Risk factors for youth violence: Youth violence commission, International Society For Research On Aggression (ISRA)

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144599/1/ab21766.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144599/2/ab21766_am.pd

Does it look safe? An eye tracking study into the visual aspects of fear of crime

Studies of fear of crime often focus on demographic and social factors, but these can be difficult to change. Studies of visual aspects have suggested that features reflecting incivilities, such as litter, graffiti, and vandalism increase fear of crime, but methods often rely on participants actively mentioning such aspects, and more subtle, less conscious aspects may be overlooked. To address these concerns, the present study examined people’s eye movements while they judged scenes for safety. Forty current and former university students were asked to rate images of day-time and night-time scenes of Lincoln, UK (where they studied) and Egham, UK (unfamiliar location) for safety, maintenance and familiarity, while their eye movements were recorded. Another twenty-five observers not from Lincoln or Egham rated the same images in an internet survey. Ratings showed a strong association between safety and maintenance and lower safety ratings for night-time scenes for both groups, in agreement with earlier findings. Eye movements of the Lincoln participants showed increased dwell times on buildings, houses, and vehicles during safety judgments, and increased dwell times on streets, pavements, and markers of incivilities for maintenance. Results confirm that maintenance plays an important role in perceptions of safety, but eye movements suggest that observers also look for indicators of current or recent presence of people

Landscape, Memory, and the Shifting Regional Geographies of Northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina

Writing and arguing with older discourses that have informed the subdiscipline of regional geography and setting them against new ways of conceiving of the region, this article considers the northwest of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a site that calls for a newly animated form of regional study. Of particular concern here is the role that memory and commemorative practices play in such a spatial schema. The monumental landscapes of the Tito regime and its collective commemoration of World War II sit alongside and are troubled by the more recent traumas and spaces of unmarked death associated with the ethnic war in Bosnia during the early 1990s. Read together, northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina functions as a vivid exemplar for understanding traumatic historical mourning as a phenomenological process that is inseparable from the wider geopolitical landscape

Cross-National Measurement Invariance of the Teacher and Classmate Support Scale

The cross-national measurement invariance of the teacher and classmate support scale was assessed in a study of 23202 Grade 8 and 10 students from Austria, Canada, England, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, and Slovenia, participating in the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) 2001/2002 study. A multi-group means and covariance analysis supported configural and metric invariance across countries, but not full scalar equivalence. The composite reliability was adequate and highly consistent across countries. In all seven countries, teacher support showed stronger associations with school satisfaction than did classmate support, with the results being highly consistent across countries. The results indicate that the teacher and classmate support scale may be used in cross-cultural studies that focus on relationships between teacher and classmate support and other constructs. However, the lack of scalar equivalence indicates that direct comparison of the levels support across countries might not be warranted

Children’s Postdisaster Trajectories of PTS Symptoms: Predicting Chronic Distress

BACKGROUND: There are no studies of the distinct trajectories of children’s psychological distress over the first year after a destructive natural disaster and the determinants of these trajectories. OBJECTIVE: We examined these issues using an existing dataset of children exposed to Hurricane Andrew, one of the most devastating natural disasters in US history. METHODS: At 3-months postdisaster, 568 children (55 % girls; grades 3–5) residing in areas most directly affected by the hurricane completed measures of hurricane exposure and stressors, social support, coping, and general anxiety. Children also reported major life events occurring since the hurricane (at 7-months) and posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms at 3-, 7-, and 10-months postdisaster. RESULTS: Latent growth mixture modeling identified three trajectories of PTS reactions: resilient (37 %), recovering (43 %), and chronic distress (20 %). Predictors of the trajectories were examined. Odds ratios indicated that, compared to the resilient trajectory, girls were more likely to be in the recovering and chronically distressed trajectories, as were children reporting higher anxiety and greater use of coping strategies that reflected poor emotion regulation. Compared to the recovering trajectory, children in the chronically distressed trajectory had greater odds of reporting high anxiety, less social support, more intervening life events, and greater use of poor emotion regulation strategies. CONCLUSIONS: Hurricane exposure may be less effective in identifying children who develop chronic postdisaster distress than other child (anxiety, coping) and contextual variables (social support, life events). Effective screening after disasters is critical for identifying youth most in need of limited clinical resources

The Cyst-Dividing Bacterium Ramlibacter tataouinensis TTB310 Genome Reveals a Well-Stocked Toolbox for Adaptation to a Desert Environment

Ramlibacter tataouinensis TTB310T (strain TTB310), a betaproteobacterium isolated from a semi-arid region of South Tunisia (Tataouine), is characterized by the presence of both spherical and rod-shaped cells in pure culture. Cell division of strain TTB310 occurs by the binary fission of spherical “cyst-like” cells (“cyst-cyst” division). The rod-shaped cells formed at the periphery of a colony (consisting mainly of cysts) are highly motile and colonize a new environment, where they form a new colony by reversion to cyst-like cells. This unique cell cycle of strain TTB310, with desiccation tolerant cyst-like cells capable of division and desiccation sensitive motile rods capable of dissemination, appears to be a novel adaptation for life in a hot and dry desert environment. In order to gain insights into strain TTB310's underlying genetic repertoire and possible mechanisms responsible for its unusual lifestyle, the genome of strain TTB310 was completely sequenced and subsequently annotated. The complete genome consists of a single circular chromosome of 4,070,194 bp with an average G+C content of 70.0%, the highest among the Betaproteobacteria sequenced to date, with total of 3,899 predicted coding sequences covering 92% of the genome. We found that strain TTB310 has developed a highly complex network of two-component systems, which may utilize responses to light and perhaps a rudimentary circadian hourglass to anticipate water availability at the dew time in the middle/end of the desert winter nights and thus direct the growth window to cyclic water availability times. Other interesting features of the strain TTB310 genome that appear to be important for desiccation tolerance, including intermediary metabolism compounds such as trehalose or polyhydroxyalkanoate, and signal transduction pathways, are presented and discussed

Developmental Issues in School-Based Aggression Prevention from a Social-Cognitive Perspective

Contemporary research on the development and prevention of aggressive behavior in childhood and adolescence emphasizes the importance of social-cognitive factors such as perceptual biases, problem-solving skills, and social-moral beliefs in the maintenance of aggression. Indeed, school-based social-cognitive intervention approaches have been identified as best practices by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, because child age is an important covariate of both intervention effectiveness and social-cognitive ability, school-based prevention program designers should keep in mind a number of issues identified through developmental research. In this paper, we review the social-cognitive model of aggressive behavior development as applied to prevention programming. We then discuss some of the ways in which the broader developmental research base can inform the design of aggression prevention programs.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45098/1/10935_2005_Article_5.pd

Contextualising Apartheid at the End of Empire: Repression, ‘Development’ and the Bantustans

This article examines the global dynamics of late colonialism and how these informed South African apartheid. More specifically, it locates the programmes of mass relocation and bantustan ‘self-government’ that characterised apartheid after 1959 in relation to three key dimensions. Firstly, the article explores the global circulation of idioms of ‘development’ and trusteeship in the first half of the twentieth century and its significance in shaping segregationist policy; secondly, it situates bantustan ‘selfgovernment’ in relation to the history of decolonisation and the partitions and federations that emerged as late colonial solutions; and, thirdly, it locates the tightening of rural village planning in the bantustans after 1960 in relation to the elaboration of anti-colonial liberation struggles, repressive southern African settler politics and the Cold War. It argues that, far from developing policies that were at odds with the global ‘wind of change’, South African apartheid during the 1960s and 1970s reflected much that was characteristic about late colonial strategy