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This paper explores the understudied topic of international student sojourners' emotional intercultural competence in higher education by analysing Chinese postgraduate students' experiences of managing their emotions evoked during intercultural communication at a British university. Through ethnographic interviews, this study examines how students construct their emotion-management experiences as well as the effects of social interaction on the construction processes of these experiences. The findings shed light on the motives and pathways for deploying specific emotional intercultural competencies in practice. Furthermore, the findings manifest the central role of the interplay between individual agency and societal forces in shaping the substances, facilitators, constraints, two-way interactivity and dialectical tensions of emotional intercultural competencies that unfold in specific interpersonal, moral and structural contexts. By representing competence as a repertoire of action strategies performed by individuals to address their important concerns and by illuminating the meanings of competence in particular environments at particular moments, this study moves beyond the traditional 'list' approach which largely conceptualises competencies as fixed, individual-based and universal entities. The study emphasises the importance of taking a holistic, process-oriented, context-based and dialectical perspective in developing a deeper level of competence for empowering individuals engaged in intercultural communication. In addition, this study discusses practical implications regarding the development of emotion-management strategies towards competence for intercultural education in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Risk perceptions are instrumental in predicting how people will process and react to threats. While social contexts have long been associated with changes in risk perception, whether and which social contexts alter risk perceptions is not well understood. This paper explores one such social context––support-giving––which has previous links to affect, cognition, and behavior, including how threats are processed. Using a tripartite model in which risk perceptions are split between deliberative (logical), affective (emotional), and experiential (lived) assessments, we used two studies, a longitudinal-correlational (Study 1) and experimental (Study 2), to explore whether support-giving relates to and impacts risk perceptions. Findings from Study 1 revealed that support-giving toward a close other at Time 1 was associated with an increase in affective risk perceptions at Time 2. Study 2 clarified the direction of this association, finding that there was an increase in affective and experiential risk perceptions for those randomly assigned to a support-giving condition, as compared to the control. Deliberative risk perceptions did not differ between conditions. Given that affective risk perceptions strongly predict behavior, support-giving may be a promising new avenue by which to inspire preventative behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2010, the Nordic countries have experienced substantial fertility decline. This was unexpected, as these countries have well-established systems of family support policies and they did not experience a fertility shock in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 economic recession like many other European countries. Previous studies paid little attention to the spatial dimension of this unexpected fertility change, despite evidence of large spatial variation in fertility. This paper aims to close this gap through a spatial perspective and deepen our understanding of how Nordic fertility change varies by economic and social contexts. We apply advanced spatial panel models on data for 1,099 municipalities covering Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Next to analyzing total fertility rates, we also compare the relevance of economic and social contexts for spatial fertility variation at younger or older ages. We note distinct differences by levels of urbanization and differing trends between the age groups. We also find that measures of unemployment and union stability are associated with lower levels of fertility across space and time, while support for conservative parties is related to higher fertility. Age-specific analyses highlighted that economic conditions are more relevant for fertility variation under age thirty than over age thirty. Overall, our analysis provides support for the view that both economic and social factors are highly relevant for understanding spatial variation in the Nordic fertility decline. Given the strong spatial component in Nordic fertility change, policy initiatives would also benefit from a spatial dimension to effectively address fertility change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we introduce the umbrella construct of "we-ness" to unite a broad array of researchers seeking to design motivationally supportive learning environments for Black students. Drawing from a variety of culturally informed perspectives both inside and outside of the psychology discipline, we outline the cultural significance of (1) Freedom Dreaming (2) Stressing the Communal "Why," (3) Re-membering, and (4) Steering and Voicing. We explain how these motivationally influential practices are essential for acknowledging and leveraging students' cultural assets in learning contexts, and for supporting students' development as community leaders and change agents. We propose questions for future research on we-ness in educational psychology and suggest communally engaged methodological approaches that are crucial for advancing school-based partnerships that focus on the we-ness experiences of historically marginalized populations. We end by situating the study of we-ness in a broader set of assumptions that can guide future equity-focused research inquiry on motivation and social processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study was aimed to develop a general argumentation framework for evaluating the quality of causal arguments across scientific and social contexts. We designed a computer-delivered assessment that contains four scenario-based argumentation tasks. Each task asks students to identify relevant evidence from provided data sources and use the evidence to construct an argument that answers a causal question. One task is about a social issue, while the rest three tasks each requires knowledge of a scientific concept (melting/evaporation, photosynthesis, trophic cascade). The assessment was implemented with 349 students from urban middle and high schools. Based on the data and prior research, we developed an empirically grounded argumentation framework that contains four qualitatively different levels: non-causal arguments, causal arguments lacking logical connections, causal arguments with weak reasoning, and causal arguments with strong reasoning. The qualitative results provide evidence of the existence of the argumentation levels. The IRT analysis and the Wright map provide the evidence that the order of and the distinctions among the argumentation levels are meaningful. Together, the qualitative and quantitative results support the viability of the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a novel kind of argument for assessing the moral significance of acts of lying and misleading. It is based on considerations about valuable social norms that might be eroded by these actions, because these actions function as signals. Given that social norms can play an important role in supporting morality, individuals have a responsibility to preserve such norms and to prevent 'cultural slopes' that erode them. Depending on whether there are norms against lying, misleading, or both, and how likely it is that they might be eroded, these actions can thus have different moral significance. In cases in which the rule 'do not lie', as a relatively simple rule, functions as a 'focal point', acts of misleading are often morally preferable. In other words, in such cases the possibility of 'cultural slopes' can ground a context-dependent slippery slope argument for a moral difference between lying and misleading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online social networking sites have shown an unbelievable widening in the last decade. Spammers utilise social networking sites to unroll spam messages due to its fame and use various procedures to spread spam. Consequently, the identification of spam must be well fortified enough to detect unsolicited messages and deter spammers. Though various spam identification procedures are obtainable, to improve the accuracy for spam identification is inevitable. In this work, a method to detect unsolicited messages is proposed to recognise and avert spam messages. The social context parameters such as trust and strength as well as spam template matching are also considered along with basic classifiers for effective spam classification. The intercommunication factors between the users are used for strength calculation. Spam template generation is performed based on the majority merge operation on the spam messages during the training time, and spam templates comparison is performed with the incoming messages during the testing time. Trust value updation is performed after the message classification. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model with SVM-Polynomial Radial Basis kernel which provides better accuracy in spam classification and outperforms all the state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assertiveness, as the ability to adequately express oneself while maintaining social gains, can be applied to various social contexts and concomitant social demands, but the cognitive and emotional correlates underlying assertive behaviour in diverse social events has not been considered. We tested a cognitive-behavioral framework for understanding the self-reported enactment of diverse types of assertive behaviours (i.e., displaying negative and positive feelings, expressing and managing personal limitations, and taking initiative), using a sample of 679 adolescents (mean age = 16.68, 261 boys) and a model generation approach to structural equation modelling. Cognition directly predicted lower distress and more frequent assertive behavior; also, cognition indirectly predicted assertive behavior through distress. Interpersonal management was the most salient cognitive theme predicting various types of assertive behaviors, alongside feeling less distressed when displaying negative feelings. Evidence was found for cognitive-behavioral theories being a valid approach to understanding assertiveness and sustaining insights for efficacious assertive training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined daily experiences of interest in and across the social contexts of family and in- and out-of-school peers. Forty-two Dutch adolescents, aged 13-15 years, provided us with 2 weeks of experience sampling data on their engagement in interesting topics and activities throughout their daily lives. Findings show that adolescent daily life included a diverse range of parallel interests. School-related interests made up a substantial part of adolescents' daily lives, challenging the idea of mere disengagement of secondary school students in academics. Findings also show that some interests are strongly bound to a specific context, while others appear across family and peer contexts. This indicates how multiple contexts can simultaneously feed interests, something that calls for further across-context research of interest development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in information technology have turned out World Wide Web to be the main platform for interactions where participants-users and corresponding events-are triggered. Although the participants vary in accordance with scenarios, a considerable size of data will be generated. This phenomenon indeed causes the complexity in information retrieval, management, and resuse, and meanwhile, turns down the value of this data. In this research, we attempt to achieve efficient management of user-generated data and its derivative contexts (i.e., social ad hoc data) for human supports. The correlations among data, contexts, and their hybridization are specifically concentrated. An intelligent state machine is proposed to outline the relations of data and contexts, and applied to further identify their usage scenarios. The performance and feasibility can be revealed by the experiments that were conducted on the data collected from open social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) in the past few years with size around 500 users and 8,000,000 shared contents from them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typically developing (TD) infants could capitalize on social eye gaze and social contexts to aid word learning. Although children with autism disorder (AD) are known to exhibit atypicality in word learning via social eye gaze, their ability to utilize social contexts for word learning is not well understood. We investigated whether verbal AD children exhibit word learning ability via social contextual cues by late childhood. We found that AD children, unlike TD controls, failed to infer the speaker's referential intention through information gathered from the social context. This suggests that TD children can learn words in diverse social pragmatic contexts in as early as toddlerhood whereas AD children are still unable to do so by late childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue of AIDS and Behavior, we focus on the social contexts of sexual transmission of HIV/STI in one South China city. Our multiple projects grew from partnerships across the social and biomedical sciences, and with public health experts in Liuzhou City, to address critical gaps in knowledge about how social factors drive heterosexual transmission. The eleven articles that comprise this special issue feature multidisciplinary and mixed method approaches, collecting data in Liuzhou from different populations, environments, and social venues where individuals often find sexual partners. They document heterosexual behaviors and their meanings. They investigate the experiences and behaviors of women and men in social venues, exploring the networks of people within these venues, how they relate to one another, share information, and influence each other. The articles also examine the experiences of people living with HIV, again collecting data from multiple levels and sources, and revealing the ongoing power of stigma to shape these lives. Taken together, the articles demonstrate the critical role of social contexts in shaping behaviors and meanings, which are linked to heterosexual transmission of HIV/STI, and which must be taken into account for the development of appropriate and effective public health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designation as a 'Habitual Offender' is an enhanced form of punishment which unlike, 'Three Strikes' or '10-20-Life,' is entirely discretionary. We use Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling to assess the direct effects of race and Latino ethnicity on the designation of Habitual Offenders as well as the effect of both static and dynamic indicators of racial and ethnic threat on those outcomes. Our data include 26,740 adults sentenced to prison in Florida between 2002 and 2004 who were statutorily eligible to be sentenced as Habitual. The odds of receiving this designation are significantly increased for black and Latino defendants as compared to whites, though race and ethnicity effects vary substantially by crime type, being strongest for drug offenses and negligible for violent crimes. Static measures of group level threat (% black and % Latino) have no cross-level effect on sentencing by race or Latino ethnicity. However, increasing black population over time increases the odds of being sentenced as Habitual for both black and Latino defendants. Increasing Latino population increases the odds of Habitual Offender sentencing for Latinos, but decreases it for blacks. The prospect of engaging dynamic as opposed to static measures of threat in future criminal justice and other social control research is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Girls' early pubertal timing has been linked in many studies to behavioral problems such as delinquency and substance use. The theoretical explanations for these links have often involved the girls' peer relationships, but contexts have also been considered important in some explanations. By integrating two theoretical models, the peer- socialization and the contextual- amplification hypotheses, we propose a contextual framework for explaining the link between early pubertal timing and external problem behavior in girls. We hypothesize that early developing girls engage in unhealthy, dangerous, and risky behavior under contextual conditions that promote access to older friends and opposite-sex relationships. Under other conditions it is less likely. We tested this integrated hypothesis in two studies conducted in Sweden. The first was a cross-sectional study with information about school and free-time friends in a community sample (N = 284). Early pubertal timing was linked to having older, more normbreaking friends outside of school, but not in school, thus suggesting that the school context interferes early-developing girls' selection of older peers. The second study involved both a longitudinal (N = 434) and a cross-sectional sample of girls (N = 634), where we examined a leisure setting that is known to attract delinquent youth. Results showed that early pubertal timing was most strongly linked to delinquency for girls who spent time in this context and were heavily involved with boys and peers. In sum, results from both studies supported our predictions that certain contexts would amplify the peer-socialization effect. Overall, we conclude that the integrated peer-socialization/contextual-amplification model satisfactorily explains the link between pubertal timing and external problem behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this present study is to expand our general understanding of bullying behaviour and to advance our knowledge about bullying among pupils. As evidenced by historical documents, the phenomenon of bullying is not a new concept. The fact that some people are frequently and systematically harassed or attacked by others is described in literary works and it also has been found most realistically in schools. Overall, considerable examples of bullying incidents among young people in earlier times have been found out through this study. In earlier times, according to descriptions in old documents from the 18th to early 20th centuries, bullying was generally described as physical harassment that usually related to a death, strong isolation, or extortion in school children. However, in contrast to the forms of bullying in earlier times, and the first descriptions of bullying as one or a few physically strong boys directly and harshly treating weaker ones, bullying in modern contexts includes more psychological and verbal threatening as well. Moreover, the meaning and forms of bullying has been expanded and developed as including mean gestures and facial expression, gossiping, and spreading rumours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, approaches to developing, encouraging and extending children’s’ thinking are of considerable professional interest. Teachers and researchers have explored a number of different strategies. These are categorized in recent Department for Education and Skills (DFES) guidance into three broad areas: philosophical, cognitive intervention, and brain-based learning approaches. Within all these approaches, spoken language has been identified as essential for collaborative learning of any kind and in some, information technology is also seen as a potentially supportive collaborative medium (McGuiness, 1999). This paper takes the form of a case study of children aged 10–11, from two Primary schools and considers the place of diagrammatic software in supporting children’s’ exploration and representation of ideas. The case study provides some concrete examples of ways in which the children made links between their discussion of ideas and their visual record. Children were recorded as they worked together to produce their map and as they reported to their peers on its completion. Data were collected over a six week period using observational schedules, field notes, and pupil feedback. The analysis of maps themselves was a central concern as this as techniques for this are not yet fully established, although some significant work is available (e.g. Mavers et al., 2002) The study showed the ease with which all pupils adapted to the use of the software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]