Online sexual violence prevention on a female college campus in India: Evaluation of the RISE-ON program.

Background: Sexual violence represents a severe problem for young Indian women and requires effective prevention. Since face-to-face prevention programs are limited in reach, we developed the online sexual violence prevention program RISE-ON consisting of three modules, namely Gender, Sexual Violence, and Bystander Education. The study's objective is to investigate the short-term effects of the RISE-ON modules on participants' knowledge and attitudes. Method: A total of N = 244 female college students from Delhi aged 17 to 22 were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups with two of the three modules. By design, each group functions as a treatment group for the two included modules and as a control group for the third, missing module. Results: From pre- to posttest, there were significantly larger increases of participants' knowledge on gender, sexual violence, and bystander education in the treatment than in the control group. Concerning attitudes, we found significant increases for gender awareness and bystander attitudes across all groups. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that the RISE-ON modules are effective in terms of increasing knowledge, but there were no module-specific changes of attitudes. Thus, future online prevention programs need to focus increasingly on attitudes, especially attitudes about sexual violence, and behavior change.

Early social-cognitive development as a dynamic developmental system-a lifeworld approach.

Based on developmental systems and dynamic systems theories, we propose the lifeworld approach-a conceptual framework for research and a hypothesis concerning early social-cognitive development. As a framework, the lifeworld approach recognizes the social embeddedness of development and shifts the focus away from individual developmental outcomes toward the reciprocal interplay of processes within and between individuals that co-constitutes early social-cognitive development. As a hypothesis, the lifeworld approach proposes that the changing developmental system-spanning the different individuals as their subsystems-strives toward attractor states through regulation at the behavioral level, which results in both the emergence and further differentiation of developmental attainments. The lifeworld approach-as a framework and a hypothesis, including key methodological approaches to test it-is exemplified by research on infants' self-awareness, prosocial behavior and social learning. Equipped with, first, a conceptual framework grounded in a modern view on development and, second, a growing suite of methodological approaches, developmental science can advance by analyzing the mutually influential relations between intra-individual and interactional processes in order to identify key mechanisms underlying early social-cognitive development.

The socialization of visual attention: Training effects of verbal attention guidance in urban German children.

Verbal attention guidance is assumed to be an important cultural tool contributing to the development of culture-specific visual attention styles in childhood. We used a training approach to test whether verbal attention guidance in a 10 day app-based training that accentuates either analytic or holistic processing has the power to produce enduring effects on 6- to 7-year-old urban German children's (N = 42, 22 female, 20 male) attention in a picture description task, a single-choice recognition task and a change blindness task. Results indicate that verbal attention guidance is effective in influencing children's attention styles across indicators. These findings provide convergent evidence for the assumption that verbal attention guidance plays a central role in the long-term socialization of attention styles. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Mealtime conversations between parents and their 2-year-old children in five cultural contexts.

Children all over the world learn language, yet the contexts in which they do so vary substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children (N = 99 families) during mealtime across five cultural settings (Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Germany, and Japan) and coded the amount of talk and gestures as well as their conversational embedding (interlocutors, function, and themes). We found a comparable pattern of communicative interactions across cultural settings, which were modified in ways that are consistent with local norms and values. These results suggest that children encounter similarly structured communicative environments across diverse cultural contexts and will inform theories of language learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Visual attention across cultures: Similarities and differences in child development and maternal attention styles.

Previous cross-cultural research has described two different attention styles: a holistic style, characterized by context-sensitive processing, generally associated with interdependent cultural contexts, and an analytic style, a higher focus on salient objects, generally found in independent cultural contexts. Though a general assumption in the field is that attention styles are gradually socialized in culture-specific interactions in childhood, empirical evidence for the proximal mechanisms underlying this development is scarce. This study aimed to document the emergence of cross-cultural differences in attention styles in three cultural contexts differing in social orientations, namely in urban middle-class families from Münster, Germany (i.e., more independent context), and Kyoto, Japan, and Indigenous-heritage families from Cotacachi, Ecuador (i.e., more interdependent contexts). Furthermore, to test the assumption that caregivers' attention guidance is one of the forces driving differential development, we investigated how caregivers guide children's attention. In total, 270 children between 4 and 9 years of age and their mothers participated in three tasks: an eye-tracking task, a picture description task and a forced-choice recognition task. Results indicate a mixed pattern of findings: While some tasks revealed the expected cultural differences, namely a higher object focus in Münster compared to Kyoto and Cotacachi, others did not. Regarding caregivers' attention guidance, we found that mothers in Münster more strongly emphasized the focal object than mothers in Kyoto and Cotacachi. The results are discussed in terms of culture-specific developmental trajectories and the generalizability of attentional processes across tasks and cultural contexts. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We investigated visual attention styles in 4- to 9-year-old children and their mothers from urban Germany, urban Japan, and rural Ecuador in three different tasks. Special emphasis lied on mothers' verbal attention guidance toward their children as a proximal mechanism underlying the emergence of culture-specific attention styles. Mothers from urban Germany guided their children's attention in more analytic ways than mothers from urban Japan and rural Ecuador. The relevance of verbal attention guidance in the development of culture-specific attention styles has been demonstrated beyond the East-West dichotomy.

Universality without uniformity - infants' reactions to unresponsive partners in urban Germany and rural Ecuador.

Previous studies based on non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples provide initial evidence that the still-face effect is universal. Based on the assumption that - independent of their cultural niches - infants share some fundamental expectations of social interactions, we put forth the assumption that a universal response exists for when a social interaction is interrupted. At the same time, we hypothesized that the size of the effect depends on the typicality of the interaction that precedes the adult partners' interruption. To test these hypotheses, we conducted the Still-Face Paradigm (SFP) with infants (3- and 4.5-month-olds) from two cultural milieus, namely Münster (urban Germany) and the Kichwa ethnic group from the northern Andes region (rural Ecuador), as these contexts presumably offer different ways of construing the self that are associated with different parenting styles, namely distal and proximal parenting. Furthermore, we developed a paradigm that comes much closer to the average expected environment of Kichwa infants, the "No-Touch Paradigm" (NTP). Overall, the results support our initial hypothesis that the still-face effect is universal. Moreover, infants from both cultural milieus responded to the no-touch condition with a change in negative affect. At the same time, some of the infants' responses were accentuated in a culture-specific way: Kichwa infants had a stronger response to an interruption of proximal interaction patterns during the NTP. While our findings underline infants' universal predisposition for face-to-face interaction, they also suggest that cultural differences in internalized interactions do influence infant behavior and experience and, in turn, development.

Interactional preludes to infants' affective climax - Mother-infant interaction around infant smiling in two cultures.

Due to limited research on cross-cultural similarities and differences in the development of infant smiling, the main goals of this study were to analyze, first, the development of infants' bouts of intense smiling during their third month and, second, the interactional preludes to infants' affective climax in two cultural contexts, namely Kichwa families from the Ecuadorian Andes region and educated urban middle-class families from Münster, Germany, which differ concerning their cultural models on infant smiling. Based on a longitudinal, naturalistic study design, mother-infant interaction in Kichwa (n = 10) and Münster (n = 10) families was analyzed when infants were 9 and 13 weeks old. Following a mixed methods approach, a quantitative analysis of infant smiling based on a 1-second interval-coding approach showed that there was a significant increase in infants' high-intensity positive affect from 9 to 13 weeks in the Münster, but not the Kichwa sample, leading to significant cross-cultural differences at 13 weeks. Complementarily, the qualitative analysis of the interactional preludes to the 66 infants' affective climaxes at 13 weeks identified two main patterns that characterized the dynamic that resulted in high-intensity positive affect and that were similar across the two cultural contexts: the first was intense and multimodal stimulation with repetition and theme variation, and the second was positively tuned and mutually contingent responsiveness, often in the form of prolonged proto-conversations between mother and infant. Overall, this open approach converged on key mechanisms underlying infant smiling, namely infants' experience of mastery based on effortful assimilation or self-efficacy, which was embedded in episodes of intersubjective coordination. Overall, these results suggest universality without uniformity; that is, similar interactional mechanisms are associated with high-intense positivity in infants, while the episodes are co-constructed differently in different dyads and high-intense positivity varies in significance and frequency across cultures.

Evaluation of RISE: A Sexual Violence Prevention Program for Female College Students in India.

RISE, a sexual violence prevention program for female college students in India, covers topics on gender, healthy relationships, sexual violence, and bystander education, and focuses on the teaching of knowledge, the promotion of positive attitudes as well as the support of effective behaviors to prevent sexual violence against women in India. However, it is yet unclear what impact this program has in preventing sexual violence. In this evaluation study, a total of N = 245 female college students based in New Delhi and aged 17 to 22 years were assigned to a training (N = 128) or a waitlist control group (N = 117). The prevention program was conducted by two Indian professionals of a non-governmental organization (NGO) in New Delhi within five sessions. Results indicated that students in the training group showed significant increases in awareness of gender stereotypes, the importance of communication in relationships, bystander efficacy as well as intentions to intervene as a bystander in situations of violence when compared to students in the control group right after the program (posttest) and six months later (follow-up). Additionally, the training group displayed a significant increase of knowledge in all four program areas (gender, healthy relationships, sexual violence, and bystander education). Our findings implicate that future sexual violence prevention programs in India need to address women as well as men to effectively tackle sexual violence. In this context, bystander education seems to be one of the most promising approaches by targeting whole communities and creating new social norms regarding helping behavior and the prevention of sexual violence.

Insight into toddlers' motivation to help: From social participants to prosocial contributors.

What drives toddlers' helping behavior? And do toddlers' helping motivations change across time? In line with Dahl and Paulus (2019), we propose that initially, toddlers start helping in ongoing chores driven by their interest in social interactions, and, later on, their helping becomes more concern based, or based on a sense of responsibility. To test this assumption, we used a longitudinal approach to examine the role that social interaction plays in toddlers' motivation to help as they grow older. As such, we investigated whether a disruption to an experimenter during a shared chore task affected toddlers' motivations to continue helping at the ages of 18, 21 and 24 months. Results showed that toddlers at 18 months were less likely to continue helping when the experimenter was disrupted from the shared task, in comparison to toddlers at 21 and at 24 months. These findings support the idea that toddlers develop from socially based participators into more prosocially based contributors.

The role of preacademic activities and adult-centeredness in mother-child play in educated urban middle-class families from three cultures.

The present study analyzes similarities and differences in cultural beliefs about mother-child play and their manifestation in maternal and children's play practices in three different educated urban middle-class cultures. Based on the general assumption that mother-child play is an important context for child learning and development in educated urban middle-class communities that should result in cross-cultural similarities in mother-child play, the current study also hypothesized culture-specific accentuations, namely a stronger emphasis on preacademic vs. non-academic play activities and on adult-centered vs. child-centered modes of interaction in Chennai, India, (n = 28) than in Münster, Germany, (n = 35) and New York City (NYC), USA, (n = 36). Maternal goals and strategies were assessed in semi-structured interviews and mothers from Chennai emphasized play goals and preacademic goals to similar degrees, whereas mothers from Münster and NYC accentuated play goals. In line with their emphasis on preacademic goals and strategies, Chennai mothers showed significantly more preacademic activities during play with their 2-year-olds, especially explicit teaching. Furthermore, Chennai mothers' stronger emphasis on play directives and children's higher levels of responsive play complemented the pattern of more adult-centered beliefs and practices. In contrast, mothers from Münster and NYC were more likely to emphasize child-centeredness, with significantly more goals revolving around child immersion in play activities and autonomy-supporting play practices, including autonomous exploration, toddlers' leadership and control, and maternal responsiveness. Unexpectedly, toddlers from NYC engaged the most in preacademic activities, especially responding to maternal quizzing.

The effect of verbal priming of visual attention styles in 4- to 9-year-old children.

The way humans attend to their visual field differs profoundly between individuals. Previous research suggests that people tend to have either an analytic style, with a higher focus on the salient object of a scene, or a holistic style, characterized by higher attention to a scene's contextual information. Although a general assumption in many studies has been that these attention styles are socialized in social interaction during childhood, not much work has focused on the proximal mechanisms underlying this development. This study focuses on language as a potential cultural tool to habitualize ways of perceiving the world and investigates whether the visual attention of 4- to 9-year-old children can be experimentally manipulated via verbal primes that accentuate either analytic or holistic processing. Results indicate that verbal priming is effective in guiding children's gaze behavior in an eye-tracking task and their verbal accounts in a picture description task, but it only influences the way visual scenes are remembered in a forced-choice recognition task after own verbal productions. In concert with previous cross-cultural and correlational studies, these findings provide convergent evidence for the assumption that verbal attention guidance plays an important role in the socialization of attention styles.

Preventing Sexual Violence in Adolescence: Comparison of a Scientist-Practitioner Program and a Practitioner Program Using a Cluster-Randomized Design.

Numerous school-based prevention programs have been developed by scientists and practitioners to address sexual violence in adolescence. However, such programs struggle with two major challenges. First, the effectiveness of many well-established practitioner programs has not been rigorously evaluated. Second, effective scientific programs may be hard to implement into everyday school practice. Combining the knowledge of scientists and practitioners in a scientist-practitioner program could be a helpful compromise. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the effects of a scientist-practitioner program and a practitioner program using a cluster-randomized experimental design. Twenty-seven school classes were randomly assigned to either one of two programs or a control group. Outcome variables (knowledge, attitudes, behavior, and iatrogenic effects) were assessed at pretest, posttest, and a 6-month follow-up for 453 adolescents (55% female, Mage = 14.18). Short-term effects were found in both programs regarding general knowledge, knowledge of professional help, and victim-blaming attitudes. Long-term effects were found in both programs regarding general knowledge and knowledge of professional help and, in the practitioner program, in a reduction of victimization. No other effects were found on attitudes and behavior. No iatrogenic effects in the form of increased anxiety were found. Both the scientist-practitioner and the practitioner program show promise for the prevention of sexual violence in adolescence; in particular, the practitioner program may be a more cost-effective method.

Cross-Cultural Differences in the Generation of Novel Ideas in Middle Childhood.

Innovation and creativity have recently been in the center of the debate on human cultural evolution. Yet, we know very little about childrens' developing capacity to generate novel ideas, as a key component of innovation and creativity, in different cultural contexts. Here, we assessed 8- to 9-year-old children from an autonomous and a relational cultural context, namely Münster (urban Germany; n = 29) and Banten (rural Cameroon; n = 29). These cultural contexts vary largely in their ecology, social structure, and educational system, as well as the cultural models on children's individual development and thinking. Therefore, they provide an optimal contrast to investigate cultural similarities and differences in development of creative capacities. We applied classical divergent thinking tasks, namely an alternative uses task and a pattern association task. In these tasks, children are asked to generate as many ideas as possible what an object could be used for or what a pattern could be. First, our study revealed a good internal consistency and inter-task correlations for the assessment of children's fluency and the generation of unique ideas in both cultures. Second, and most critically, we found significantly higher levels of creative capacities in children from Münster in contrast to Banten. This was reflected in both a higher number of ideas (fluency) and a higher number of unique ideas (uniqueness). Third, looking at the type of answers that children gave in the alternative uses task, we found that children from Münster and Banten uttered a similar number of conventional ideas, but that children from Münster uttered more ideas to manipulate an object, invent novel things with an object, and involve an object in play or pretend play, or in a fantasy story. This demonstrates that early creative development is strongly influenced by the cultural context and substantiates the cultural nature of human cognitive development.

Culture and early social-cognitive development.

From a developmental systems perspective, this chapter focuses on the question whether culture matters for children's early social-cognitive development. Based on a review of the current cross-cultural literature, we evaluate the current state of research on cross-cultural similarities and differences in major developmental milestones of early social cognition, namely (i) the development of self-awareness and an understanding of self and others as intentional agents, (ii) advanced forms of social learning and (iii) prosocial cognition and behavior. Overall, the current cross-cultural research suggests universality without uniformity: the common suite of social-cognitive skills emerges reliably and, at the same time, there are culture-specific accentuations of social-cognitive development across domains that mostly are in line with cultural values, beliefs and practices. By following different agendas when providing and structuring physical and social settings for their children, caregivers coherently organize infants' nascent intuitions, sentiments, and inclinations into increasingly coherent patterns of attention, appraisal, experience and behavior that are in line with cultural ideals and beliefs. By doing so, culturally informed social interaction sets the stage for culture-specific modulations of social cognition already in the first years of life.

The Development of Context-Sensitive Attention in Urban and Rural Brazil.

Human perception differs profoundly between individuals from different cultures. In the present study, we investigated the development of context-sensitive attention (the relative focus on context elements of a visual scene) in a large sample (N = 297) of 5- to 15-year-olds and young adults from rural and urban Brazil, namely from agricultural villages in the Amazon region and the city of São Paulo. We applied several visual tasks which assess context-sensitive attention, including an optical illusion, a picture description, a picture recognition and a facial emotion judgment task. The results revealed that children and adults from the urban sample had a higher level of context-sensitive attention, when compared to children and adults from the rural sample. In particular, participants from São Paulo were more easily deceived by the context elements in an optical illusion task and remembered more context elements in a recognition task than participants from rural Amazon villages. In these two tasks, context-sensitivity increased with age. However, we did not find a cultural difference in the picture description and the facial emotion judgment task. These findings support the idea that visual information processing is highly dependent on the culture-specific learning environments from very early in development. Specifically, they are more consistent with accounts that emphasize the role of the visual environment, than with the social orientation account. However, they also highlight that further research is needed to disentangle the diverse factors that may influence the early development of visual attention, which underlie culture-specific developmental pathways.

The Development of Context-Sensitive Attention Across Cultures: The Impact of Stimulus Familiarity.

Across cultures, there are marked differences in visual attention that gradually develop between 4 and 6 years of age. According to the social orientation hypothesis, people in interdependent cultures should show more pronounced context sensitivity than people in independent cultures. However, according to the differential familiarity hypothesis, the focus on the salient object should also depend on the familiarity of the stimulus; people will focus more on the focal object (i.e., less context sensitivity), if it is a less familiar stimulus. To examine the differences in visual attention between interdependent and independent cultures while taking into account stimulus familiarity, this study used an eye-tracking paradigm to assess visual attention of participants between 4 and 20 years who came from urban middle-class families from Germany (n = 53; independent culture) or from Nso families in a rural area in Cameroon (n = 50; interdependent culture). Each participant saw four sets of stimuli, which varied in terms of their familiarity: (1) standard stimuli, (2) non-semantic stimuli, both more familiar to participants from Germany, (3) culture-specific matched stimuli, and (4) simple stimuli, similarly familiar to the individuals of both cultures. Overall, the findings show that mean differences in visual attention between cultures were highly contingent on the stimuli sets: In support of the social orientation hypothesis, German participants showed a higher object focus for the culture-specific matched stimuli, while there were no cultural differences for the simple set. In support of the differential familiarity hypothesis, the Cameroonian participants showed a higher object focus for the less familiar sets, namely the standard and non-semantic sets. Furthermore, context sensitivity correlated across all the sets. In sum, these findings suggest that the familiarity of a stimulus strongly affects individuals' visual attention, meaning that stimulus familiarity needs to be considered when investigating culture-specific differences in attentional styles.

Psychological Antecedents of Refugee Integration (PARI).

The successful management of refugee immigration, including refugee integration in host societies, requires a sound understanding of underlying psychological processes. We propose the psychological antecedents of refugee integration (PARI) model, highlighting perceived forcedness (i.e., coercion and loss of control from "push" factors) and ensuing perils (risks and potential suffering during migration) as distinctive factors of refugee (vs. voluntary) migration. According to our model, perceptions and subjective representations of forcedness and associated perils activate specific psychological processes relevant to refugee integration and thus moderate responses to the demands and stressors of the immigration situation. We conceptualize these distinctive influences for integration-relevant processes in both refugees and in residents. By pinpointing the unique features of refugee migration, PARI generates novel and specific hypotheses about psychological processes predicting refugee integration. For instance, refugees' memories of forcedness and associated perils should lead to a high level of preoccupation with the restoration of basic needs after arrival in a receiving country that interferes with integration-related activities. Conversely, residents' perceptions of forcedness and related perils may enhance empathy with refugees but may also magnify feelings of anxiety and threat. Implications for refugee integration are discussed for the domains of occupational work, education, and mental health.

Young Children Respond to Moral Dilemmas Like Their Mothers.

There is a large scientific interest in human moral judgments. However, little is known about the developmental origins and the specific role of the primary caregivers in the early development of inter-individual differences in human morality. Here, we assess the moral intuitions of 3- to 6-year-old children and their mothers (N = 56), using child-friendly versions of five trolley dilemmas and two control scenarios. We found that children responded to moral dilemmas similar to their mothers, revealed by correlations between the responses of mothers and their children in all five moral dilemmas and a highly similar overall response pattern between mother and child across all judgments. This was revealed by a high agreement in the response pattern of children and their mothers. Furthermore, children's overall response tendencies were similar to the response tendencies of adults. Thus, similar moral principles (e.g., the Doctrine of the Double Effect) which have been identified in adults, and describes as a universal moral grammar, may guide the moral intuitions in early childhood already. Taken together, the present findings provide the first evidence that children's moral intuitions are closely associated with the moral intuitions of their mother.

Sexual Violence Against Women in India: Daily Life and Coping Strategies of Young Women in Delhi.

This study assesses the current situation concerning sexual violence against women in India and women's individual coping strategies. We conducted 15 semistructured interviews with 17- to 22-year-old Indian college students. First, results about the current situation showed threatening circumstances for women and revealed how deeply sexual violence affects women's lives. Second, to cope with sexual violence women mentioned three types of strategies, namely (a) safety, (b) avoidance, and (c) empowerment strategies. In the discussion, we suggest that women's use of safety and avoidance strategies are safety behaviors that play a key role in maintaining women's fear and societal dynamics.

From understanding others' needs to prosocial action: Motor and social abilities promote infants' helping.

In the present study, we test the main hypothesis that infants' understanding of others' needs translates into helping behavior, when critical motor and social competencies have emerged, early in the second year. We assessed the understanding of others' needs in an eye-tracking paradigm and the helping behavior of 10- (n = 41) and 16-month-olds (n = 37). Furthermore, we assessed the motor and social abilities of 16-month-olds. Critically, while infants understood others' needs already at 10 months, fine motor and social interaction skills moderated the link between infants' prosocial understanding and helping behavior at 16 months. This provides first evidence that infants' helping behavior relates to their understanding of others' needs. Furthermore, we found that fine motor, gross motor, and social interaction skills predicted early helping behavior by themselves. These findings highlight that the emergence of infants' helping behavior is the result of a developmental system that includes infants' understanding of others' needs and also their motor and social competencies. The link between infants' understanding of others' needs and their early helpful actions provide further support for the prosocial nature of early helping behavior.