale assessing OCB/CWB was shown to be equivalent across countries and a nonbipolar pattern of relationships was consistent across countries. Overall, findings imply a universal nature to the relationship between OCB and CWB across societal cultural groups.     

An empirical study of some demographic and work-related variables on job satisfaction of academics in a Turkish university

The Job Satisfaction Survey was administered to 610 faculty in a university in North Cyprus. As expected, job satisfaction increased with rank, and those who held administrative positions were more satisfied than staff who did not. The longer the participants had served in the current university, the higher their rated job satisfaction. Job satisfaction of women in higher academic positions was higher than that of their male peers. Age was not correlated with increases in job satisfaction.     

Memory-Based Hypothesis Formation: Heuristic Learning of Commonsense Causal Relations from Text

We present a memory-based approach to learning commonsense causal relations from episodic text. The method relies on dynamic memory that consists of events, event schemata, episodes, causal heuristics, and causal hypotheses. The learning algorithms are based on applying causal heuristics to precedents of new information. The heuristics are derived from principles of causation, and, to a limited extent, from domain-related causal reasoning. Learning is defined as finding—and later augmenting—inter-episodal and intea-episodal causal connections. The learning algorithms enable inductive generalization of causal associations into AND/OR graphs. The methodology has been implemented and tested in the program NEXUS.     

Perception of homosexuality among Turkish university students: the roles of labels, gender, and prior contact

The author examined three questions: (a) What constitutes participants' causal attributions for the labels "gay," "lesbian," and "homosexual"?; (b) Do participants' attitudes vary by labels?; and (c) Do participants' attitudes vary with previous social contact with homosexuals? Participants were 334 university students (140 women, 194 men). Three labels--"gay," "lesbian," and "homosexual"--served as probes. The author investigated participants' attributions toward causes of homosexuality with Principal-Component Analysis (PCA) and obtained 4 components: disorder, problems, modeling or sensation seeking, and preference. The author found the most negative attitudes toward the label "gay." Finally, participants who had previous contact with homosexual people held more positive attitudes toward homosexuality than did the others. The author also obtained some gender differences. The author discussed the results in the light of the current literature.     

Cross-cultural differences in distributive justice: a comparison of Turkey and the U.S

When allocators make decisions about distributing resources, they face a dilemma if the expectations for consequences that will flow from particular choices are incongruent with each other. For example, a certain allocation choice might be expected to make an allocator appear warm and likable but unfair. Previous research has found that culture can shape these perceptions and, thus, their congruence or incongruence. The present study further investigated these ideas. Differences between Turkish and U.S. students' perceptions of allocators who distributed resources on the basis of merit vs. need were investigated. Results revealed an allocation dilemma among the U.S. but not among the Turkish students. Specifically, the U.S. students perceived greater incongruence among allocation consequences for both merit and need choices than did the students from Turkey for whom perceptions of allocator's fairness were more aligned with perceptions of allocator's warmth.     

The effect of cultural orientation and leadership style on self‐ versus other‐oriented organizational citizenship behaviour in Turkey and the Netherlands

This paper investigated the effects of a paternalistic and empowering leadership style on organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) in an experimental design using 100 Turkish and 100 Dutch students who held part‐time jobs. Confirming our expectations, a paternalistic leadership style had a more positive effect on job dedication and organizational support in Turkey than in the Netherlands. Contradicting our expectations, an empowering leadership style did not have a more positive effect on any of the OCB dimensions in the Netherlands than it did in Turkey. However, in the Netherlands an empowering leadership style had a stronger effect on interpersonal facilitation, job dedication, and organizational support than a paternalistic leadership style. Paternalistic and empowering leadership styles both had positive effects on OCB dimensions in Turkey. As expected, collectivism moderated the relationship between paternalistic leadership style and other oriented OCB (i.e., interpersonal facilitation). Specifically, people who had more collectivistic tendencies were more positively influenced by a paternalistic leader than people who had low collectivistic tendencies in both countries. However, individualism did not have any moderating effects on the relationship between empowering leadership style and self‐oriented OCB (i.e., job dedication). Our findings are relevant for understanding the effects of leadership styles and cultural orientations on self‐ versus other‐oriented OCB in Turkey and the Netherlands.     

Home-Based Early Education for Refugee and Local Children via Mothers: A Model of Contextually Sensitive Early Intervention

Journal of Child and Family Studies - Contextually sensitive home-visiting programs can foster positive parenting and enhance child development and learning especially among vulnerable families...     

Cognitive control of a simple mental image in patients with obsessive--compulsive disorder

The nature of obsessions has led researchers to try to determine if the main problem in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is impaired inhibitory control. Previous studies report that the effort to suppress is one of the factors that increase the frequency of obsessive thoughts. Based on these results and those of the present study that suggest inferior parietal lobe (IPL) abnormality in OCD and findings of a recent study that reported the importance of the right posterior parietal cortex in cognitive control of a simple mental image, the present cognitive control paradigm study aimed to determine whether there is a difference in brain dynamics between OCD patients and non-obsessive controls while performing tasks that necessitate cognitive control of a simple mental image, and whether the right posterior parietal region is one of the regions in which a difference in activity between the OCD patients and controls would be observed. Functional brain imaging was performed while the participants attempted to suppress, imagine, or manipulate a mental image. The general linear model showed that there was a main effect of group and main effect of task. Accordingly, in all contrasts (suppression minus free-imagination, erasing minus free-imagination, and imagination minus free-imagination), the right IPL, right posterior cingulate cortex, and right superior frontal gyrus activity were lower in the OCD patients than in the healthy controls. These results and the observed correlations between activity levels, and symptom and subjective performance scores are discussed. In conclusion, the results of the present study and those of previous studies suggest that the main problem in OCD might be difficulty activating the right frontoparietal networks during tasks that require cognitive control, which might result in the intrusiveness of obsessive thoughts.     

Forced Migrants or Voluntary Exiles: Ethnic Turks of Bulgaria in Turkey

Turkey has been experiencing various types of migration flows since the foundation of the Republic in 1923. Migration of ethnic Turks of Bulgaria in 1989 is one of the important immigration waves in size and in nature as well. More than 350,000 Bulgarian Turks refusing to assimilation policies of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) fled to Turkey in 1989. Behind this triggering political reason, there were deeper sources of this migration, such as economic, social, institutional and cultural exclusion/inclusion problems in Bulgaria. Furthermore, most of the Turks of Bulgaria kept the idea of migrating to their “imagined motherland’ someday. The same migrants have been experiencing integration/exclusion problems where they settled in Turkey, too. This paper attempts to open a conceptual debate by using concepts of ‘mixed migration”, ‘accidental diaspora’ and ‘voluntary exiles’ to overcome the ‘forced and voluntary’ dichotomy in this literature, rather than analysing all the dimensions in detail. Hence, the multiple dimensions of this migration will be tried to be understood via the perceptions of migrants.