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Problematic internet use profiles and psychosocial risk among adolescents
Get PDFObjective: Although Problematic Internet Use (PIU) is an emerging area of study in psychology, little is known about the unique features of specific subgroups of internet users and their psychosocial vulnerabilities within robust and nationwide populations.
Methods: The aim of this study was to identify distinct latent groups of internet users based on their PIU risk and to compare their psychosocial outcomes. To achieve this, a nationally representative sample of adolescents of the same grade (N = 1,066, Meanage = 13.46 years, range = 12–16) was recruited from several schools in Slovenia through stratified random sampling.
Results: A Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) revealed a two-class solution, with Class 1 (n = 853, 80%) featuring ‘low PIU risk’ participants and Class 2 (n = 213, 20%) including ‘high PIU risk’ participants. Behaviorally, the main feature of Class 1 denoted ‘time management difficulties’ while Class 2 was best characterized by ‘mood and time management issues’. Further frequentist and Bayesian analyses indicated that Class 2 presented greater psychosocial risk compared to Class 1 due to significantly higher levels of PIU (generalized and across specific PIU subfactors) coupled with lower levels of subjective well-being and self-control.
Conclusions: Contrary to what was initially envisaged, the two classes did not differ in terms of perceived quality in parent-child relationship. This study shows that PIU patterns and symptom-severity may be developmentally specific, further highlighting the need for clinically age-adjusted PIU screening practices within epidemiological and healthcare settings
Fire in African landscapes
Get PDFFires have burned in African landscapes for more than a hundred million years, long before vertebrate herbivores trod the earth and modified vegetation and fire regimes. Hominin use of lightning fires is apparent c.1.5mya, becoming deliberate and habitual from c.400kya. The emergence of modern humans c.195kya was marked by widespread and deliberate use of fire, for hunting and gathering through to agricultural and pastoral use, with farming and copper and iron smelting spreading across Sub-Saharan Africa with the Bantu migrations from 4-2.5kya. Europeans provided detailed reports of Africans’ fire use from 1652 in South Africa, and the 1700s in West Africa. They regarded indigenous fire use as destructive, an agent of desiccation and destruction of forests, with ecological theories cementing this in the European imagination from the 1800s. The late 1800s and early 1900s were characterised by colonial authorities’ attempts to suppress fires, informed by mistaken scientific ideas and management principles imported from temperate Europe and colonial forestry management elsewhere. This was often ignored by African and settler farmers. In the 1900s, the concerns of colonial foresters and fears about desiccation and soil erosion fuelled by the American dustbowl experience, informed anti-fire views until mid-century. However, time enough had elapsed for colonial and settler scientists and managers to have observed fires and indigenous burning practices, and their effects, for long enough to begin to question received wisdom on their destructiveness. Following World War 2, during a phase of colonial cooperation and expert-led attempts to develop African landscapes, a more nuanced understanding of fire in African landscapes emerged, alongside greater pragmatism about what was achievable in managing wildfires and fire use. Although colonial restrictions on burning fuelled some independence struggles, postcolonial environmental managers appear on the whole to have adopted their former oppressors’ attitudes to fire and burning. Important breakthroughs in fire ecology were made in the 1970s and 1980s, influenced by a movement away from equilibrium-based ecosystems concepts where fires were damaging disturbances to ecosystems, to an understanding of fires as important drivers of biodiversity integral to the functioning of many African landscapes. Notably from the 1990s, anthropologists influenced by related developments in rangeland ecology combined ecological studies with studies of indigenous land use practices to assess their impacts over time, challenging existing narratives of degradation in West African forests and East African savannas. Attempts were made to integrate communities (and to a lesser extent, indigenous knowledge) into fire management plans and approaches. In the 2000s, anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, historians and political ecologists have contributed studies telling more complex stories about human fire use. Together with detailed histories of landscape change offered by remote sensing and analysis of charcoal and pollen deposits, these approaches to the intertwined human and ecological dimensions of fire in African landscapes offer the prospect of integrated histories which can inform our understanding of the past and guide our policies and management in the future
The evil May Day Riot of 1517 and the popular politics of anti-immigrant hostility in early modern London
Get PDFLondon experienced repeated outbreaks of popular xenophobia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the worst coming in the Evil May Day riot of 1517. This article illuminates the hydra-like nature of the stereotype of the immigrant at this time, which rhetorically combined the diverse population of aliens into a single material and political threat. It begins with a close analysis of the riot itself, before examining the continuing relevance of this distinctive caricature. It shows how the perceived ‘privileges’ afforded to several different sorts of strangers in early modern London made them a special target for popular hostility
A two-lab direct replication attempt of Southgate, Senju and Csibra (2007)
Get PDFThe study by Southgate et al. (2007 Psychol. Sci. 18, 587–592. (doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01944.x)) has been widely cited as evidence for false-belief attribution in young children. Recent replication attempts of this paradigm have yielded mixed results: several studies did not replicate the original findings, raising doubts about the suitability of the paradigm to assess non-verbal action prediction and Theory of Mind. In a preregistered collaborative study including two of the original authors, we tested one hundred and sixty 24- to 26- month-olds across two locations using the original stimuli, procedure and analyses as closely as possible. We found no evidence for action anticipation: only roughly half of the infants looked to the location of an agent’s impending action when action prediction did not require taking into account the agent’s beliefs and a similar number when the agent held a false-belief. These results and other non-replications suggest that this paradigm does not reliably elicit action prediction and thus cannot assess false-belief understanding in 2-year- olds. While the present results do not support any claim regarding the presence or absence of Theory of Mind in infants, we conclude that an important piece of evidence that has to date supported arguments for the existence of this competence can no longer serve that function
Re-reading Fanon
No full text“Re-reading Fanon” (65minutes, 2021) is a Hidden Persuaders film by Nasheed Qamar Faruqi, featuring Fakhry Davids, Stephen Frosh, Lisa Guenther, Jean Khalfa, Samia Khatun, Achille Mbembe, Daniel Pick, and Robert J.C. Young. It is a documentary about one filmmaker’s journey to understand Fanon’s clinical, political and philosophical writing in today’s context. Directed by Nasheed Qamar Faruqi; Editor Yann Heckmann. With grateful acknowledgement of The Wellcome Trust
Onlining
No full textOnlining, tackles the tangle of anxieties that arise from living in our contemporary connected society. Smartphone use, data gathering and performative social media pressures are examined by writer Timandra Harkness, author of Big Data: Does Size Matter? (2016), and historian Charlie Williams (Queen Mary University of London). The film also makes use of resources generated during the life of the Hidden Persuaders project: an interview filmed in 2015 with the late Zygmunt Bauman, in which the renowned philosopher and sociologist addressed the idea of brainwashing as a functional component of modern life, and a film made by Misty Scrimgeour and Esme Ramlal when they were Year 12 students as part of the project’s outreach programme with Camden schools in 2018
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