Context Matters: Links Between Neighborhood Discrimination, Neighborhood Cohesion and African American Adolescents’ Adjustment

Racial discrimination has serious negative consequences for the adjustment of African American adolescents. Taking an ecological approach, this study examined the linkages between perceived racial discrimination within and outside of the neighborhood and urban adolescents’ externalizing and internalizing behaviors, and tested whether neighborhood cohesion operated as a protective factor. Data came from 461 African American adolescents (mean age = 15.24 years, SD = 1.56; 50 % female) participating in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. Multilevel models revealed that perceived discrimination within youth’s neighborhoods was positively related to externalizing, and discrimination both within and outside of youth’s neighborhoods predicted greater internalizing problems. Neighborhood cohesion moderated the association between within-neighborhood discrimination and externalizing. Specifically, high neighborhood cohesion attenuated the association between within-neighborhood discrimination and externalizing. The discussion centers on the implications of proximal stressors and neighborhood cohesion for African American adolescents’ adjustment.     

The price of alliance: Anglo-American intelligence cooperation and Imperial Japan’s criminal biological warfare programme, 1944–1947

From 1932 to 1945, Imperial Japan secretly developed the largest state biological warfare (BW) programme of its time, which was unique in its use of biological weapons in warfare and in its inhumane experiments on captive Chinese civilians. After Japan’s surrender, US military intelligence teams searched for any evidence of BW activities, whilst sharing all it could find with its close partner, the UK. Despite the UK offering little intelligence material in return, it secured detailed US intelligence reports on Japanese BW war crimes, and colluded with the United States to keep these Japanese war crimes a secret.     

The experience of breast development and girls' stories about the purchase of a bra

Girls' experiences of secondary sexual characteristic development were explored via direct interview and protective techniques. In a pilot study (Study 1), 30 White middle to upper middle class 6th–8th-grade girls were interviewed about how they felt about breast and pubic hair growth, their comfort discussing these events, and their information acquisition. Breast growth was perceived as more important than hair growth, in part because the former is perceived as a more public event. Few girls reported intensely negative feelings to either change. Since responses to the direct questions were limited, 80 White 6th–9th graders were asked to tell a story (using a semi structured interview technique) about a picture of an adolescent girl, adult female, and adult male in which the adult female was taking a bra out of a shopping bag (Study 2). Affect, attitudes, and character alliances were coded. More girls attributed negative feelings to the father than to the mother character. Almost all girls describe the adolescent in the story as embarrassed. The daughter and father characters were described as uncomfortable more often than the mother character (50% vs. 10%). Positive maternal affect in the stories was associated with more advanced pubertal status, positive body images, more positive emotional tone, and lower anxiety scores. Affect ascribed to the father and daughter characters was less likely to be associated with girls' psychological functioning. Results are discussed in term sof the possible role of puberty upon parent-child relationships and communication.We wish to thank the W. T. Grant Foundation and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for their generous support of our research. This article was written while the first author was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation; the support of the foundation is appreciated.Received Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.Received M.D. from Columbia University.     

Perceptions of Time and Their Impact on Negotiations in the Arabic-Speaking Islamic World

This article examines how perceptions of time affect Arabic-speaking Islamic negotiators and how their attitudes about time, and their corresponding behaviors, may differ from those of their Western counterparts. We begin by identifying cultural differences in the conceptualization of time and then comment on the role of time in negotiations, discussing how time influences bargaining, trust, and negotiation tactics. In the section on tactics, we discuss stall-and-delay tactics, the use of the past as an objective standard, and limits on negotiating the future. Our purpose is to encourage negotiators from the West to be knowledgeable about the way they, as well as negotiators from Arabic-speaking Islamic cultures, conceive of and use time in negotiations. We believe that understanding that the very concept of time is often quite different in these two cultures is an important step in facilitating negotiations that cross these cultural boundaries.     

Science, PIC and POPs: Negotiating the Membership of Chemical Review Committees under the Stockholm and Rotterdam Conventions

Multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) often have close relationships with scientific and technical advisors, and as international policy makers negotiate the post-Rio generation of MEAs, there has been an increased emphasis on establishing science advisory bodies (SABs) as part of the institutional design of MEAs. This article will examine the negotiations of the design, membership and roles of the science advisory bodies to two of the most recent additions to the MEA landscape: the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade; and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. A particular emphasis will be placed on concerns over membership, examining how policy makers have sought to achieve representative membership by ensuring that the limited number of experts on a SAB reflect the national, economic and geographic diversity of stakeholders (capturing interests of those benefiting and suffering from the problem or its solution), while also maintaining an institutional and disciplinary diversity suitable to the nature of the problem (including those directly or traditionally implicated in the study or management of the problem, whilst still allowing input from other experts more tangentially related, who are likely to identify inter-problem linkages).