Your child is dead.

OBJECTIVE--To determine parent''s views on how death of their children should have been handled. DESIGN--Retrospective questionnaire survey of parents who had experienced death of their child. SETTING--Charitable organisation of bereaved parents. SUBJECTS--150 bereaved parents, all members of the organisation, of whom 120 (80%) participated voluntarily in the study. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES--Child''s age; date and cause of death; details of person breaking the news and handling of the interview; time parents spent with dead child, their attitude to requests for organ donation, and follow up support received. RESULTS--122 children''s deaths were described; the largest single group was due to road traffic accidents, 16 were suicides, and eight were murders. Twice as many interviews were rated as sympathetically or reasonably handled as badly or offensively handled (68 v 34). The interview ratings depended on the sensitivity and personal skills of the interviewers rather than on their previous contact or professional position; police were rated as more sympathetic than doctors and nurses. Of 109 respondents, 81 had seen their child''s body, 44 of whom thought that sufficient time had been denied. Of the 28 parents who did not see the body, 17 subsequently stated their regret. In 82 parents organ donation had not been discussed. Only 16 parents recorded any follow up support from hospital staff and very few support at the time. CONCLUSIONS--The consistency of the responses suggests a serious need to revise the in service training and education of the police and health professionals in their approach to informing of death; organ donation should be discussed sensitively and parents allowed time with their dead child with fewer restrictions.     

Temporality of Post‐mortem Divination and Divination of Post‐mortem Temporality1

When an Ambonwari person dies divination may be used to consult spirits as to the cause of death. Listening to the tapping of a bamboo pole—where the rhythm reflects totemic signals usually beaten on a slit‐drum—a diviner examines the links between people's wrong doings and other past deeds and events. The aim of post‐mortem divination is to reconstitute and rearrange the relationships between village clans, between clans and their land, between clans and their spirits, both of the dead and of the bush. The aim of divination is to place the events, deeds, relationships, historicity and temporality in good order again, to avoid chaotic unpredictability and the possibility of collective misfortune or even destruction. Though to a lesser degree than in initiation rituals, divination, by reordering and realigning social relationships, reconstructs society at its base. As with initiation, the aim of divination is to reconstruct time.     

Management of perinatal loss of a twin.

The death of a twin during pregnancy or around birth gives rise to a bewildering confusion of thoughts and feelings that can impede mourning and disturb the bereaved mother''s care of a surviving twin. Every effort should be made to give the parents and siblings an experience of the dead baby. Photographs especially can reduce confusion and assist reality testing and thus facilitate the grieving process and improve the care of the surviving twin.     

Experimental Philosophy (E.V. Ilyenkov and A.I. Meshcheriakov)

Evald Vasil'evich Ilyenkov was only two months younger than Aleksandr Ivanovich Meshcheriakov—a doctor of psychological sciences and posthumous winner (with his teacher Ivan Afanas'evich Sokolianskii) of the USSR State Prize in 1980 for their work to set up a system for training and educating deaf and blind children. Ilyenkov outlived Meshcheriakov by less than four and a half years. These men were the closest of friends. Ilyenkov not only followed Meshcheriakov's work but participated in it in an extremely active way. After the latter died, Ilyenkov directed and completed the training of four of Mescheriakov's deaf and blind students in the department of psychology of Lomonosov Moscow State University. The author of this article was one of these students.     

Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies

Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum.     

Knowledge as the source of progress: The Marshall family testament to the “Bushmen”

There can be no doubt that the Marshalls’ testament to the “Bushmen,” particularly Elizabeth's The Harmless People and John's The Hunters, played a major role in shaping a public image of humankind's ancient ancestors, especially in the United States. John has said, correctly I believe, that simply by being made known through his family's efforts, Khoisan‐speaking “Bushmen” were brought into the surviving ethnographic record that intrigued a growing number of anthropologists as well as the general public at the beginning of the 1960s. I offer here a preliminary account, based on archival materials, personal letters, etc., of the paradigms and politics that underlay their efforts. I begin with an examination of the extent to which Laurence Marshall must be seen as the inspiration for and the driving force behind the family project, then turn to a consideration of J. O. Brew's role in it. Although this was an ethnoarchaeological project from its beginning, Brew's role has been wholly unappreciated, but cannot be exaggerated; he was, in terminology appropriate to the business nature of the case, Chief Executive Officer to Laurence's Chairman of the Board.

I then turn to the political arena of prehistory—of the living and the dead—that became as important as the arena of its field sites in the 1960s. The Marshalls were thrust into dormancy by academically more powerful rivals who publicly and privately contested their work, but there can be little doubt that their record critically influenced reawakening anthropological interest in hunting societies. Indeed, struggles to be the proprietary heirs to the Marshalls’ “Bushman” legacy ricochetted off the walls of academia from Cambridge (US) to Berkeley to Johannesburg to London to Cambridge (UK).

Finally, I consider the mythic underpinnings of the Marshalls’ work, and conclude that while Elizabeth, in The Harmless People, presents the least occluded view of the Marshalls’ Kalahari, seen as a whole John's “Bushmen” films reveal the expanding of a sensitive consciousness not only to a gestalt of life but to the complexity of filmic (re)presentation and to the limitations of audiences to comprehend what is presented. Collectively, his films constitute important ethnographic documents. They are not, however, dependable documents of the objectified peoples made subjects in the films, but faithful documents of the filmmaker/ethnographer situated in the discourse of a distorted modernity at the time they were made. They permit us to draw inferences about the species of colonial ideology that was pervasive at that time.     

Weather Effects on the Patterns of People's Everyday Activities: A Study Using GPS Traces of Mobile Phone Users

This study explores the effects that the weather has on people''s everyday activity patterns. Temperature, rainfall, and wind speed were used as weather parameters. People''s daily activity patterns were inferred, such as place visited, the time this took place, the duration of the visit, based on the GPS location traces of their mobile phones overlaid upon Yellow Pages information. Our analysis of 31,855 mobile phone users allowed us to infer that people were more likely to stay longer at eateries or food outlets, and (to a lesser degree) at retail or shopping areas when the weather is very cold or when conditions are calm (non-windy). When compared to people''s regular activity patterns, certain weather conditions affected people''s movements and activities noticeably at different times of the day. On cold days, people''s activities were found to be more diverse especially after 10AM, showing greatest variations between 2PM and 6PM. A similar trend is observed between 10AM and midnight on rainy days, with people''s activities found to be most diverse on days with heaviest rainfalls or on days when the wind speed was stronger than 4 km/h, especially between 10AM–1AM. Finally, we observed that different geographical areas of a large metropolis were impacted differently by the weather. Using data of urban infrastructure to characterize areas, we found strong correlations between weather conditions upon people''s accessibility to trains. This study sheds new light on the influence of weather conditions on human behavior, in particular the choice of daily activities and how mobile phone data can be used to investigate the influence of environmental factors on urban dynamics.     

Parental mortality rates in a western country after the death of a child: assessment of the role of the child's sex

Background: Loss of a child has been associated with elevated mortality rates in parents. Studies that focus on the influence of the child's sex on parental mortality are sparse.Objective: The main objective of the present study was to reevaluate the combined impact of the parents' and child's sex within a larger sample and focus on adverse health effects as an objective measure of possible long-term effects of maladaptive grief reactions.Methods: For the time period between 1980 and 1996, all children in Denmark who died before 18 years of age were identified. Parents who had lost a child were identified as the bereaved (exposed) group. Mortality rates of parents within the same-sex parent-child dyad were compared with mortality rates of parents within the opposite-sex parent-child dyad. Separate analyses were performed for bereaved fathers and for bereaved mothers, and additional analyses were conducted to examine the sole effect of the child's sex, irrespective of parental gender. A Cox proportional hazards regression model was used to estimate the hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% CIs.Results: The study population consisted of 21,062 parents (mean age at entry, 32 years; 11,221 mothers, 9841 fathers). Bereaved parents who had lost a child of the same sex had similar overall mortality as bereaved parents who had lost a child of the opposite sex (HR = 1.02; 95% CI, 0.85–1.22). Similar findings were observed for mortality due to natural death (HR = 0.96; 95% CI, 0.78–1.18) or mortality due to unnatural death (HR = 1.22; 95% CI, 0.84–1.77). Bereaved fathers who had lost a son had similar mortality as those bereaved by the death of a daughter (HR = 1.10; 95% CI, 0.86–1.40). Bereaved mothers who had lost a daughter had similar mortality as those bereaved by the death of a son (HR = 0.93; 95% CI, 0.70–1.22). Bereaved parents who had lost a son had mortality rates similar to those who had lost a daughter (HR = 1.09; 95% CI, 0.91–1.31). The interactions between grouping variable and sex of parents were not significant, indicating that the differential effect of losing a child based on sex of the child was not greater for fathers than for mothers.Conclusions: The results of this study revealed no significant effect of sex of the deceased child on mortality in these bereaved parents. The results might differ if this study was replicated in a population with a different grief culture and, more importantly, different gender schemas.     

A knitted model gut—extending the possibilities

This paper reports on young people's understanding of genes as they near the end of their compulsory science education in the UK. A sample of 482 school students aged 14–16, drawn from across the ability range, took part in this study. Findings, based mainly on written responses to written questions, but supported by interview data, show that this sample had only a very limited understanding of the most basic ideas relating to function, structure, and location of genes. It is argued that these findings are not atypical for this population of school students. The implications for teaching the more complex genetic concepts demanded by the National Curriculum —genetic engineering, for example — are considered.     

Some Problems in People's Cognitive Awareness of one Another under Conditions of Modern Production

Psychology studies people's cognitive awareness of one another as a multilevel reflexive process of social psychological interaction among people. The essential features of this interaction are determined by the ensemble of people's relations in their work and in their social and political activity. Study of people's direct and indirect reflection in each other's minds in a production setting is one of the most important scientific and specifically psychological preconditions for improving the management and organization of modern production. As the subject matter of social psychology, the laws of people's cognitive awareness of one another and of themselves are an organic part of processes of group formation; they mediate all forms of practical and emotional communication in a production brigade, and they are regularly manifested in both the group-related and individually oriented mental states of workers and the dynamic patterns displayed by their moods. Cognitive awareness of others, of course, also exerts an influence on the effectiveness of work.     

“When we got divorced,I left all my things behind.”: How the lifespan of household goods is linked to the biographical trajectory of their owners

Social science research suggests that in our current affluent societies, individuals are accustomed to frequently replacing their household goods. However, some still try to keep their objects for a long time. How do they come to be concerned about products’ lifespan? This paper draws on a powerful method already explored in the literature on consumption: the diachronic approach through individual life trajectories. Analyzing interviews conducted with 60 individuals seeking to make their objects last, this biographical approach allows identifying some factors that explain people's propensity to make objects last. This paper shows that the tendency to keep objects for a long time can come from the familial milieu, just as it can happen later, in connection with personal events—advancement in the life cycle, bifurcations in the personal course, or interactions with public discourses and objects’ breakdowns. Finally, it demonstrates that biographical events can also have a one-time influence on products’ careers in the households, without changing the individual's relationship to objects’ lifespan—these can be personal or more historical and exceptional events, such as lockdown during the COVID-19 crisis.     

Contemporary Chinese TV Serials: Configuring Collective Memory of Socialist Nostalgia via the Cultural Revolution

Using China's Cultural Revolution as a representative historical event, this article examines how the collective memory and popular history revolving around it are manufactured and interpreted in televisual media narratives. The collective memory of the Cultural Revolution, as I will show, is constructed and not preserved, and the collective framework of memory, as the predominant thoughts and the governing ideological rhetoric of society, configures people's memories of past events. A textual analysis of the TV drama, The Place Where Dreams Start [Meng kaishi de difang, 1998], a typical revolutionary nostalgia text, will expose the process of collective memory concerning the Cultural Revolution for what it is—cultural amnesia that is misleading and regressive.     

Comparing the adoption of protective behaviors: The framing effects of national culture and hazard onset type

On the basis of framing effect and protective action decision model, this study examines the differences in people's response to diverse hazard onset types (sudden or gradual) under different cultural frameworks (China and the United States) and the framing effects of culture and hazard onset type on people's perception and behavioral response. The data are derived from three questionnaire surveys on people's behavioral response to H7N9 and smog emergency in China and H1N1 in the United States. Results indicate that people with different cultures and diverse contexts of hazard onset type present substantial differences in risk perception, protective action perception, stakeholder perception, and behavioral expectations. Furthermore, culture and hazard onset type exert significant framing effects on people's three types of perception, reliance on official information sources, and intention to adopt protective actions. This research empirically verifies the existence of framing effect in culture and decision scenarios, thereby helping in developing different emergency communication strategies.     

Constructions of race: symbolic ethnic capital and the performance of youth identity in multicultural Australia

The relationship between ethnicity and cultural and social capital has been taken up by several scholars in terms of questions of disadvantage. This paper considers the performance of race and ethnicity as positive capital among a group of Sudanese young people with refugee backgrounds in Brisbane, Australia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate young people's adaptation of cultural associations in their hybridized and essentialized self-representations. In particular, I explore my informants’ use of hip hop music and style as resources in performance. Much of young people's engagement with capital in performance enables their relatively overt and self-conscious process of clarifying who they are in relationship to one another, often with particular reference to race and ethnicity. Their engagement with globally relevant mediums is indicative of young people's agency in defining their own lives in the context of the political and moral framework of Australian multiculturalism.     

城市公园景感要素及其对不同人群公园活动方式的影响

景感生态学以可持续发展为目标,契合了新型城镇化和人居环境科学的思想,强调以人为本,关注人的感知与环境的关系,为理解城市景观与人群活动的关系提供了一个崭新的视角。基于景感生态学视角,对城市公园常见的景感要素进行归纳分类,探讨城市公园景感要素对不同人群活动的作用途径;然后选择厦门市滨海、滨湖、山体、老城区和文化等五类典型城市公园的代表作为研究对象,实证分析和比较五类公园景感要素组成和民众感知评价的差异,并以此尝试解释不同类型公园吸引不同人群(访客密度、访问时间)及其在公园活动方式上的差异。研究结果表明,公园景感要素通过多层次关联对人群活动产生作用,即景感要素作用影响人的感觉类型,产生多样景感效果,满足民众由愿景产生的需求,进而影响其活动意愿和方式;各景感要素综合作用,共同对公园活动产生影响;当公园景感要素承载的设计愿景与民众愿景产生共鸣,才能产生良好景感效果,促进游园人群活动热情;公园景感要素和人群活动的关系侧重体现暴露性的生态系统服务。该论文研究结果希望为深入研究城市公园服务人群机制拓展一个自然与人文融合的崭新视角,同时为城市公园设计和运营提供有效的科技支撑。     

When and What Parents Tell Children About Race: An Examination of Race-Related Socialization Among African American Families

This article describes a developmental systems approach to applied developmental science (ADS), which provides a framework to design and evaluate technology-rich programs that promote positive development by emphasizing the strengths and assets of young people instead of focusing on diminishing or preventing risk-taking behaviors. Until now, most of the psychoeducational programs conceived within the ADS model have not focused on the role of new technologies in young people's lives. This absence is particularly striking given that, in today's world, new technologies play an important role in different areas of the lives of young people, such as education, entertainment, socialization, and communication. This article presents the concept of identity construction environments (ICE), an interdisciplinary model that proposes guidelines to design and study new technologies purposefully created to promote positive youth development (PYD). Two types of ICE have been developed: one focusing on stand-alone technologies for learning, such as the Zora virtual city; and the other focusing on an approach for developing technologically rich learning contexts, such as the Project Inter-Actions robotics workshops. This article presents both examples of ICE and describes how their design fosters the 6 components of PYD. Initial findings from pilot studies conducted with very different populations of youth engaged in both types of ICE—such as young children, adolescents, and chronically ill children—are presented.     

Orientalism in the Documentary Representation of Culture

Structured around the idea that there is a non-linguistic and cross-cultural, possibly biological, basis on which the understanding of pictures rests, this essay looks at the ways whereby images in documentary films challenge the notion of cultural difference. Drawing on Said's Orientalism [1978] and its impact on the basic assumptions of anthropologists, the essay stresses Said's relevance to documentary film theorists, and discusses the work of visual anthropologists and filmmakers influenced by Merleau-Ponty's ideas about the phenomenology of perception. Discussion suggests that the kind of knowledge disclosed by revelatory films represents an important answer to one of the fundamental epistemological issues that Said does not take up in Orientalism, namely the question of the materialization of an “authentic human encounter” not subjugated to the dead book. The essay implies that we should have no objection in principle to the self/other dichotomy when it is used intelligently.     

Implicit Racial Attitudes Influence Perceived Emotional Intensity on Other-Race Faces

An ability to accurately perceive and evaluate out-group members'' emotions plays a critical role in intergroup interactions. Here we showed that Chinese participants'' implicit attitudes toward White people bias their perception and judgment of emotional intensity of White people''s facial expressions such as anger, fear and sadness. We found that Chinese participants held pro-Chinese/anti-White implicit biases that were assessed in an evaluative implicit association test (IAT). Moreover, their implicit biases positively predicted the perceived intensity of White people''s angry, fearful and sad facial expressions but not for happy expressions. This study demonstrates that implicit racial attitudes can influence perception and judgment of a range of emotional expressions. Implications for intergroup interactions were discussed.     

Equity or equality? Moral judgments follow the money

Previous research emphasizes people''s dispositions as a source of differences in moral views. We investigate another source of moral disagreement, self-interest. In three experiments, participants played a simple economic game in which one player divides money with a partner according to the principle of equality (same payoffs) or the principle of equity (payoffs proportional to effort expended). We find, first, that people''s moral judgment of an allocation rule depends on their role in the game. People not only prefer the rule that most benefits them but also judge it to be more fair and moral. Second, we find that participants'' views about equality and equity change in a matter of minutes as they learn where their interests lie. Finally, we find limits to self-interest: when the justification for equity is removed, participants no longer show strategic advocacy of the unequal division. We discuss implications for understanding moral debate and disagreement.     

内生驱动因素对景感意愿度差异的影响——从城市公园斑块-廊道-基质景观角度

城市绿色空间与人的健康息息相关,新发展阶段人们对城市绿色空间建设提出了更高要求,来满足日益增长的美好生活需要。优化城市绿色空间,维持、提升和增加城市生态系统服务,是景感生态学研究的使命之一,然而以往研究鲜有从人自身的人格属性角度探讨内生驱动因素在景观感知和景观评价中的影响。以景感意愿度作为衡量景观感知和需求的指标,探究内生驱动因素对人的景观感知和行为偏好选择的影响,提出内生驱动因素对人在不同景观类型中的感受存在差异,而且这种差异影响到个体的行为偏好这一假设。以杭州市主城区5座城市公园的"斑块-廊道-基质"景观作为研究对象,以MBTI量表所得的人格类型作为内生驱动因素,将内生驱动因素与景观和行为偏好选择进行有序回归分析,探讨其对景感意愿度的影响。结果表明：基质景观中受访者景感意愿度最强烈,其次为斑块景观,廊道景观中景感意愿度最低;在斑块景观中,ESFP （外向-感官-感性-自然）型、ENFP （外向-畅想-感性-自然）型、ESFJ （外向-感官-感性-控制）型和INFP （内向-畅想-感性-自然）型的人格类型对景感意愿度具有显著相关关系;在廊道景观中,有14种人格类型对景感意愿度具有显著相关关系;在基质景观中,有9种人格类型对景感意愿度具有显著相关关系。研究结果证实了内生驱动因素影响着人们的景感意愿度。在城市景观生态评价、规划和景感营造,以及生态系统服务研究中,不仅需要考虑生态环境因素和人的社会属性,还应考虑到人的内在属性特征,将景感意愿度和内生驱动因素纳入生态规划中。