Publikationsliste KOPS

Acute stress is known to increase prosocial behavior in men via a “tend-and-befriend” pattern originally proposed as a specifically female stress response alongside the fight-or-flight response. However, the direct effects of acute stress on women’s social behavior have not been investigated. Applying the Trier Social Stress Test for groups (TSST-G), 94 women were confronted with either a stress or control condition. We repeatedly measured their subjective stress responses, salivary cortisol, and heart rate, and investigated their level of trust, trustworthiness, sharing, punishment and non-social risk using social decision paradigms. We detected significant increases in all stress parameters, as well as the wish for closeness during the stress condition. Acute stress exposure elevated prosocial trustworthiness and sharing without affecting non-social risk behavior. These results are in line with findings on the effects of stress in men, and further validate the tend-and-befriend pattern as one possible behavioral response during stress in humans.

Bilingual children are a heterogeneous population, as the amount of input and use of their languages may differ due to various factors, for example, the status of each language (majority, minority), which language is used in the school, and whether children are acquiring literacy in one or both languages. Their language ability depends to a large extent on the use of each language and on whether they each language at the same rate. The aim of the study was to investigate how primary school bilingual children in the UK perform on several domains of language and reading skills and how these relate to language dominance. Moreover, it addressed how this performance is affected by a range of contextual factors and whether there are cross-language relationships in the children’s language and reading abilities. Forty Greek-English bilingual children in Year 1 and Year 3 were tested on vocabulary, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, morpho-syntax, and decoding in Greek and English. The results showed that as a group, the children were Greek dominant before the age of 4 but English dominant now and confirm that language dominance could change even before children enter school and affects language and literacy skills equally. A strong relationship between language use and performance was only in evidence in the minority language, which suggests that parental effort should be directed towards the minority language because schooling appears to level out differences in the majority language. There was no negative relationship between the use of the heritage language and children’s language and reading performance in the majority language. In contrast, significant positive cross-language associations were revealed among vocabulary, phonological awareness, inflectional morphology and decoding skills. The practical implications of this study are that parents and teachers should be informed for the positive effects of heritage language use in and outside the home for the maintenance of the heritage language and for the development of the children’s language and literacy skills.

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The growing multitude of sophisticated event-level data collection enables novel analyses of conflict. Even when multiple event data sets are available, researchers tend to rely on only one. We instead advocate integrating information from multiple event data sets. The advantages include facilitating analysis of relationships between different types of conflict, providing more comprehensive empirical measurement, and evaluating the relative coverage and quality of data sets. Existing integration efforts have been performed manually, with significant limitations. Therefore, we introduce Matching Event Data by Location, Time and Type (MELTT)—an automated, transparent, reproducible methodology for integrating event data sets. For the cases of Nigeria 2011, South Sudan 2015, and Libya 2014, we show that using MELTT to integrate data from four leading conflict event data sets (Uppsala Conflict Data Project–Georeferenced Event Data, Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, Social Conflict Analysis Database, and Global Terrorism Database) provides a more complete picture of conflict. We also apply multiple systems estimation to show that each of these data sets has substantial missingness in coverage.

In the context of large-scale migration within and into Europe, the question of whether and under which conditions immigrants should be granted access to social benefits in the country of destination is of high political relevance. A large body of research has studied natives’ attitudes towards giving immigrants access to the welfare state, while research on attitudes of immigrants themselves is scarce. Focusing on the impact of self-interest, we compare immigrants and native citizens in their attitudes towards granting immigrants access to the welfare state. We identify three mechanisms through which self-interest can influence these attitudes: immigrant origin, socio-economic status and – for first-generation immigrants only – incorporation into the host society. We test our expectations using cross-national data from the European Social Survey round 2008. The findings suggest that self-interest is indeed one of the factors that motivate attitudes towards welfare state restrictiveness among natives and immigrants, but also point at relevant exceptions to this pattern.

While the political nature of evaluation is widely recognized, few attempts exist to conceptualize and compare these politics. This article develops the concept of evaluation stakeholder influence potential, which builds on four political resources for influence (agenda-setting powers, staff and budgetary resources, access to evaluation results, and access to evaluators). These resources are measured for both member states and international public administrations in 24 United Nations organizations. We find that the administration—and not member states—have the largest influence potential in almost two-thirds of the international organizations. Our findings allow classifying them into three groups for which we expect differences in political contestation about evaluation use: two extreme-case groups (either member state or administrative dominance) and a group of contested middle cases. This finding of bureaucratic dominance reinforces literature on bureaucrats as powerful evaluation stakeholders in domestic settings and speaks to nascent research on bureaucratic influence in international organizations.

This study analyzes the ways in which the Basque diaspora community in the United States consumes news media from their home origin. Using survey data collected from over 400 Basque-Americans with varying generations (first, second, third, etc.), we explore the ways in which surveyed individuals consume media from their ancestral territory of origin, in this case, the Basque Country of Spain and France. This research is exploratory and descriptive of the media habits and behavior of individuals with Basque origins. We find that significant shifts in media consumption occur between first generation immigrants and those beyond the second generation. As we move across generations, we observe that individuals shift from engagement with home-origin media to engagement with Basque cultural activities, such as dancing clubs. Our study suggests that the importance of digital media from the homeland is growing, but that most consumption of information by the Basque diaspora is through social networks. Our findings also suggest that, among those who continue to consume home-origin media, it is mainly through readership of national newspapers (in this case, from Spain) rather than local newspapers (from the Basque Country). This article enriches our understanding of the media habits of the Basque diaspora and raises questions for future research about the effect of transnational media consumption on the political, social and economic behavior of immigrants in the United States.

The current study investigated links between students' level of perceived challenge (being over- or underchallenged) and students' career aspirations. We hypothesized indirect effects of over- and underchallenge on career aspirations via academic self-concept and academic trait boredom and tested our hypotheses in a sample of N = 662 Swiss eleventh grade students in the domains of German, French, and mathematics. Our results were consistent across all three domains and showed that being overchallenged had a negative impact on academic self-concept. Lower academic self-concept, in turn, was associated with decreased career aspirations. Being underchallenged enhanced academic self-concept, which was positively related to students' career aspirations. Further, both being over- and underchallenged enhanced students' domain-specific boredom experiences resulting in a decrease in their career aspirations. As such, the effect of being underchallenged was of particular importance as its influence on career aspirations via academic trait boredom was negative, whereas via academic self-concept there was a positive indirect effect.