Does Humor Explain Why Relationally Aggressive Adolescents are Popular?

The association between relational aggression and popularity during early adolescence is well established. Yet, little is known about why, exactly, relationally aggressive young adolescents are able to achieve and maintain high popular status among peers. The present study investigated the mediating role of humor in the association between relational aggression and popularity during early adolescence. Also considered was whether the association between relational aggression and humor varies according to adolescents’ gender and their friends’ levels of relational aggression. Participants were 265 sixth-grade students (48 % female; 41 % racial/ethnic minority; M _age = 12.04 years) who completed peer nomination and friendship measures in their classrooms at two time points (Wave 1: February; Wave 2: May). The results indicated that Wave 1 relational aggression was related to Wave 1 and 2 popularity indirectly through Wave 1 humor, after accounting for the effects of Wave 1 physical aggression, ethnicity, and gender. Additional analyses showed that relational aggression and humor were related significantly only for boys and for young adolescents with highly relationally aggressive friends. The results support the need for further research on humor and aggression during early adolescence and other mechanisms by which relationally aggressive youth achieve high popular status.     

Putin's Power Revisited: How Identity Positions and Great Power Interaction Condition Strategic Cooperation on Syria

Abstract

This article investigates how Russian foreign policies are shaped in a two-level interactive social game. Russian foreign policies take their cue from ingrained identity positions articulated by the state leadership and negotiated in domestic debates, but they are also informed by interaction with other states. The article explains the shift in Russian policies away from pragmatic cooperation with the West in Syria from autumn 2015 onwards. While the Russian leadership initially sought such cooperation, the prominence of anti-Western discourse in Russia following the crisis in Ukraine as well as the West's rejection of Russia in this period spurred Russia to act independently in Syria.     

“Bordering on Treason”? Sir Raphael Cilento and Pre‐Second World War Fascism in Australia

Sir Raphael Cilento died on 16 April 1985 at the age of ninety‐two. The notice in the Canberra Times spoke of Cilento's “worldwide” reputation in tropical medicine, his contribution to the public health service in Queensland, and his role with the United Nations in the immediate post‐war years. In short, he was an “eminent son of Australia”. But Sir Raphael Cilento's halo has been tarnished by his persistent eugenicist beliefs and his later association with the anti‐Semitic League of Rights. There were also lingering allegations and rumours about his apparent pre‐war association with Fascism. Without the evidentiary “smoking gun”, this association has occasionally been alluded to by scholars but never fully examined. Drawing on an unreleased, previously classified security file, this article addresses this question in Cilento's life. Through an examination of what the security service and military intelligence knew of Cilento's activities, the article argues that Cilento was at best an active fellow traveller and at worst a card‐carrying Fascist who narrowly escaped internment.     

Differentiating specialists and generalists within college students' social support networks

In order to examine the relationships among social network structure, types of social support, and determinants of support satisfaction, an alternative method was used to score the Social Support Questionnaire (SSQ). Factor analysis procedures suggested that college students' (N=198) social networks consisted of four groups: nuclear family, other family, friends, and others. Satisfaction with support was positively related to the proportion of the network occupied by nuclear family and negatively related to the proportion of friends in the network. Evidence was found for the presence of both support specialists and support generalists in the networks of the college students. These results are discussed from a developmental perspective with attention to the implications for interventions.