Adolescents’ Self-Perception of Morality,Competence, and Sociability and their Interplay with Quality of Family,Friend, and School Relationships: A Three-Wave Longitudinal Study

Morality, competence, and sociability have been conceptualized as fundamental dimensions on which individuals ground their evaluation of themselves and of other people and groups. In this study, we examined the interplay between self-perceived morality, competence, and sociability and relationship quality within the core social contexts with which adolescents have extensive daily interactions (family, friends, and school). Participants were 916 (51.4% girls; M_age?=?15.64 years) adolescents involved in a three-wave longitudinal study with annual assessments. The results of cross-lagged analyses indicated that (a) self-perceived morality was more important than self-perceived competence and sociability in strengthening family, friend, and school relationships; and (b) high-quality friendships led to increasing levels of self-perceived morality over time. Overall, this evidence advances our theoretical understanding of the primacy of morality from a self-perspective approach and highlights the developmental importance of friends.     

Adolescent Agentic Orientations: Contemporaneous Family Influence,Parental Biography and Intergenerational Development

Agentic orientations developed in adolescence have been linked to better health, well-being, and achievements in the years following. This study examines longitudinal parental influences on the development of adolescent children’s agentic orientations, captured by the core constructs of mastery beliefs and generalized life expectations. Drawing on multigenerational panel data from the United States (1991–2011), the study examines contemporaneous family factors, but also how parental biographies (their own transition to adulthood) and parents’ own adolescent agentic orientations influence their adolescent children. Study adolescents were 46% male, 52% white, and 15.6 years old on average. The findings indicate that parents’ early orientations and experiences in the transition to adulthood have little effect on their children’s mastery beliefs, but that parents’ generalized life expectations (in adolescence) and having married before having the child were associated with their children’s more optimistic life expectations. Contemporaneous family income and optimistic expectations among parents-as-adolescents were somewhat substitutable as positive influences on adolescents’ optimistic life expectations. The findings contribute to our understanding of intergenerational and over-time influences on these key adolescent orientations.     

The Effect of Jury Deliberations on Jurors' Reasoning Skills

The effect of jury deliberation on jurors' reasoning skill in a murder trial was examined. Specifically, the effect of deliberating on reasoning competence (as defined by Kuhn, Weinstock and Flaton, 1994) was explored. One hundred and four participants viewed a videotaped murder trial and either deliberated in 12-person juries or ruminated on the case individually. Among those assigned to juries, half had their reasoning skill assessed prior to deliberations, while the others were tested after deliberating. Jurors in the individual rumination condition were assessed after they had the opportunity to reflect on the case alone. As hypothesized, post-group-deliberation jurors were more likely to discount both the selected verdict and alternative theories and incorporate judgmental supporting statements than were the other mock jurors. However, the mock jurors did not differ with regard to making statements that supported alternative verdicts or including judgmental statements that discounted their chosen verdict. In terms of Kuhn's reasoning continuum from satisficing (low level) to theory–evidence coordination (high level), there is some evidence that post-group-deliberation jurors may be closer to the high end than predeliberation jurors or post-individual-rumination jurors in some aspects of the task, but not in others.     

The belief systems of protesting college students

A group of 29 college students who had been arrested or nominated as having participated in a street disturbance aimed at producing social change were interviewed. The interview schedule was highly similar to one which had been used to investigate attitudes toward violence in a random, representative sample of American men. The data collected from the arrestees are compared with data from college students in the national sample. This study shows that the arrestees are more likely to think that violence is necessary to produce social change than are college students generally, and are more likely to believe that existing social institutions are inadequate. As a group, the arrestees are more identified with white student demonstrators and black protestors than are college students generally. The arrestees are also likely to regard the police as untrusworthy, looking for trouble, and apt to dislike people like themselves. In addition to the negative attitudes toward the police held by the student arrestees, they are more likely to regard police actions as violence (and hence provocative) than are other college students. The arrestees are far more likely than other college students to cleave to humanistic values. However, most of the differences between the arrestees and other American college students could be predicted from a general model of the justification of violence, so that it appears that the student activists' beliefs differ not so much in kind from those of other Americans as they do in degree.This research was funded by NSF Grants GS 2424 and GS 28295 under a project codirected by Monica D. Blumenthal, Robert L. Kahn, and Frank M. Andrews.Currently Program Director at the Institute for Social Research in the Survey Research Center, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan Medical School. Obtained M.D. from the University of Michigan Medical School and Ph.D. in physiology from the University of California, Berkeley. Currently engaged in social psychological research, with main interests focused on violence and the epidemiology of depressive disorders. Psychiatric interests are biologically oriented and focused on adult psychiatry.     

Situational Trust: How Disadvantaged Mothers Reconceive Legal Cynicism

Research has shown that legal cynicism is pervasive among residents of poor, black neighborhoods. However, controlling for crime rates, these residents call police at higher rates than whites and residents of middle‐class neighborhoods, and ethnographic research suggests that mothers in particular sometimes exact social control over partners and children through police notification. Given these findings, how might researchers better understand how legal cynicism and occasional reliance on police fit together? Drawing on interviews with poor African‐American mothers in Washington, DC, this article develops an alternative conception of cultural orientations about law: situational trust. This concept emphasizes micro‐level dynamism in cultural conceptions of the police, expanding the literature on police trust by emphasizing situational contingency. Mothers deploy at least four alternative strategies that produce moments of trust: officer exceptionalism, domain specificity, therapeutic consequences, and institutional navigation. These strategies shed light on the contextual meanings of safety and legitimacy.     

Associations Between Psychosocial Well-Being,Stressful Life Events and Emotion-Driven Impulsiveness in European Adolescents

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Knowing the extent to which mental well-being and stressful life events during adolescence contribute to personality characteristics related to risk-taking...     

Conceptualising Violence in Close Relationships: Discrepancies Between Police Conceptions and the Letter of the Law in Finland

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research - The focus in this Finland-based study is on violence in close relationships—a term that partly overlaps with the more commonly used...     

Why do only some people who support parties actually join them? Evidence from Britain

What makes people join a political party is one of the most commonly studied questions in research on party members. Nearly all this research, however, is based on talking to people who have actually joined parties. This article simultaneously analyses surveys of members of political parties in Britain and surveys of non-member supporters of those same parties. This uniquely enables us to model the decision to join parties. The results suggest that most of the elements that constitute the influential ‘General Incentives Model’ are significant. But it also reveals that, while party supporters imagine that selective benefits, social norms and opposing rival parties’ policies are key factors in members’ decisions to join a party, those who actually do so are more likely to say they are motivated by attachments to their party’s values, policies and leaders, as well as by an altruistic desire to support democracy more generally.     

Assessing callous–unemotional traits in adolescent offenders: Validation of the Inventory of Callous–Unemotional Traits

The presence of callous–unemotional (CU) traits designates an important subgroup of antisocial youth. To improve upon existing measures, the Inventory of Callous–Unemotional Traits (ICU) was developed to provide an efficient, reliable, and valid assessment of CU traits in samples of youth. The current study tests the factor structure and correlates of the ICU scale in a sample (n = 248) of juvenile offenders (188 boys, 60 girls) between the ages of 12 and 20 (M = 15.47, SD = 1.37). Confirmatory factor analyses are consistent with the presence of three independent factors (i.e., Uncaring, Callousness, and Unemotional) that relate to a higher-order callous–unemotional dimension. Also, CU traits overall showed associations with aggression, delinquency, and both psychophysiological and self-report indices of emotional reactivity. There were some important differences across the three facets of the ICU in their associations with these key external criteria.     

Using Social Science to Inform the Law of Intestacy: The Case of Unmarried Committed Partners

Laws of intestate succession determine how the estate of a person who dies without a will is distributed. Researchers have struggled with the question of how to infer the donative intent of persons who die intestate. Based on an empirical study of unmarried committed partners, we compare the usefulness of two methods of social research for informing intestacy law: will studies and interviews with living persons about their preferences for estate distribution. The results indicate that for some groups of unmarried committed partners, will studies may not adequately reflect the extent to which intestate decedents wish their partner to share in their estate. In addition, the results demonstrate a close correspondence between respondents' actual wills, when they had them, and their distributive preferences on hypothetical scenarios. These findings are discussed as they relate to an examination of which sources of social scientific evidence are most useful in informing the law of intestacy.