The Role of Stressful Parenting and Mineralocorticoid Receptor Haplotypes on Social Development During Adolescence and Young Adulthood

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - The development of social behavior could be affected by stressful parenting. The mineralocorticoid receptor, one of the two main receptors for the stress hormone...     

Choice and vulnerability in aging societies: Understanding the impact of age on user capacity

One necessary condition for realizing the benefits of choice‐based models of public service provision is that the service users in a given sector are capable of exercising choice. However, along with population aging, critics may question the level of user capacity in the growing user group consisting of older citizens with healthcare needs. For the first time in an older‐aged sample (52 to 97 years, N ~ 10,000), this study examines the link between age and user capacity (public service efficacy). Our results from the hospital sector in Denmark reveal a negative age gradient, where those of advanced age and declining health report significantly lower public service efficacy. However, when examining this age gap, much is attributable to cohort differences in educational attainment. Thus, while current generations of older service users constitute a vulnerable group under choice‐based policies, this challenge is likely to diminish in the future.     

Preventing violence through hip hop: an evolutionary perspective

ABSTRACT

For decades Hip Hop cultural practices have been disparaged for allegedly inciting and being responsible for the eruption of urban violence. This assumption, likely built upon pre-existing biases regarding the street culture and ethnic minorities where Hip Hop emerged, ignored how some of the genre’s main elements – particularly freestyle rap, breakin’ or breakdancing and graffiti tagging – initially served the purpose of providing at-risk youths with real alternatives to direct physical violence in their day-to-day lives, and continue do so today. It has also ignored broader analogies with other cross-cultural and cross-species manifestations of similar practices that have served for millennia as effective mechanisms for reducing the likelihood of potentially lethal violence. By presenting these manifestations – namely song dueling and mark making – in comparative terms with Hip Hop’s freestyle song and dance battles and tagging territorial contests, this article seeks to highlight the relevance and potential of Hip Hop for preventing violence while also suggesting a common evolutionary backdrop within the context of strategies aimed at minimizing intraspecific aggression.     

Cognitive Vulnerabilities to Depression for Adolescents in Single-Mother and Two-Parent Families

Although research consistently suggests that adolescents in single-mother families are at increased risk for depression, the mechanisms that explain this relationship are unclear. In a community sample of adolescents (N?=?368; ages 12–16; 50?% female; 50?% White) and their mothers (42?% single), adolescents completed measures of depressive symptoms, rumination, and depressogenic inferential style at baseline and two yearly follow-ups. Mothers reported on stressful events that occurred in the child’s life from birth until baseline. Adolescents raised by single mothers, relative to partnered mothers, experienced more childhood stressors and higher rumination levels at 1-year follow-up. Additionally, higher rumination mediated the relationship between single motherhood and greater youth depressive symptoms at the 2-year follow-up. Clinical implications and developmental considerations are discussed.     

Rethinking the Tunisian miracle: a party politics view

Five years on from the Tunisian revolution, Tunisia stands as the sole success story of the Arab Spring. The country since then has managed to adopt a pluralist and democratic constitution, and held three free and fair elections. Accordingly, in the eyes of several observers, Tunisia is now in the process of consolidating its new democracy. However, the reality on the ground seems much gloomier, as most recent opinion surveys suggest that there is a significant degree of dissatisfaction, not only with political parties and Parliament but also with the very institution of democracy. Nevertheless, what accounts for this change? After the collapse of the long-lasting and oppressive Ben Ali regime, how, just in five years, has Tunisians’ confidence in the democratic process changed? This article accounts for this state of affairs from a party politics view, arguing that political parties, which are the main protagonists of the consolidation process, fail to fulfill their role of acquiring legitimacy for the new regime. While party–state relations seem to be stabilized due to the inclusiveness of the constitution-making process, both inter-party relationships and the relationship between parties and society suffer from numerous flaws which, in turn, hamper the democratic consolidation process.