The Right to Do Wrong: Lying to Parents Among Adolescents and Emerging Adults

In this study, 229 high school students and 261 college students evaluated the acceptability of lying to parents under 19 different circumstances where a person's motive for lying differed. Students also indicated the frequency with which they had lied to their parents about diverse issue such as friends, dates, and money. Results indicated that adolescents and emerging adults quite commonly lied to their parents, and that in part they framed lying to parents as a way to assert the right to autonomy. Emerging adults were less accepting of lying and reported less frequent lying, compared to adolescents. Results also showed the association of sex, personality (self-restraint and tolerance of deviance), and family environment (control and cohesion) upon adolescents' and emerging adults' acceptance of lying to parents and lying behavior.     

Causes of sudden natural death in Jamaica: a medicolegal (coroner's) autopsy study from the University Hospital of the West Indies

Medicolegal (coroner's) autopsies are an important source of epidemiological data. A large proportion of them comprise sudden natural deaths and an analysis of such cases has never been undertaken at the University Hospital of the West Indies, the only teaching hospital in Jamaica. In a retrospective study, 841 cases of sudden natural deaths comprising 51.3% of the medicolegal autopsies conducted over the 15-year period, January 1983 to December 1997, were analyzed. There were 459 males and 382 females (M:F ratio = 1.2:1); 35 patients (4.1%) were less than 1 year of age, and the mean age of the remainder was 53.7+/-21.8 years. The peak age group was the seventh decade accounting for 21.9% of cases. The most common causes of death were cerebrovascular accidents (13.6%), pneumonia (9.4%), pulmonary embolism (7.4%), ischaemic heart disease (7.0%) and diabetes mellitus (6.1%). These findings contrasted with those from developed countries in which ischaemic heart disease is the commonest cause of sudden death. Hypertension was associated with the majority of cases of cerebrovascular accident and congestive cardiac failure (78.1 and 61.9%, respectively). Sickle cell disease represented one of the 10 most common causes of death accounting for 2.5% of cases. Documentation of autopsy-based data such as these is important in the planning of medical services in a developing country.     

Combining work and family in the Netherlands: Blessing or burden for one's mental health?

In this article we study which characteristics of combining work and family put people at risk for mental illness. Two alternative perspectives on the impact of multiple social roles on mental health are tested: the role accumulation perspective and the role strain perspective. Both perspectives are studied with data from a cross-sectional national survey held among a large, representative sample of Dutch people (N=1008). Multivariate analyses provided support for both perspectives. Having more social roles was related to better mental health. We also found a positive mental health effect of having a full-time job in combination with having children. However, having a partner who contributes less to household duties or having a job with low decision latitude or lower skill discretion was related to mental illness. So, certain aspects of social roles may also threaten people's mental health. Overall, our findings do not support the idea that combining work and family is necessarily a burden and harmful for people's mental health. Whether multiple social roles are a blessing or burden for people's mental health seems to depend on the characteristics of the social roles.     

Forced confabulation more strongly influences event memory if suggestions are other‐generated than self‐generated

Purpose. Virtually all eyewitnesses to a crime, who eventually testify in court, are interviewed by police officers at least once. How do these interviews affect what the eyewitnesses are subsequently likely to report? The purpose of this study is to compare the relative impact of self‐ versus other‐generated misinformation on confabulated memory about an event. Self‐generated misinformation can occur by encouraging eyewitnesses to guess or speculate about possible answers to questions about which they report having no memory. Other‐generated misinformation can occur by having an investigator suggest an answer to an eyewitness. Methods. After viewing a 5 minutes crime video, participants answered written questions. One week later these same questions were answered again. We specifically focused on individuals' answers to unanswerable questions that probed information not actually presented in the video. If a participant answered an unanswerable question, we know that their answer was confabulated because the information was not presented in the video. Results. If an answer to an unanswerable question was forced confabulated at time 1, that answer was more likely to be repeated at time 2 if it had been other‐generated (suggested in the question) rather than self‐generated (fabricated by the participant). Conclusions. Pressuring eyewitnesses to answer questions about an event, when they indicate that they do not know the answer, can result in false confabulations. Answers suggested by the investigator are more likely to be repeated later than are answers that are simply self‐generated or speculated by the eyewitness. These results are consistent with the reality monitoring framework and ‘recollect‐to‐reject’ metacognitive reasoning strategies.     

Private game farming and its social consequences in post-apartheid South Africa: contestations over wildlife,property and agrarian futures

Spaces of privatised wildlife production, in the form of game farms, private nature reserves and other forms of wildlife-oriented land use, are an increasingly prominent feature of the South African countryside. Whilst there is a well-developed literature on the social impacts of state-run protected areas, the outcomes of privatised wildlife production have thus far received little attention. It is argued here that the socio-spatial dynamics of the wildlife industry, driven by capitalist imperatives related to the commodified production of nature and ‘wilderness’, warrant both in-depth investigation in their own right, and contextualisation in terms of broader processes of agrarian change locally as well as globally. The growing influence of trophy hunting and the wildlife industry on private land can be seen as a significant contributing factor to processes of deagrarianisation that are mirrored in other parts of the African continent and elsewhere. In South Africa, these developments and their impacts on the livelihoods of farm dwellers take on an added dimension in the context of the country's efforts to implement a programme of post-apartheid land reform. Two decades after the formal end of apartheid, contestations over land rights and property ownership remain live and often unresolved. This theme issue explores these dynamics on private land partly or wholly dedicated to wildlife production, with special emphasis on two South African provinces: KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.