Pathways from Childhood Maltreatment to Unsupportive Emotion Socialization: Implications for Children’s Emotional Inhibition

Journal of Family Violence - Adults who have experienced child maltreatment report problems with emotion regulation (ER) and parenting difficulties, which have been associated with maladaptation in...     

Evidence-based prevention strategies of suicide behavior in the world: implications for Slovenia

In this review we consider how Slovenia could consider tackling its high rate of suicide (overall 29 per 100,000, 46 in males, 13 in females). First, we consider the evidence for risk factors that may contribute to Slovenia's high rate of suicide. Second, we describe the interventions to try to reduce the impact of these factors and the evidence for such interventions. We categorize interventions in terms of their operation at either the population level or that of high-risk groups. However, it should be borne in mind that settings often assumed to provide access to population groups, such as general practice and schools, do not reach some people who are likely to be at high risk; for example those who have dropped out of school or who have been excluded from a GP's list. We focus particularly on those for high-risk groups, as a number of East-European countries with high suicide rates such as Slovenia, Hungary, and the Baltic republics are currently considering a shift toward more community-based mental health services. The provision of community mental health services in Slovenia would provide an opportunity to study their impact on the suicide rate. However, we conclude that their development should be accompanied by other initiatives operating at population levels. This multilevel approach acknowledges the complexity of the etiology of suicide, the impossibility of reaching all those at risk through services and the lack of strong evidence for any one intervention.     

Institutionalized Evaluation and Intergovernmental Relations: The Case of Coastal Zone Management

The enactment of national environmental management programswas prompted, in large part, by the perceived failure of stateand local government officials to deal adequately with pollutioncontrol and resource management problems. Paradoxically, theimplementation of several important environmental managementprograms relies heavily on these same state and local officials.Congress has sought to resolve this paradox by requiring federalevaluation of state and local environmental planning and managementactivities. Many of these evaluations are little more than routinefiscal audits. However one agency, the Office of Coastal ZoneManagement, has sought to develop a systematic evaluation processfocusing on all aspects of state coastal zone programs. Theseevaluative efforts have led to intergovernmental tensions, mostnotably with regard to the purposes and methods of evaluation,the appropriate roles of federal and state officials, and theresources available for evaluation. In spite of these tensions,there is broad agreement about the value of the evaluation processand its potential applicability in other contexts.     

Perceptions of domestic violence and mock jurors' sentencing decisions

The purpose of the investigation was to examine the influence of the victim's provocation and hopefulness on the sentencing of a husband convicted of domestic violence. It was hypothesized that mock jurors would assign less-severe sentencing if the victim was provoking and hopeful. Mock jurors read one of four factorial court case combinations of provocation and hopefulness and rendered an individual predeliberation sentence and a group postdeliberation sentence. Analyses revealed a significant effect of provocation, indicating that participants reduced the sentencing for the defendant when the wife was provoking relative to when she was not provoking. The analyses also revealed an effect of gender on predeliberation sentencing, with women delivering more-severe sentences than men. The effect of gender was not present in the postdeliberation sentencing, indicating that deliberation produced a sentencing compromise between women and men. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Winner Takes It All: Revisiting the Effect of Direct Democracy on Citizens’ Political Support

Despite the strong theoretical expectations about the beneficial effect of direct democratic instruments on citizens’ political support, the empirical evidence is scarce and inconsistent. We add to this literature by studying the effect of the use of a direct democratic process on citizens’ political support and its underlying causal mechanism. Using a unique research design that combines a strong test of causality with a high level of ecological validity, we surveyed inhabitants of a Belgian neighborhood that held a local referendum and a comparison group (i.e. inhabitants of a comparable neighborhood without referendum) before and after the referendum (n = 1049). Using difference-in-differences analysis and first difference regression analysis, we show that in line with our expectations the increase in political support following the referendum is not driven by involvement or procedural fairness perceptions but by an increase in support levels among the winners of the decision. Moreover, despite the contested nature of the issue, losers’ level of political support did not decrease significantly after the result of the referendum was announced.     

Citizenship and Mediated Society

This paper challenges the idea of the liberating potential of information and communication technologies in terms of their meaning related to citizenship. It shows that the mechanisms that are supposedly conducive to the democratization of society can function as the mechanisms of exclusion of citizens. Adopting the critical-cultural perspective applied to issues of consumerism and their relations to citizens in media environment, the paper addresses the mediated appearances and manifestations of citizenship. The line dividing “old” from “new” media that is commonly used to apply to new media their participatory democratic potential lacks a reflection that would more explicitly admit new media limitations. These, when seen more in depth, appear as comparable to those of mass media. If in the beginning of the 1990s the Internet was embraced as truly enhancing political action, today its consumer realities, together with the spread of racism and xenophobia, need to be critically studied. As studies have shown, the Internet increasingly encourages the individual to look for private solutions to the problems of public nature which contributes to the understanding of citizenship not as a public but predominantly as a private affair. If cyberspace is becoming a vital link for new social movements and different groups of political activists, when seen from a broader citizenship perspective, the Internet has to be discussed also with regards to its limited democratic potential.