Child Anger Regulation, Parental Responses to Children's Anger Displays, and Early Child Antisocial Behavior

The display and regulation of child anger in family interaction was coded in a sample of 240 boys and girls at child age 6, and coded using the Specific Affect Coding System. Child antisocial behavior was longitudinally assessed, beginning in kindergarten. Pooled‐ and family‐level analyses were used to assess hazard rates for child anger. Parents’ ability to modulate their own emotions and negative behavior, and children's ability to down‐regulate anger were associated with increased latency for child anger. Hazard for child anger increased as parents’ insensitive and negative responses toward the child cumulated during family interaction. Macro‐level, non‐hazard analyses indicated that chronic levels of child antisocial behavior were associated with the frequency of parental negative behavior, but not with the frequency of child anger. Micro‐level hazard analyses indicated that children's ability to regulate anger was related to chronic levels of child covert but not overt antisocial behavior.     

A cumulative ecological–transactional risk model of child maltreatment and behavioral outcomes: Reconceptualizing early maltreatment report as risk factor

The current analysis was designed to critically examine the tendency to focus on child maltreatment as a unique risk factor and test the resulting assumption of a direct causal relationship between early maltreatment and later behavioral problems. The variation seen in behavioral outcomes among children reported for maltreatment early in life led us to hypothesize that the cumulative level of risk facing children and their families can, at least in part, account for that variation in outcome. Participants were 242 mothers of predominantly at-risk newborn infants who were interviewed shortly after giving birth. The State Central Registry of Maltreatment was then reviewed over each child's first four years of life to assess for early maltreatment. Following the neonatal interviews, mothers completed the Child Behavior Checklist when their children were 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 years-of-age. Although early maltreatment report does appear to be important to early child functioning, the cumulative level of risk more strongly predicts long-term clinical behavioral difficulty. High-risk children who were not reported for maltreatment by age 4 demonstrate greater behavioral problem trajectories than did low-risk children with a maltreatment report. Maltreatment itself may be best conceptualized as an important, but not singularly so, risk factor for later behavioral problems. In focusing directly on reported maltreatment, our child protective systems may be paying too little attention to what else is going wrong in the lives of children and targeting intervention efforts in the wrong direction. When it comes to early maltreatment our child protective policy and practice need to broaden their lenses to include greater emphasis on overall family functioning, stress and well-being. Early maltreatment, it seems, may be a symptom of more profound problems in the early environments of our most vulnerable children, rather than the problem itself.     

Individual Participation in Collective Action in the Context of a Caribbean Island State: Testing the Effects of Multiple Dimensions of Social Capital

This article presents the findings of a case study examining the relationship between social capital and individual participation in collective action on a Caribbean island recovering from devastation inflicted by Hurricanes Ivan and Emily. Using data drawn from 114 residential surveys on the island of Carriacou, Grenada, over the summer of 2006, we empirically test social capital as a predictor of individual participation in both formal and informal civic events. In addition, we further the theoretical development of the concept of social capital by independently testing the relationships between its multiple dimensions, specifically social networks; interpersonal trust; and norms of reciprocity. We find that associational membership and age are the two strongest predictors, while interpersonal trust, gender, and marital status are also significant. Our path analysis reveals that there is not a significant direct effect between associational membership and interpersonal trust, suggesting that the two dimensions may have independent, yet complementary, influences. This study sheds light on factors influencing citizen participation in “civic” forms of collective action in a developing region of the world, while demonstrating the multidimensional nature of social capital.     

College Student Behavior: A Ten-Year Look

Abstract

Lester and Perez¹ have suggested that student behavior can be usefully construed in terms of a traditional-hedonic, implicit value system. They demonstrated that drug use and sexual activity provide simple behavioral anchors for this dimension, and observed an increasingly hedonic orientation among students. Ten years after their initial study, the student population at the same institution was again sampled using an anonymous questionnaire. The 1980 sample included 208 subjects, and these were compared with 688 subjects who responded to the 1970 survey. This comparison was supplemented by an intensive week-long study of 53 students within one campus living unit.

Significant increases in pre-college sexual activity were noted for both men and women. Marijuana use in high school also increased for both men and women during this period, while alcohol use increased only among women. Previously observed differences between male and female pre-college sexual activity and marijuana use had largely disappeared by 1980. Significant increases in sexual activity while in college were found for women but not for men. For men, overall marijuana and alcohol use in college did not change during the study period, but there was an increase in the frequent use of these drugs. Increases in all categories of marijuana use were noted among women, along with overall increases in their alcohol use. The significant differences between male and female marijuana use noted in the 1970 study were absent in 1980. The intensive week-long study revealed that alcohol use was part of the daily lives of one-third to two-thirds of the students sampled, although they reported interpersonal conflicts, absences from class, accidents, and injuries among the consequences of their drinking. A significant inverse relationship between sleep and alcohol use was observed among women, but not among men.

These data suggest that student behavior has become increasingly hedonic during the past ten years, with women in particular closing the gap which previously differentiated their behavior from that of their male peers. Institutions of higher learning must take these changes into account in the planning of academic programs, residential life, and health services.     

Extended generalised Pareto models for tail estimation

The most popular approach in extreme value statistics is the modelling of threshold exceedances using the asymptotically motivated generalised Pareto distribution. This approach involves the selection of a high threshold above which the model fits the data well. Sometimes, few observations of a measurement process might be recorded in applications and so selecting a high quantile of the sample as the threshold leads to almost no exceedances. In this paper we propose extensions of the generalised Pareto distribution that incorporate an additional shape parameter while keeping the tail behaviour unaffected. The inclusion of this parameter offers additional structure for the main body of the distribution, improves the stability of the modified scale, tail index and return level estimates to threshold choice and allows a lower threshold to be selected. We illustrate the benefits of the proposed models with a simulation study and two case studies.     

Darwin's final message: we have no honour

There is much talk currently about the genetic basis of violence and crime. Yet far from undermining the National Children's Bureau (NCB) position that ‘children are not born violent: they are made so', evolutionary biology wholeheartedly endorses this view. From Darwin to Dawkins, the NCB stance is affirmed. Unfortunately, the war that has been running for over a quarter of a century within Darwinism has allowed certain evolutionary heretics to promote their agenda instead. Between the heretics' flawed understanding of genetics, and their defence of the anti‐scientific concept of ‘free will', we continue to abuse the unluckiest and most vulnerable children in our society. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself 'White': White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa Before the First World War

The white working classes in the pre-First World War British Empire were not composed of 'nationally' discrete entities, but were bound together into an Imperial working class by flows of population which traversed the world. The labour movements based on this imperial working class produced and disseminated a common ideology of White Labourism. In this ideology, the element of the critique of exploitation and the element of racism were inextricably intermingled. The paper seeks to identify a few of the many 'vectors' along which white labourist ideology moved around the world. The paper ends with a discussion of the British labour movement response to the 1914 deportations of South African white labour leaders, which seeks to demonstrate how integral to that movement the conceptions of White Labourism had become.     

Social Control and Emotions

This is the first article in Symbolic Interaction's symposium in tribute to Tamotsu (Tom) Shibutani (1920–2004). The author, a student in Shibutani's graduate course on social control, discusses his teacher's ideas and their evolution into his own. The article provides ample basis for the author's observation: a scholar's contribution can be measured not only by the cumulative corpus of his or her published work, but also by the influence that this individual has had on the work of others.     

The Development of Intergroup Forgiveness in Northern Ireland

As societies like Northern Ireland, Israel, and South Africa strive to resolve social conflict, there is growing theoretical and empirical interest in the role of intergroup forgiveness. This study examined intergroup forgiveness among 340 young adults in Northern Ireland. A short form of the Enright Forgiveness Inventory explored possible influences on propensity to forgive. All participants were Catholic and female (mean age 17.36 years), and had experienced verbal or physical injury or bereavement due to the Northern Irish political violence. Overall forgiveness levels were low in comparison with previous studies of interpersonal forgiveness but similar to previous studies of intergroup forgiveness in Northern Ireland. The strongest (negative) predictor of forgiveness was the perceived degree of hurt caused by the injury .