Background:

Prospective longitudinal studies of infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) play an important role in advancing our knowledge about early developmental pathways in ASD. Despite this clear benefit, currently little is known about potential risks or disadvantages for participating families. As a first step in addressing this issue, we asked parents about their experiences from participating in an infant sibling study.

Method:

Eighty-eight families responded to a questionnaire examining parents' experiences from participating in an infant sibling study. The questions assessed parents' satisfaction with the study, the child's perceived satisfaction, and the parents' motivation for participating. The study included parents of two groups, (1) infants with an older sibling diagnosed with ASD (HR, high risk, n = 43) and (2) infants with no familial history of ASD (LR, low risk, n = 21).

Results:

The results indicated that parents are generally positive about study participation and few disadvantages were reported. This pattern was mirrored when splitting parents' responses into the two groups. There was no indication for group differences between parents of infants at high risk and low risk for ASD.

Conclusion:

Our findings present a first step into understanding parents' experiences from participating in an infant sibling study. Most parents were satisfied with participation in the study and only few disadvantages were reported. Our results have implications for ethical discussions about benefits and risks regarding infant sibling studies in various fields.

In typical development, infants form predictions about future events based on incoming sensory information, which is essential for perception and goal-directed action. It has been suggested that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) make predictions differently compared to neurotypical individuals. We investigated how infants who later received an ASD diagnosis and neurotypical infants react to temporarily occluded moving objects that violate initial expectations about object motion. Our results indicate that infants regardless of clinical outcome react similarly to unexpected object motion patterns, both in terms of gaze shift latencies and pupillary responses. These findings indicate that the ability to update representations about such regularities in light of new information may not differ between typically developing infants and those with later ASD.

Atypical motor development has frequently been reported in infants at elevated likelihood for autism spectrum disorder. However, no previous study has used detailed motion capture technology to compare infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder and infant siblings with no familial history of autism spectrum disorder. We investigated reaching movements during an interceptive action task in 10-month-old infants using kinematic data with high spatiotemporal resolution. The results indicated that several measures were different in infants at elevated likelihood. However, longitudinal analyses revealed that while specific infant motor measures (e.g. number of movement units) were related to broad measures of general developmental level in toddlerhood, the associations with later autism spectrum disorder symptomatology were not significant. These findings confirm that some aspects of motor functioning are atypical in infants at elevated likelihood for autism spectrum disorder, but provide no support for the view that these issues are specifically linked to autism spectrum disorder symptoms, but may rather reflect neurodevelopment more generally.Lay abstractAtypicalities in motor functioning are often observed in later born infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder. The goal of our study was to investigate motor functioning in infants with and without familial history of autism spectrum disorder. Specifically, we investigated how infants catch a ball that is rolling toward them following a non-straight path, a task that requires both efficient planning and execution. Their performance was measured using detailed three-dimensional motion capture technology. We found that several early motor functioning measures were different in infants with an older autistic sibling compared to controls. However, these early motor measures were not related to autistic symptoms at the age of 2 years. Instead, we found that some of the early motor measures were related to their subsequent non-social, general development. The findings of our study help us understand motor functioning early in life and how motor functioning is related to other aspects of development.

In this note a T1 formal space (T1 set-generated locale) is a formal space whose points are closed as subspaces. Any regular formal space is T1. We introduce the more general notion of a T1∗ formal space, and prove that the class of points of a weakly set-presentable T1∗ formal space is a set in the constructive set theory CZF. The same also holds in constructive type theory. We then formulate separation properties Ti∗ for constructive topological spaces (ct-spaces), strengthening separation properties discussed elsewhere. Finally we relate the Ti∗ properties for ct-spaces with corresponding properties of formal spaces.

This study examines ethnic preferences using data from the television cooking show Come Dine With Me in Sweden. Amateur chefs compete by hosting dinner parties. Contestants rate each others performance and the host with the highest ratings wins a cash prize. The show gives an unorthodox opportunity to study ethnic preferences in a high-stakes game environment. The analysis of the collected data shows that native Swedish contestants rate co-ethnic hosts significantly more favourably than they rate other hosts, demonstrating the existence of co-ethnic preferences. This observation seems to be an outcome of own-group favouritism rather than dislike against other groups. Also, the observed co-ethnic preference is assumed to be subtle or non-conscious based on the nature of the analysed data.

This article presents the first field experiment on sexual orientation discrimination in the hiring process in the Swedish labor market. Job applications were sent to about 4000 employers in 10 different occupations in Sweden. Gender and sexual orientation were randomly assigned to applications. The results show that sexual orientation discrimination exists in the Swedish labor market. The discrimination against the gay male applicant and the lesbian applicant varied across different occupations and appears to be concentrated in the private sector. The results also show that the gay male applicant was discriminated against in typical male-dominated occupations, whereas the lesbian applicant was discriminated against in typical female-dominated occupations. Theoretical implications are discussed

This paper presents an experimental study of perceptions about gay, lesbian, and heterosexual domestic violence in Sweden. More than 1,000 participants were asked to read one out of eight possible fictitious scenarios of domestic violence in married couple relationships and subsequently respond to a questionnaire. Sexual orientation, victims’ and batterers’ gender, and severity of the violence varied across the different scenarios. The clearest result of this study was that participants perceived domestic violence to be significantly more serious when a man battered his wife than in any other case (i.e., when a woman battered her husband, when a gay man battered his husband, or when a lesbian woman battered her wife). In all types of relationships, participants matched their perceptions of domestic violence to the level of severity of the violence and participants with more negative attitudes toward women perceived domestic violence as less serious. Female participants were more concerned about lesbian domestic violence than male participants. Attitudes toward gays and lesbians mattered little for the perceptions of domestic violence.

Are people more prosocial in a religious context? We addressed this question through an experiment. We randomly placed participants in the control group in a neutral location (a lecture hall), and we placed participants in the experimental group in a religious location (a chapel). The participants then took part in a one-shot three-person public goods game, which measured participants' degree of cooperativeness. The results showed that participants in the experimental group cooperated significantly more than did participants in the control group. Furthermore, participants' beliefs about other participants' cooperativeness were more positive in the experimental group than they were in the control group. Improved expectations of others partially explained the enhanced cooperation in the religious context. We found no main or interaction effect of self-reported religiosity in the experiment.

Partly human, partly organization

In this article the phenomenon of organization is discussed and its consequences for the understanding of human actions and human choices are examined. Affiliation to organizations are found to be both restrictions on and preconditions for most human action. In this connection families are regarded as organizations as well as enterprises, voluntary associations and states. Human action is primarily action on behalf of organizations where individuals are partly human, partly organization. To understand the meaning of action on behalf of organization it is important to realize that people rarely choose their organizational affiliation. People are selected. This means that actions on behalf of organizations cannot be regarded as expressions of individual choices. Actions on behalf of organizations are generally characterized by a dual involvement.

This article seeks to review the common assumption of a clear, largely endogenous, continuous and singular medieval period in Muslim history. The assumption implicates a romantic vision of history as one of continuity, and the possibility of writing the history of large-scale masses as one of singularity, and that the historical masses can quite satisfactorily be identified by transhistorical nominatives such as Islam, Hellenism, or the West. Correlatively, the histories of such masses are encoded according to the literary topos of rise and decline, à la Herder, Hegel, Renan, Becker, Toynbee and others. The author proposes that the conceptualisation of historical objects as Muslim or otherwise, and the consequent periodisation is possible only when shorn of romantic historism, and if the titles under which historical material is organised were to be subverted to preserve a definite distance between self-representation and subsequent construal on the one hand, and the actual workings of History on the other. It thus suggests that ’Late Antiquity’ be taken to encompass the conditions that gave rise to Islam, which would present the Arab empires as points of arrival and the crystallisation of cultural, economic, demographic, religious, statist and other universalist trends that constitute Late Antiquity.

If the realist tradition has underappreciated the formalizable quality of Thucydides’ scientific investigations, neorealist teachers and writers have generally failed to see the normative and dramatical features of Thucydides’ political science, each an expression of his dialectical epistemology and ontology. Nicholas Rescher’s partial formalization of dialectics as a controversy-oriented approach to knowledge cumulation and Kenneth Burke’s dramaturgical approach to textual understanding are both shown to fit Thucydides’ argumentation in the Melian dialogue. Thus argumentation produces new knowledge about the inner determinants of Athenian imperialism; simultaneously it dramatically reveals the constituting practical rationale of Athenian actions to be unjust. Once Thucydides’ determining essences of power politics are properly uncovered, their false eternal, mathematical necessity can be appropriately criticized. A case is thus suggested for a neoclassical polimetrics more fundamentally grounded in political argumentation about practical choices in particular contexts than in ahistorical laws, inductive statistics or deductive mathematics.

The Estonian NEO-FFI was administered to 2,650 Estonian adolescents (1,420 girls and 1,230 boys) aged from 12 to 18 years and attending 6th, 8th, 10th, or 12th grade at secondary schools all over Estonia. Although the mean levels of personality traits of Estonian adolescents were quite similar to the respective scores of Estonian adults, there was a developmental gap in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Three of the five personality dispositions demonstrated a modest cross-sectional change in the mean level of the trait scores: the level of Openness increased and the levels of Agreeableness and Conscientiousness decreased between 12 and 18 years of age. Although the five-factor structure of personality was already recognizable in the sample of 12-year-old children, it demonstrated only an approximate congruence with the adult structure, suggesting that not all children of that age have developed abilities required for observing one's own personality dispositions and for giving reliable self-reports on the basis of these observations. The self-reported personality trait structure matures and becomes sufficiently differentiated around age 14-15 and grows to be practically indistinguishable from adult personality by the age of 16. Personality of adolescents becomes more differentiated with age: along with the growth of mental capacities the correlations among the personality traits and intelligence become smaller.

Many social scientists have predicted that one inevitable consequence of modernization is the unlimited growth of individualism, which poses serious threats to the organic unity of society. Others have argued that autonomy and independence are necessary conditions for the development of interpersonal cooperation and social solidarity. We reanalyzed available data on the relationship between individualism-collectivism and social capital within one country (the United States) and across 42 countries. In America, the states with a high level of social capital (higher degree of civic engagement in political activity, where people spend more time with their friends and believe that most people can be trusted) were found to be more individualistic. A correspondingly strong association between individualism and social capital was observed in the comparison of different countries. These results support Durkheim’s view that when individuals become more autonomous and seemingly liberated from social bonds, they actually become even more dependent on society.

Abstract The paper presents an analysis of the economic relationship between the two most important economies in Asia. Over the last decades, the Chinese and Japanese economies have become more economically interdependent, a development which will, in the long run, impact the countries’ political relationship. The paper seeks to answer the question: How can China and Japan gain from the current economic situation, further enhance their relationship and increase their synergies for regional economic development? Data on trade and Foreign Direct Investment are used in combination with primary data from interviews with Japanese and Chinese companies on how they perceive the current business situation and future potential. The result of the data analysis shows that the countries have much to gain from their economic interdependence. The firms see great potential in their respective markets but are concerned about political turbulence. Three possible scenarios for the future economic relationship are presented, including fierce competition on all markets and a leveraging of resources for mutual development between Chinese and Japanese companies.

Increasingly, many people in democracies are turning to a strongarm politics for reassurance against globalization, uncertainty and precarity. In countries ranging from the US and the UK to Brazil, India and Turkey, support has grown for a nativist politics attacking migrants, minorities, liberals and elites as enemies of the nation. Is there a politics of belonging that progressive forces could mobilize to counteract these trends?

After Nativism takes up this question, arguing that disarming nativism will require more than improving the security and wellbeing of the ‘left-behind’. The lines drawn by nativism are of an affective nature about imagined community, with meanings of belonging and voice lying at the heart of popular perceptions of just dues. This, argues Ash Amin, is the territory that progressive forces – liberal, social democratic, socialist – need to reclaim in order to shift public sentiment away from xenophobic intolerance towards one of commonality amid difference as a basis for facing existential risk and uncertainty. The book proposes a relational politics of belonging premised on the encounter, fugitive aesthetics, public interest politics, collaboration over common existential threats, and daily collectives and infrastructures of wellbeing. There is ground for progressives to mount a counter-aesthetics of belonging that will convince the discontents of neoliberal globalization that there is a better alternative to nativism.

This paper summarises a core theme running through the author’s book Land of Strangers selected for discussion in this symposium. It examines the politics of intolerance towards minorities and migrants in multicultural and multiethnic Europe. It dissents from the prevailing view that this politics is symptomatic of a breakdown of social cohesion, in need of correctives of community, contact and border closure. Instead, the paper locates this development in a new ‘catastrophist’ biopolitics of risk and uncertainty that descends on the figure of the stranger, tapping into an ingrained vernacular of phenotypical racism. Accordingly, the paper argues for a politics of the commons that makes space for, and publicises, rituals of cohabitation, the shared commons, a welfarist biopolitics and other collective interventions that might strengthen civilities of indifference to difference.