Associations between Students’ Perceptions of the Psychosocial School Environment and Indicators of Subjective Health in Finnish Comprehensive Schools

The study examined how far students’ perceptions of the psychosocial school environment are associated with self‐rated health, life satisfaction and subjective health complaints. Students’ perceptions were associated with one or more indicators of subjective health. Perceived health was better in direct proportion to positive perceptions. Student relations and school strain were the factors that stood out in both genders, with regard to all the health indicators. School engagement, parental support and educational aspiration were found to be important for overall perceived health of the students. This study indicates the importance of the psychosocial school environment for students’ health.     

Women Who Work: The limits of the neoliberal feminist paradigm

This article examines Ivanka Trump's Women Who Work, arguing that it represents the newest permutation of the neoliberal feminist subject. After providing an overview of the recent emergence of neoliberal feminism, I explain why the book should be considered part of the wider cultural landscape in which this variant of feminism has increasingly become commonsensical. I then turn to demonstrate how Women Who Work construes the ideal female subject not only as generic human capital but also incites her to invest in herself constantly, where activities ranging from professional workshops through hobbies to friendships are understood as practices that appreciate the value of the self. The conversion of women into generic rather than gendered human capital remains, however, incomplete, since the ideal of a happy work–family balance continues to serve as a push back to the wholesale erasure of traditional notions of sexual difference. Finally, I highlight that neoliberal feminism is erasing other long‐standing divisions and political differences. Not only does the private–public divide collapse, but so, too, does the distinction between one's private self and one's public enterprise as the self itself becomes an enterprise. This dual process of collapse and reconfiguration shapes the newest neoliberal feminist subject, the main protagonist of Trump's Women Who Work.     

Why spouses depress each other: A cross‐national study to test the shared resource hypothesis in depressive symptom concordance within older adult couples

The shared resource hypothesis suggests that married couples share the same environmental resources, which shape their health concordance. This study tests its cross‐national applicability. Cross‐sectional 2012–2013 Health and Retirement Study data from China, England, Mexico, and the United States were analyzed. Heterosexual couples (age ≥60) who were married or partnered were studied (N = 20,565 pairs). Dyadic data were analyzed by multilevel models to examine the effect of self and spousal social and physical health statuses on depressive symptoms. Regression models were used to test the relationship between couples' shared resources and depressive symptom concordance. Results indicated both husbands and wives' depressive symptoms were associated with their own and spouses' social and health statuses. Most couple‐level resources were insignificant predictors for Chinese and Mexican couples' concordance, but having more social and financial resources was associated with higher concordance among British and American couples. Self‐reported health was the most consistent predictor in all countries. The shared resource hypothesis was more applicable to depressive symptom concordance within couples in the United States and England, but not in China and Mexico. Couple‐centered intervention is suggested for clinical practice, and the spousal effect should be considered in policymaking.     

Comfort with discussions about death,religiosity, and attitudes about end‐of‐life care

In end‐of‐life (EOL) care research, death anxiety and religiosity are often overlooked. Terror management theory (TMT) may provide a useful conceptual model with which to examine how comfort discussing death and religiosity influence attitudes related to EOL care. A telephone‐based survey was conducted among community‐dwelling adults in the Unites States. Via random sampling, with over‐sampling of Hispanics/African Americans, 123 completed survey interviews (response rate = 46%) were analyzed. Respondents were more likely to have better attitudes toward EOL care if they were older or white, religiously active, and comfortable with the subject of death. Religiosity and comfort discussing death were correlated with each other and remained significant predictors of attitudes about EOL care even without demographic covariates. Findings suggest that promoting an open dialogue about mortality may improve attitudes about EOL care and utilization of palliative care services. The study also provides evidence about the utility and applicability of TMT for EOL care.     

Bioecological Implications of Narrative Exposure Therapy in Low‐Resource Settings: Individual,Family, Community,and Socio‐Political Contexts

Traumatic stress can have detrimental effects on individuals, families, and communities. Narrative exposure therapy (NET) is an evidence‐based intervention for decreasing individuals’ post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and has been tested in some of the most challenging contexts, such as in post‐conflict refugee camps. Although the focus of NET is on reducing individual PTSD symptoms, the impact of NET can be seen beyond the individual level. The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the ecological implications of using NET with trauma‐affected populations in low‐resource settings. We describe the implications of NET at the family, community, and sociopolitical levels using several case examples. Finally, we outline limitations and future directions for improving the delivery of NET in settings with limited resources.     

The Career Decision‐Making Difficulties Questionnaire: A Case for Item‐Level Interpretation

The Career Decision‐Making Difficulties Questionnaire (CDDQ; Gati, Krausz, & Osipow, 1996) has long been demonstrated as a useful instrument for career counseling practice. Several case studies have demonstrated how and why using the CDDQ facilitates the career counseling process (e.g., Amir, Gati, & Kleiman, 2008; Gati & Levin, 2014; Levin & Gati, 2014). This study explores how an in‐depth analysis of a case study conducted at the item level can provide career counselors with a richer understanding of their clients’ needs. The case study also emphasizes how administering and providing feedback on the CDDQ in career counseling sessions is likely to foster working alliances. The study concludes by presenting an intervention map based on the CDDQ taxonomy.     

Participatory shaping of community futures in e‐waste processing hubs: Complexity,conflict and stewarded convergence in a Palestinian context

This article describes an unconventional participatory development approach carried out in an informal e‐waste hub in South‐West Hebron, an area that has collected and processed the bulk of Israeli e‐waste for over a decade. Our approach contributes to the critique and recovery of community representation in participatory development and the search for ways to facilitate representative community engagement. Specifically, we describe our use of a novel Delphi‐like method that allowed us to facilitate a broadly endorsed development trajectory within a heterogeneous and conflicted community. We show how the results yielded by this approach diverged from those that were likely to emerge from more facile forms of participation in ways that are important for other similar e‐waste hubs internationally, which face a destructive status quo on the one hand, or the economically ruinous international policies that ban e‐waste trade from “developed” to “developing” countries on the other. Despite real tensions and cleavages within the affected communities, the process described facilitated a shift from deadlocked environmental versus livelihood positions towards building capacity and regulating existing informal e‐waste trades to preserve livelihoods dependent on these.     

Social health protection in Cambodia: Challenges of policy design and implementation

The Government of Cambodia is implementing ambitious reform initiatives to improve the country's social health protection system. In January 2018, it was announced that the Health Equity Fund (HEF), which is fully subsidized by a joint government‐donor initiative for the reimbursement of user fees for the poor at public health facilities, is to be expanded to some segments of informal workers belonging to associations, as well as to commune and village chiefs. Since 2017, the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) has provided social health insurance for formal economy workers in enterprises with eight employees or more. In January 2018, it was expanded to civil servants and all employees regardless of the size of the enterprise. However, this article highlights that the new ambitious reforms are not accompanied by careful planning as regards funding, service delivery, human resources and institutional design. This article therefore aims to examine key policy issues and challenges for Cambodia's ambitious reform of its social health protection system in terms of resource generation, population coverage, strategic purchasing and governance.     

From cognitive dissonance to cognitive Polyphasia: A sociocultural approach to understanding meat‐paradox

Cognitive Dissonance Theory seeks to understand inconsistency by situating it within individual cognition. By doing so, it overlooks the role of the social context in the experience and management of inconsistency and dissonance and fails to capture the processes through which it is negotiated when it appears. On the other side, the cognitive polyphasia hypothesis together with a dialogical approach on Social Representations provide a socioculturally situated, process‐oriented understanding of inconsistency. In this paper, meat‐paradox, the phenomenon of simultaneously declaring love and respect towards animals and also consuming animals, mainly studied through Cognitive Dissonance Theory, is used in order to highlight the merits of a sociocultural approach to inconsistency. Four relevant empirical examples from interviews and focus groups with meat‐eaters and vegetarians in Cyprus are used to illustrate the approach. The examples illustrate how meat‐eaters manage dissonance in ways that exhibit coexistence of contradictory representations and ways of thinking. Three different modalities of knowledge coexistence are identified, as proposed by cognitive polyphasia researchers: displacement, selective prevalence and hybridisation. We discuss the importance of a sociocultural approach to studying paradoxes, the epistemological and methodological implications of such a theorisation and we suggest other life contexts in which such an approach can be applied.     

Modeling stereotypes and negative self‐stereotypes as a function of interactions among groups with power asymmetries

Stereotypes is one of the most researched topics in social psychology. Within this context, negative self‐stereotypes pose a particular challenge for theories. In the current work, we propose a model that suggests that negative self‐stereotypes can theoretically be accounted for by the need to communicate in a social system made up by groups with unequal power. Because our theory is dynamic, probabilistic, and interactionist, we use a computational simulation technique to show that the proposed model is able to reproduce the phenomenon of interest, to provide novel accounts of related phenomena, and to suggest novel empirical predictions. We describe our computational model, our variables' dynamic behavior and interactions, and link our analyses to the literature on stereotypes and self‐stereotypes, the stability of stereotypes (in particular, gender and racial stereotypes), the effects of power asymmetries, and the effects of intergroup contact.