Letting Oneself Go Isn't Enough: Cognitively Oriented Expressive Writing Reduces Preadolescent Peer Problems

Peer problems are a stressor for many early adolescents, and simple cost‐effective tools for managing peer stress are needed. Expressive writing (EW) may be one such tool. With a sample of middle school children aged 12–14 years (n = 119; 53% males), this research evaluates whether cognitively oriented expressive writing (CEW), which focuses more on psychological self‐distancing, improves personal well‐being better than traditional EW, which focuses more on emotional disclosure. CEW—compared with EW—slightly enhanced long‐term social adjustment for the entire sample, and increased positive affect for those early adolescents that reported more peer problems at baseline. These findings suggest that structured writing instructions with early adolescents may be key to improvements.     

Investigating the exploitative and empowering potential of the prosumption phenomenon

This article underscores the increasing attention devoted to the concept of prosumption in the social sciences, outlines its historical evolution as a phenomenon, and highlights the emergence of a vivid debate about its beneficial or harmful consequences for individuals. It also unveils the importance of the settings in which prosumptive practices are investigated in contributing to the understanding of prosumption as an exploitative or empowering phenomenon. Drawing on the ever‐expanding literature on the topic, 5 main types of prosumption (infra) are presented and their linkage with pessimistic and optimistic analytical and rhetorical strategies underlined.     

Initial agronomic performances of Mediterranean xerophytes in simulated dry green roofs

The growing desire to make the urban environment more sustainable from an ecological point of view has stimulated research on the architectural and agronomic aspects of green roofs. The practical realisation of green roofs, is however limited by economic and ecological issues. More specifically, water availability is the most limiting factor, and is likely to be ever more so in the future in the light of climate change. For this reason, we evaluated the agronomic performance of several xerophytes in a simulated dry green roof. Seeds of 20 species were collected in typically dry habitats (abandoned quarries, rocky soils, dunes, etc.) and studied in the laboratory for germination ecology. In cases of strong dormancy, methods were tested to stimulate germination and their germination ecology was studied. The resulting seedlings were transplanted in spring 2008 in two green roof types that differ in substrate depth (150 and 200 mm) made up of lapil, pumice, zeolites and peat, resting on a drainage layer of hydroperlite. Temperature and humidity in the substrate and drainage layer were measured during the whole test period. Survival of the seedlings in both substrate depths was almost 100%, favoured by a rainy spring. Most of the tested species showed an excellent performance during the hot and dry summer months in terms of survival rates, growth, and vegetation cover dynamics, notwithstanding the difficult ecological conditions (temperatures around 50°C; hydric potential Ψ -15 bars). Furthermore, most of the species had a long flowering stage in the first year of growth. Plants in the green roof with the deeper substrate depth produced, for most of the tested taxa, a significantly higher vegetation cover and growth compared to when they were placed in the 150 mm substrate. The results of this study show that some Mediterranean xerophytes have biological characteristics suitable for their use in dry green roofs, although an irrigation system for emergency use seems advisable. To conclude, further research should focus on long term evaluation of green roof vegetation in terms of plant survival and flowering dynamics.     

EU Children in Brexit Britain: Re-Negotiating Belonging in Nationalist Times

This article contributes to debates on identification, home and belonging by focusing on EU children in Brexit times.¹ The article combines attention to the emotional and affective side of integration with a focus on the effects of the discursive practices of the state on these processes. The article explores how Italian children and their parents navigate the increasingly neo-assimilationist pressures in Britain. Specifically, it looks at children's ways of accommodating their parents’ values of mobility, multilingualism and transnationalism with the revived nationalist logic now dominant. The article argues for renewed scrutiny into the role of public discourses on migrants’ experiences, which illuminate the redrawing of the boundaries between inclusion and exclusion at moments of crisis.     

Cinderella purchasing transformation: linking purchasing status to purchasing practices and business performance

This paper contributes to the on-going debate about the relevance of the purchasing function for the firm value creation. We empirically examine the role of the purchasing function in improving business performance through an international survey based on 653 responses. Results suggest that purchasing practices related to spend rationalisation have a positive impact on the overall business performance, whereas supplier development & integration and sustainable purchasing have not. Moreover, the purchasing recognition by top managers and other organisational units emerge as a powerful antecedent of all purchasing practices. Instead, pure formal authority provided by the position in the organisation chart (i.e. the report level) does not have any influence on purchasing practices adoption.     

Construction and Validation of the Moral Inclusion/Exclusion of Other Groups (MIEG) Scale

Moral exclusion is defined as viewing others as lying beyond the boundary within which moral values and rules of justice apply. In contrast, the process of moral inclusion involves the extension of social justice to several social groups. Thus, both moral inclusion and exclusion are a pivotal dimension in the study of social inequalities. Although the concept of moral inclusion/exclusion has a history of more than 20 years, research still lacks accurate instruments for measuring it. In this article, a first version of a scale that measures moral inclusion/exclusion was constructed and validated. The good reliability and correlation indexes found across the samples suggest that MIEG is a good measure for tapping into moral exclusion/inclusion symptoms.     

LACK OF COMMITMENT AND THE LEVEL OF DEBT

The tendency of countries to accumulate public debt has been rationalized in models of political disagreement and lack of commitment. We analyze in a benchmark model how the evolution of public debt is affected by lack of commitment per se. While commitment introduces indeterminacy in the level of debt, lack of commitment creates incentives for debt to converge to specific levels. One of the levels that debt often converges to implies no debt accumulation at all. In a simple example we prove analytically that debt converges to zero, and we analyze numerically more complex models. We also show in an imperfect credibility setting that a small deviation from full‐commitment is enough to obtain these results.     

Response improvement in complex experiments by co-information composite likelihood optimization

We propose an adaptive procedure for improving the response outcomes of complex combinatorial experiments. New experiment batches are chosen by minimizing the co-information composite likelihood (COIL) objective function, which is derived by coupling importance sampling and composite likelihood principles. We show convergence of the best experiment within each batch to the globally optimal experiment in finite time, and carry out simulations to assess the convergence behavior as the design space size increases. The procedure is tested as a new enzyme engineering protocol in an experiment with a design space size of order 10⁷.     

Disobedience and support for democracy: Evidences from the World Values Survey

For some time, social movement research and political science have studied protests and activists. However, little empirical research attempts to relate movements to the type of social change they endeavour to achieve. In this paper, we suggest that different psychosocial processes may distinguish between different types of movement and protest. In particular, we cross lines between classical social psychology studies on the individual–authority relationship and studies on protest and social movements. We focus attention on the psychological processes triggered in obedience/disobedience. Our results show that when disobedience is associated with attitudes of inclusiveness, it is also positively linked to prodemocratic individual attitudes and to the enhancement of democracy at institutional levels.