Overcrowding as a risk factor for domestic violence and antisocial behaviour among adolescents in Ejigbo, Lagos, Nigeria.

BACKGROUND: The objective was to investigate the relationships between overcrowding, domestic violence, and antisocial behaviour in a sample of adolescents in Lagos metropolitan area, Nigeria. Possible gender differences and differences due to religious affiliation concerning domestic violence and antisocial behaviour were also investigated. METHOD: A questionnaire was filled in by 238 Nigerian adolescents, 12-20 years of age; the sample included 122 females (m = 15.1 years, s.d. = 2.0) and 116 males (m = 15.8 years, s.d. = 2.0). The respondents were from junior and senior secondary schools in Ejigbo and surrounding cities (Isolo, Egbe and Ago-Palace Lagos). Six scales were included: adolescents as victims of adult and sibling aggression, respectively, witnessing of domestic violence, parental negativity towards adolescents, antisocial behaviour among adolescents and poverty in the home. Overcrowding, gender and religious affiliation served as independent variables. RESULTS: According to a multivariate analysis of variance with level of poverty as covariate, overcrowding showed significant associations with four of five scales measuring aggressive and antisocial behaviours. Gender and religion were associated with three variables each. However, multiple regression analyses revealed that overcrowding tended to partial out the effects of both gender and religion showing that overcrowding was the most important factor determining negative outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: The results have implications for housing policies in Nigeria. Moreover, these results may also have implications for research and policy making in other nations and parts of the world.

Parents' assessments of how much time they spend with their children at different ages.

The self-reported amount of active engagement time parents (n = 1107) and children (n = 773) spend together was investigated with questionnaires. Mothers spent more time with their children than fathers did. The amount of parental quality time decreased with the age of the child, the average across age groups being 4.4 +/- 3.0 hr. for mothers and 3.0 +/- 2.9 hr. for fathers per day. Children reported spending roughly 1 hour more time with their parents than the latter reported.

Social defeat as a stressor in humans.

Studies on social defeat in humans, and their similarities with studies on social defeat in animals are reviewed. Studies on social defeat in humans typically are conducted as a branch of social psychology, most often focusing on bullying in schools and in workplaces. Victims of bullying are known to suffer from depression, anxiety, sociophobia, loss of self-esteem, psychosomatic diseases, and other behavioral symptoms. On the other hand, animal studies on social defeat, usually based on the rodent resident--intruder paradigm, present findings related to physiological rather than to behavioral consequences of defeat. The two branches use different terminology, e.g., "dominant" and "subordinate" (animal studies) and "bully" and "victim" (human studies). It is suggested that the two fields could benefit from a mutual exchange in theory and methodology.

Attitudes toward violent conflict resolution among male and female karateka in comparison with practitioners of other sports.

Most modern martial arts are based upon a philosophy of nonviolence. Whether practitioners of karate indeed have more negative attitudes toward violent conflict resolution than wrestlers and boxers, noncontact sportsmen, and controls practising no sports was investigated (N = 319; 214 men, 105 women; M age = 24.1 yr.). Within sex, male karateka held relatively negative attitudes toward violent conflict resolution, whereas the opposite was noted for female karateka.

At what age do children learn to discriminate between act and actor?

Children's ability to make moral judgements about an act on the basis of aspects of the act rather than on liking and preconceived ideas about the actor was investigated. 85 children of 4 age groups (preschool, Grades 1, 2, and 3, age range 5-9 years) participated. Act/Actor discrimination was investigated with a test consisting of 8 cartoons. In 4, a rabbit was behaving aggressively against a wolf; the other 4 portrayed identical acts with the wolf as aggressor and the rabbit as victim. Participants made moral evaluations of each cartoon. IQ was measured with Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices, and the general level of moral development was measured in accord with Piaget's (1932) criteria. Age, IQ, and general moral development correlated with discriminative ability for Act and Actor. In Piagetian terms, children at the heteronomous level were not capable of such discrimination, while children at the autonomous level (above 7 years of age) in general were.

Attribution of aggression to acts: a four-factor model.

Factors determining why acts are regarded as aggressive were investigated in a sample of 303 subjects (140 males, 163 females, M age = 17.7 yr., SD = 1.4). A model was tested, according to which people base their attribution of aggression to acts on four factors: (1) intention (yes/no), (2) reason (attack/defense), (3) injury (death/injury/no injury), and (4) mode (weapon/bare hands/nonphysical means). All four factors contributed to the explanation of attribution of aggression, and the order of importance was the one mentioned above, intention being most important. The interaction between intention and reason was the second most important, contributing more than reason alone. The findings are consistent with the severity of punishment in sentences for different crimes of violence.

Children'S experience of three types of cartoon at two age levels.

Three cartoons were shown to 87 children at two age levels: 5-6 years, and 9 years. The children's experience was assessed in interviews. The younger children experienced the cartoons in a fragmentary manner and not as a continuous story, understood less of the cartoons, and tended to base their moral judgements of a character's behaviour on whether or not they identified with that character. Six months later, the younger children remembered best those scenes that had made them the most anxious earlier. A subgroup of children with abundant aggressive fantasies had a lower level of moral reasoning than the other children, preferred violent scenes, became less anxious while watching them and tended to give illogical explanations for the behaviour of the cartoon characters. The degree of anxiety provoked by a cartoon depended not on the amount of explicit violence shown but on the way the violence was presented. One cartoon, which contained no explicit violence, was considered the most frightening one due to its sound effects.