The Transformation of the Self: Competing Moral Repertoires in Contemporary Java

Character and virtue are changing rapidly in Indonesia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population. The long-praised preference for communal harmony over individual advancement is under great stress. The dominant force behind this is thought to be secular consumerism. Our project aims to assess the impact of commercialization and modern Islamic religious education on the Javanese preference for communal harmony. An extensive survey of Javanese parents and their children and close ethnographic studies of individuals will provide insights into the changing nature of Javanese morality, which is the heart of Indonesian culture. Rather than focus on self-reported values, we will focus on the morality stories that people tell. We hypothesize that the new moral repertoires of consumerism and religiosity are not in competition but are rather working in tandem to undermine the preference for communal harmony in Javanese culture.https://youtu.be/TYNDDIJVLRcN

The ontogeny of exploratory behavior in male and female adolescent rats (Rattus norvegicus)

Supported by Wellcome Trust grant 078405/Z/05/ZDuring adolescence, rats gain independence from their mothers and disperse from the natal burrow, with males typically dispersing further than females. We predicted that, if dispersal patterns are associated with responsiveness to novelty, exploratory behavior in novel environments would increase across adolescence, and males would explore more than females. Alternatively, females might explore more than males, if females are more motivated than males to learn about the immediate environment or if females have poorer spatial abilities than males. Twenty-five male and 21 female rats were exposed to two novel environments (open field and elevated plus-maze) during early, mid-, or late adolescence. Total locomotion and amount of exploration directed towards aversive areas increased across adolescence, even when body weight was included as a covariate. Female adolescents locomoted more and spent more time exploring aversive areas than males. Developmental changes in neural function potentially underlie age and sex differences in exploratory, behavior (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 51: 513-520, 2009.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Ripples in a pond: Do social work students need to learn about terrorism?

In the face of heightened awareness of terrorism, however it is defined, the challenges for social work are legion. Social work roles may include working with the military to ensure the well-being of service-men and women and their families when bereaved or injured, as well as being prepared to support the public within the emergency context of an overt act of terrorism. This paper reviews some of the literature concerning how social work responds to confl ict and terrorism before reporting a smallscale qualitative study examining the views of social work students, on a qualifying programme in the UK, of terrorism and the need for knowledge and understanding as part of their education

Stereotypes and Madrassas: Experimental evidence from Pakistan

Little is known about the behavior of Madrassa (Islamic religious seminaries) students, and how other groups in their communities interact with them. To investigate this, we use data from economic decision-making experiments embedded in a survey that we collected from students pursuing bachelors-equivalent degrees in Madrassas and other educational institutions of distinct religious tendencies and socioeconomic background in Pakistan. First, we do not find that Madrassa students are less trusting of others; in fact, they exhibit the highest level of other-regarding behavior, and expect others to be the most trustworthy. Second, there is a high level of trust among all groups. Third, within each institution group, we fail to find evidence of in-group bias or systematic out-group bias either in trust or tastes. Fourth, we find that students from certain backgrounds under-estimate the trustworthiness of Madrassa students

The Evolution of Social Orienting: Evidence from Chicks (Gallus gallus) and Human Newborns

Converging evidence from different species indicates that some newborn vertebrates, including humans, have visual predispositions to attend to the head region of animate creatures. It has been claimed that newborn preferences for faces are domain-relevant and similar in different species. One of the most common criticisms of the work supporting domain-relevant face biases in human newborns is that in most studies they already have several hours of visual experience when tested. This issue can be addressed by testing newly hatched face-na\uefve chicks (Gallus gallus) whose preferences can be assessed prior to any other visual experience with faces