Cultural aspects of coping. Illustrated with examples from a changing Hawaiian culture

Psychological consequences of environmental degradation

Psychological aspects of environmental degradation in Burkina Faso are studied among two groups of Sahel dwellers, namely the Mossi (agriculturalists, n = 402) and the Fulani (pastoralists, n = 160). Compared to pastoralists, agriculturalists were more stressed and marginalized, the psychological consequences of degradation studied here. Men in both groups scored higher on marginalization and lower on stress than women did. Modem attitudes led to more stress and marginalization. Status in the community was unrelated to stress and marginalization. Locus of control and problem- focused coping were related to marginalization but not to stress. A MIMIC (M ultiple Indicators, MultIple Causes) model was fitted to the data postulating the relationship among four input variables (culture, environmental degradation, cattle and modernity), a latent variable (called carrying capacity) and two output variables (stress and marginalization ). For both men and women an adequate fit was found, with slightly different parameter values for the two sexes.

Handedness and sex differences in intelligence: evidence from the medical college admission test

Our analysis of Medical College Admission Test subtest scores by writing hand preference and sex suggests that (a) right hemispheric dominance is associated with intellectual giftedness in verbal reasoning (left-handers obtained higher scores on the verbal reasoning test and were overrepresented in the upper tail of the distribution), (b) different patterns of brain lateralization are associated with different subcomponents of cognition (right-handers scored higher, on average, on the writing test and were overrepresented in the upper tail of the distribution), and (c) men generally score higher than women on tests of scientific knowledge (the most striking differences between men and women were on the biological and physical science tests).