Better mental health in children of Vietnamese refugees compared with their Norwegian peers - a matter of cultural difference?

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>There are conflicting results on whether immigrant children are at a heightened risk of mental health problems compared with native youth in the resettlement country.</p> <p>The objective of the study</p> <p>To compare the mental health of 94 Norwegian-born children from a community cohort of Vietnamese refugees, aged 4 - 18 years, with that of a Norwegian community sample.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The SDQ was completed by two types of informants; the children's self-reports, and the parents' reports, for comparison with Norwegian data from the Health Profiles for Children and Youth in the Akershus study.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The self-perceived mental health of second-generation Vietnamese in Norway was better than that of their Norwegian compatriots, as assessed by the SDQ. In the Norwegian-Vietnamese group, both children and parents reported a higher level of functioning.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This surprising finding may result from the lower prevalence of mental distress in Norwegian-Vietnamese children compared with their Norwegian peers, or from biased reports and cultural differences in reporting emotional and behavioural problems. These findings may represent the positive results of the children's bi-cultural competencies.</p

Game theory of mind

This paper introduces a model of ‘theory of mind’, namely, how we represent the intentions and goals of others to optimise our mutual interactions. We draw on ideas from optimum control and game theory to provide a ‘game theory of mind’. First, we consider the representations of goals in terms of value functions that are prescribed by utility or rewards. Critically, the joint value functions and ensuing behaviour are optimised recursively, under the assumption that I represent your value function, your representation of mine, your representation of my representation of yours, and so on ad infinitum. However, if we assume that the degree of recursion is bounded, then players need to estimate the opponent's degree of recursion (i.e., sophistication) to respond optimally. This induces a problem of inferring the opponent's sophistication, given behavioural exchanges. We show it is possible to deduce whether players make inferences about each other and quantify their sophistication on the basis of choices in sequential games. This rests on comparing generative models of choices with, and without, inference. Model comparison is demonstrated using simulated and real data from a ‘stag-hunt’. Finally, we note that exactly the same sophisticated behaviour can be achieved by optimising the utility function itself (through prosocial utility), producing unsophisticated but apparently altruistic agents. This may be relevant ethologically in hierarchal game theory and coevolution

Comparative Phylogeography of a Coevolved Community: Concerted Population Expansions in Joshua Trees and Four Yucca Moths

Comparative phylogeographic studies have had mixed success in identifying common phylogeographic patterns among co-distributed organisms. Whereas some have found broadly similar patterns across a diverse array of taxa, others have found that the histories of different species are more idiosyncratic than congruent. The variation in the results of comparative phylogeographic studies could indicate that the extent to which sympatrically-distributed organisms share common biogeographic histories varies depending on the strength and specificity of ecological interactions between them. To test this hypothesis, we examined demographic and phylogeographic patterns in a highly specialized, coevolved community – Joshua trees (Yucca brevifolia) and their associated yucca moths. This tightly-integrated, mutually interdependent community is known to have experienced significant range changes at the end of the last glacial period, so there is a strong a priori expectation that these organisms will show common signatures of demographic and distributional changes over time. Using a database of >5000 GPS records for Joshua trees, and multi-locus DNA sequence data from the Joshua tree and four species of yucca moth, we combined paleaodistribution modeling with coalescent-based analyses of demographic and phylgeographic history. We extensively evaluated the power of our methods to infer past population size and distributional changes by evaluating the effect of different inference procedures on our results, comparing our palaeodistribution models to Pleistocene-aged packrat midden records, and simulating DNA sequence data under a variety of alternative demographic histories. Together the results indicate that these organisms have shared a common history of population expansion, and that these expansions were broadly coincident in time. However, contrary to our expectations, none of our analyses indicated significant range or population size reductions at the end of the last glacial period, and the inferred demographic changes substantially predate Holocene climate changes