Luka Lucić | Pratt Institute (original) (raw)
Papers by Luka Lucić
Crisis Narratives
To understand how moments of crisis shape stories told in the aftermath, we explore narrative tho... more To understand how moments of crisis shape stories told in the aftermath, we explore narrative thought processes through a prism of a regional crisis. Drawing on research with participants who grew up during the military siege of Sarajevo (1992-95), we describe spaces within the unoccupied city shaped by military destruction and consider the range of unique activities these spaces afforded to the young people. Analyzing narratives written in the aftermath of the siege, we focus on participants' enactment of adverbs, a linguistic category used to qualify action in relation to place, time, circumstance, or manner. Our analyses show that, as participants reflect on activities of heightened danger across novel and precarious spaces, their narratives become more evaluative, often illustrating their feelings or impressions and qualifying the relationship between oneself and the context of activities. Beyond the singular focus on trauma narratives, our findings suggest a complex socio-cognitive response to crisis.
Migrant scholars researching migration: Reflexivity, subjectivity, and biographical research, 2023
Where narrators choose to start their story, what examples they choose to include, what events th... more Where narrators choose to start their story, what examples they choose to include, what events they decide to exclude, and what words they use to describe their experience, all matter profoundly for psychological research. True or not, conscious or not, the way I chose to construct this story reveals a lot about the way I think and feel about my immigrant experience. The same goes for other narrators. As researchers, we need to be aware that, as narrators weave their stories, they perform multiple cognitive activities and reveal various emotions. Often these psychological activities are inscribed not only in the story content (what is being said) but also in the story form (how it is said).
Human Arenas
The Covid-19 pandemic and resulting damage is often portrayed in staggering numbers and statistic... more The Covid-19 pandemic and resulting damage is often portrayed in staggering numbers and statistics. This article offers, by contrast, a personal and qualitative account of employees, volunteers, and young residents at a refugee home in Berlin, Germany. Through the story of a boy who has spent the past four years in several of Berlin's 84 remaining refugee accommodations, we examine the inequalities that already existed in Germany and how the pandemic has exacerbated them. To provide ample context, we critically assess the so-called welcome classes that children and teens have been attending since their arrival to the country in or around 2015 and argue that the segregation experienced at school mirrors the isolation from the host society that refugees and people seeking asylum are subjected to residentially. We then present an emergency response to school closures: A digital homework mentorship program designed to mitigate the heightened barriers to social interaction and access to education brought about by the pandemic. We explore the sociocultural theory underpinning the program, describe its methods, and offer a qualitative evaluation of the results. Finally, we discuss how the informal education intervention helps fill gaps in the system, offering an approach that can be used going forward to promote learning, social-emotional development, and inclusion of young people with migration and refugee backgrounds.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2020
Educational practices that developed under the conditions of the military siege of Sarajevo durin... more Educational practices that developed under the conditions of the military siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War (1992 – 1995) are examined. Analyses of interviews with teachers and students are juxtaposed with archival documentation to reveal the mode of educational activities and the structure of the curriculum implemented. By exploring how different conceptualisations of space and time rendered by the condition of the siege prefigure different human activities, the development of educational infrastructures across the besieged city are traced chronologically. The analyses highlight two educational forms: War Schools a network of makeshift mixed age underground classrooms and Radio School daily educational broadcasts together with the curricular innovations they engendered. Departing from a focus on individual outcomes such as deficits, trauma, and aggressive behaviours, this work instead argues that collective educational activities have the ability to constructively mediate threatening external circumstances and support young people’s psychological capacities even during the times of crisis.
Narrative Inquiry, 2018
This study explores how 16 individuals who grew up during the four-year long siege of Sarajevo em... more This study explores how 16 individuals who grew up during the four-year long siege of Sarajevo employ language to make sense of their experiences following the conclusion of the Bosnian War. Narrative inquiry is employed in this work to study sense-making, a psychological process based in language and situated in interaction with extant social and physical landscapes. During the study, participants wrote responses across three narrative contexts 1) the prewar period, 2) the acute war, and 3) the postwar. Data analyses examine how ecological landscape gets enacted in narrative construction through varied use of prepositions across the three narrative contexts. Significantly higher use of prepositions in the acute war narrative context indicates that growing up amidst urban destruction gives rise to thought processes that draw on spatial and temporal relations in order to make sense of radical environmental changes in the landscape of war.
Human Development, 2016
Young people growing up in war zones experience significant changes of their physical and social ... more Young people growing up in war zones experience significant changes of their physical and social environments caused by urban destruction. Employing the methodology of narrative inquiry, this work theoretically explores environmental and spatial affordances enabling sociocognitive development among young people growing up during the 4-year military siege of Sarajevo. The theoretical analysis focuses on two environmental contexts – war school and the Sarajevo war tunnel – and examines how affordances of physical environments, symbolically enacted in language, scaffold developmental activities during this highly specific wartime period. The developmental meaning of environmental affordances comes to life in contemporary narratives written by 16 adults who as young people attended war schools or worked in Sarajevo war tunnel. Theoretical foundations of sociocultural and ecological psychology are employed to illuminate how environmental affordances contributed to the development of psychological functions well suited to everyday life in circumstances of war and urban destruction.
Analyzing Human Behavior in Cyberspace, 2019
This chapter provides practical recommendations for employing the affordances of cyberspace as to... more This chapter provides practical recommendations for employing the affordances of cyberspace as tools for learning and development among young refugees undergoing migration. Building upon empirical work that examines the role of language in cognitive development among immigrants, we emphasize the pedagogical uses of narrative in the process of shaping the experiences of young refugees on the road and giving meaning to their everyday activities. The educational practices described here are grounded in the spiral curriculum pedagogy which views learning as a process of iterative conceptual development mediated via context-embedded activities. Following a review of research on the cognitive benefits that emerge from developmental activities across diverse cultural contexts, we provide a set of recommendations for structuring narrative-based educational activities that engage and activate the rich transnational experiences of young refugees in the process of migration, and transform these experiences into learning.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2016
Given the proliferation of new media technologies today’s immigrant children and youth are experi... more Given the proliferation of new media technologies today’s immigrant children and youth are experiencing the effects of time-space compression in the domain of interpersonal interactions. Increasingly, they are able to simultaneously engage in developmental activities across their native and host societies. If migration is no longer a one-way binary process, but rather a culturally dialectical process involving fluid articulation of consciousness and identity across multiple cultural landscapes, how can we structure teaching and learning to support cognitive development of immigrant children and youth as they gradually assume the responsibilities of adulthood? This work builds on socio-cultural theory in order to describe sense-making, a psychological process situated in interaction with extant social, cultural and physical environments, which employs language actively woven into a narrative as a tool for organizing consciousness and perception. Practical recommendations stemming from this theoretical framework are explored in order to enable the tools for curriculum design that support bicultural and transnational developmental orientations.
Cyber Behavior, Psychology and Learning, 2016
Young migrants across the globe increasingly interact and socialize with culturally diverse other... more Young migrants across the globe increasingly interact and socialize with culturally diverse others across technologically mediated spaces. Bicultural and transnational development are becoming norms for contemporary youth as new media technology allows them to engage in interactions with diverse others across multiple cultural landscapes. What cultural tools do young migrants use to resolve conflicts with diverse peers across technologically mediated interpersonal interactions? To answer this question 44 individuals (ages 15-20) participated in a quasi-experimental workshop engaging them in the process of sense-making. During the workshop participants wrote projective narratives in response to a vignette depicting text-massage mediated interaction embedded among monocultural and bicultural groups of peers. Quantitative and qualitative data analyses focus on physical, psychological and communicative conflict resolution strategies used in narrative construction. The results indicate that immigrant youth are able to employ and coordinate varied strategies when approaching conflict resolution across culturally diverse landscapes of social interactions.
Metropolitics, 2016
Ethnic, nationalistic and social tensions are at an all-time high in Turkey, exacerbated by the r... more Ethnic, nationalistic and social tensions are at an all-time high in Turkey, exacerbated by the re-emergence of the " Kurdish problem " and the influx of Syrian refugees fleeing the war. Minorities are persecuted and academics denouncing exactions are targeted by the government. Luka Lucić compares this situation to the collapse of Yugoslavia and warns of possible dire times to come.
Metropolitics, 2016
What are the impacts of war upon young people’s psychological development? Research with young me... more What are the impacts of war upon young people’s psychological development? Research with young men who survived Sarajevo’s siege sheds new light on how young people draw upon their social and spatial environment to make sense of violent experiences.
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2013
Building upon recent research that defines psychological development as a continuous process of s... more Building upon recent research that defines psychological development as a continuous process of sense-making situated within a cultural and historical context, this paper explores how culturally diverse youth growing up in New York City use evaluative language to enact relational complexity as they make sense of technologically mediated interpersonal interactions with their peers. Forty-four individuals (ages 15–20) participated in a quasi-experimental research workshop that engaged them in the process of sense-making by asking them to write projective narratives toward a vignette depicting text-massage mediated interpersonal interaction embedded among monocultural and bicultural group of peers. Data analyses focus on evaluative devices used by youth and manifest the relational flexibility of sense-making by immigrant youth and their U.S. born peers across diverse relational dimensions. Results suggest that immigrant youth are able to coordinate diverse ways of interpreting interpersonal interactions across relational dimensions, manifest by varied use of logical/hypothetical, causal and affective evaluative devices. In contrast U.S. born youth largely use same frequency of evaluative devices across two relational dimensions. Statistical analysis highlights the use of affect in projective narratives by exploring a discursive learning hypothesis: that higher use of emotions in the process of sense-making by U.S. born youth gradually scaffolds the use of emotions in narrative by immigrant youth.
BMC Psychology, 2013
The objective of this study was to examine the cross-cultural differences of the PANSS across six... more The objective of this study was to examine the cross-cultural differences of the PANSS across six geo-cultural regions. The specific aims are (1) to examine measurement properties of the PANSS; and (2) to examine how each of the 30 items function across geo-cultural regions.
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2010
Families migrating out of a war zone are often perceived as the lucky ones because they escape at... more Families migrating out of a war zone are often perceived as the lucky ones because they escape at least some of the devastating consequences of war. Nevertheless, we know little about the relative developmental effects of war for refugees and domestic survivors. This inquiry addresses that gap by focusing on how two groups of young people sharing a traditional culture used narrating as a tool to make sense of the circumstances of their post-war environments. The analysis presented in this paper draws on narratives by 64 young people whose experiences with war began when they were babies and children in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH), 38 youth whose families remained in BiH and 26 who migrated to the United States. Analyses based cultural–historical activity theory reveal major differences in how these Bosnian Muslim youth growing up in diverse post-war circumstances narrated conflicts. The pattern of results indicates, for example, that the U.S. participants focused on how things work in society and an orientation to other people more than themselves, while BiH participants focused critically on adults in their society and on their own personal identity clarifications. Such uses of narrating to mediate self-society relations differ from those expected in research assuming universal orientations, such as an adolescent emphasis on identity, or assuming that traditional cultural mores organize experience. The study underscores the need for ongoing research to examine the context-sensitive nature of development. Implications for future research in normative and problematic situations are discussed.▶ Youth separated by war perceive and interpret conflicts in terms of the present circumstances where they live. ▶ Bosnian youth separated by war (some living in Sarajevo and some the United States) perceive and interpret conflict differently in spite of their shared ethnic and religious origins. ▶ This study offers evidence for defining culture in terms of present situations as much as past affiliations or histories. ▶ The design and analysis of this study offer insights for future inquiry into within-group diversity.
Book Reviews by Luka Lucić
Conference Presentations by Luka Lucić
Background: Debate persists with regard to how best to categorize the syndromal dimension of nega... more Background: Debate persists with regard to how best to categorize the syndromal dimension of negative symptoms in schizophrenia. The aim was to first review published Principle Components Analysis (PCA) of the PANSS, and extract items most frequently included in the negative domain, and secondly, to examine the quality of items using Item Response Theory (IRT) to select items that best represent a measurable dimension (or dimensions) of negative symptoms. Methods: First, 22 factor analyses and PCA met were included. Second, using a large dataset (n = 7187) of participants in clinical trials with chronic schizophrenia, we extracted items loading on one or more PCA. Third, items not loading with a value of ≥0.5, or loading on more than one component with values of ≥ 0.5 were discarded. Fourth, resulting items were included in a non-parametric IRT and retained based on Option Characteristic Curves (OCCs) and Item Characteristic Curves (ICCs). Results: 15 items loaded on a negative domain in at least one study, with Emotional Withdrawal loading on all studies. Non-parametric IRT retained nine items as an Integrated Negative Factor: Emotional Withdrawal, Blunted Affect, Passive/Apathetic Social Withdrawal, Poor Rapport, Lack of Spontaneity/Conversation Flow, Active Social Avoidance, Disturbance of Volition, Stereotyped Thinking and Difficulty in Abstract Thinking. Conclusions: This is the first study to use a psychometric IRT process to arrive at a set of negative symptom items. Future steps will include further examination of these nine items in terms of their stability, sensitivity to change, and correlations with functional and cognitive outcomes.
Schizophrenia Bulletin, 39, S239, 2013
Social cognition is a key area of study in schizophrenia and assesses affect perception, social p... more Social cognition is a key area of study in schizophrenia and assesses affect perception, social perception, attributional style and theory of mind (ToM). Deficits in social cognition are linked to social dysfunction producing impaired communication and community functioning. The present study analyses the deficits of individuals with schizophrenia in three areas of social cognition using a dynamic image toolkit of tasks of Emotion Processing, ToM and Attributional Style. This study also assesses psychometric properties of a video-based DSCB.
European Psychiatry, 2015
Crisis Narratives
To understand how moments of crisis shape stories told in the aftermath, we explore narrative tho... more To understand how moments of crisis shape stories told in the aftermath, we explore narrative thought processes through a prism of a regional crisis. Drawing on research with participants who grew up during the military siege of Sarajevo (1992-95), we describe spaces within the unoccupied city shaped by military destruction and consider the range of unique activities these spaces afforded to the young people. Analyzing narratives written in the aftermath of the siege, we focus on participants' enactment of adverbs, a linguistic category used to qualify action in relation to place, time, circumstance, or manner. Our analyses show that, as participants reflect on activities of heightened danger across novel and precarious spaces, their narratives become more evaluative, often illustrating their feelings or impressions and qualifying the relationship between oneself and the context of activities. Beyond the singular focus on trauma narratives, our findings suggest a complex socio-cognitive response to crisis.
Migrant scholars researching migration: Reflexivity, subjectivity, and biographical research, 2023
Where narrators choose to start their story, what examples they choose to include, what events th... more Where narrators choose to start their story, what examples they choose to include, what events they decide to exclude, and what words they use to describe their experience, all matter profoundly for psychological research. True or not, conscious or not, the way I chose to construct this story reveals a lot about the way I think and feel about my immigrant experience. The same goes for other narrators. As researchers, we need to be aware that, as narrators weave their stories, they perform multiple cognitive activities and reveal various emotions. Often these psychological activities are inscribed not only in the story content (what is being said) but also in the story form (how it is said).
Human Arenas
The Covid-19 pandemic and resulting damage is often portrayed in staggering numbers and statistic... more The Covid-19 pandemic and resulting damage is often portrayed in staggering numbers and statistics. This article offers, by contrast, a personal and qualitative account of employees, volunteers, and young residents at a refugee home in Berlin, Germany. Through the story of a boy who has spent the past four years in several of Berlin's 84 remaining refugee accommodations, we examine the inequalities that already existed in Germany and how the pandemic has exacerbated them. To provide ample context, we critically assess the so-called welcome classes that children and teens have been attending since their arrival to the country in or around 2015 and argue that the segregation experienced at school mirrors the isolation from the host society that refugees and people seeking asylum are subjected to residentially. We then present an emergency response to school closures: A digital homework mentorship program designed to mitigate the heightened barriers to social interaction and access to education brought about by the pandemic. We explore the sociocultural theory underpinning the program, describe its methods, and offer a qualitative evaluation of the results. Finally, we discuss how the informal education intervention helps fill gaps in the system, offering an approach that can be used going forward to promote learning, social-emotional development, and inclusion of young people with migration and refugee backgrounds.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2020
Educational practices that developed under the conditions of the military siege of Sarajevo durin... more Educational practices that developed under the conditions of the military siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War (1992 – 1995) are examined. Analyses of interviews with teachers and students are juxtaposed with archival documentation to reveal the mode of educational activities and the structure of the curriculum implemented. By exploring how different conceptualisations of space and time rendered by the condition of the siege prefigure different human activities, the development of educational infrastructures across the besieged city are traced chronologically. The analyses highlight two educational forms: War Schools a network of makeshift mixed age underground classrooms and Radio School daily educational broadcasts together with the curricular innovations they engendered. Departing from a focus on individual outcomes such as deficits, trauma, and aggressive behaviours, this work instead argues that collective educational activities have the ability to constructively mediate threatening external circumstances and support young people’s psychological capacities even during the times of crisis.
Narrative Inquiry, 2018
This study explores how 16 individuals who grew up during the four-year long siege of Sarajevo em... more This study explores how 16 individuals who grew up during the four-year long siege of Sarajevo employ language to make sense of their experiences following the conclusion of the Bosnian War. Narrative inquiry is employed in this work to study sense-making, a psychological process based in language and situated in interaction with extant social and physical landscapes. During the study, participants wrote responses across three narrative contexts 1) the prewar period, 2) the acute war, and 3) the postwar. Data analyses examine how ecological landscape gets enacted in narrative construction through varied use of prepositions across the three narrative contexts. Significantly higher use of prepositions in the acute war narrative context indicates that growing up amidst urban destruction gives rise to thought processes that draw on spatial and temporal relations in order to make sense of radical environmental changes in the landscape of war.
Human Development, 2016
Young people growing up in war zones experience significant changes of their physical and social ... more Young people growing up in war zones experience significant changes of their physical and social environments caused by urban destruction. Employing the methodology of narrative inquiry, this work theoretically explores environmental and spatial affordances enabling sociocognitive development among young people growing up during the 4-year military siege of Sarajevo. The theoretical analysis focuses on two environmental contexts – war school and the Sarajevo war tunnel – and examines how affordances of physical environments, symbolically enacted in language, scaffold developmental activities during this highly specific wartime period. The developmental meaning of environmental affordances comes to life in contemporary narratives written by 16 adults who as young people attended war schools or worked in Sarajevo war tunnel. Theoretical foundations of sociocultural and ecological psychology are employed to illuminate how environmental affordances contributed to the development of psychological functions well suited to everyday life in circumstances of war and urban destruction.
Analyzing Human Behavior in Cyberspace, 2019
This chapter provides practical recommendations for employing the affordances of cyberspace as to... more This chapter provides practical recommendations for employing the affordances of cyberspace as tools for learning and development among young refugees undergoing migration. Building upon empirical work that examines the role of language in cognitive development among immigrants, we emphasize the pedagogical uses of narrative in the process of shaping the experiences of young refugees on the road and giving meaning to their everyday activities. The educational practices described here are grounded in the spiral curriculum pedagogy which views learning as a process of iterative conceptual development mediated via context-embedded activities. Following a review of research on the cognitive benefits that emerge from developmental activities across diverse cultural contexts, we provide a set of recommendations for structuring narrative-based educational activities that engage and activate the rich transnational experiences of young refugees in the process of migration, and transform these experiences into learning.
Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2016
Given the proliferation of new media technologies today’s immigrant children and youth are experi... more Given the proliferation of new media technologies today’s immigrant children and youth are experiencing the effects of time-space compression in the domain of interpersonal interactions. Increasingly, they are able to simultaneously engage in developmental activities across their native and host societies. If migration is no longer a one-way binary process, but rather a culturally dialectical process involving fluid articulation of consciousness and identity across multiple cultural landscapes, how can we structure teaching and learning to support cognitive development of immigrant children and youth as they gradually assume the responsibilities of adulthood? This work builds on socio-cultural theory in order to describe sense-making, a psychological process situated in interaction with extant social, cultural and physical environments, which employs language actively woven into a narrative as a tool for organizing consciousness and perception. Practical recommendations stemming from this theoretical framework are explored in order to enable the tools for curriculum design that support bicultural and transnational developmental orientations.
Cyber Behavior, Psychology and Learning, 2016
Young migrants across the globe increasingly interact and socialize with culturally diverse other... more Young migrants across the globe increasingly interact and socialize with culturally diverse others across technologically mediated spaces. Bicultural and transnational development are becoming norms for contemporary youth as new media technology allows them to engage in interactions with diverse others across multiple cultural landscapes. What cultural tools do young migrants use to resolve conflicts with diverse peers across technologically mediated interpersonal interactions? To answer this question 44 individuals (ages 15-20) participated in a quasi-experimental workshop engaging them in the process of sense-making. During the workshop participants wrote projective narratives in response to a vignette depicting text-massage mediated interaction embedded among monocultural and bicultural groups of peers. Quantitative and qualitative data analyses focus on physical, psychological and communicative conflict resolution strategies used in narrative construction. The results indicate that immigrant youth are able to employ and coordinate varied strategies when approaching conflict resolution across culturally diverse landscapes of social interactions.
Metropolitics, 2016
Ethnic, nationalistic and social tensions are at an all-time high in Turkey, exacerbated by the r... more Ethnic, nationalistic and social tensions are at an all-time high in Turkey, exacerbated by the re-emergence of the " Kurdish problem " and the influx of Syrian refugees fleeing the war. Minorities are persecuted and academics denouncing exactions are targeted by the government. Luka Lucić compares this situation to the collapse of Yugoslavia and warns of possible dire times to come.
Metropolitics, 2016
What are the impacts of war upon young people’s psychological development? Research with young me... more What are the impacts of war upon young people’s psychological development? Research with young men who survived Sarajevo’s siege sheds new light on how young people draw upon their social and spatial environment to make sense of violent experiences.
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2013
Building upon recent research that defines psychological development as a continuous process of s... more Building upon recent research that defines psychological development as a continuous process of sense-making situated within a cultural and historical context, this paper explores how culturally diverse youth growing up in New York City use evaluative language to enact relational complexity as they make sense of technologically mediated interpersonal interactions with their peers. Forty-four individuals (ages 15–20) participated in a quasi-experimental research workshop that engaged them in the process of sense-making by asking them to write projective narratives toward a vignette depicting text-massage mediated interpersonal interaction embedded among monocultural and bicultural group of peers. Data analyses focus on evaluative devices used by youth and manifest the relational flexibility of sense-making by immigrant youth and their U.S. born peers across diverse relational dimensions. Results suggest that immigrant youth are able to coordinate diverse ways of interpreting interpersonal interactions across relational dimensions, manifest by varied use of logical/hypothetical, causal and affective evaluative devices. In contrast U.S. born youth largely use same frequency of evaluative devices across two relational dimensions. Statistical analysis highlights the use of affect in projective narratives by exploring a discursive learning hypothesis: that higher use of emotions in the process of sense-making by U.S. born youth gradually scaffolds the use of emotions in narrative by immigrant youth.
BMC Psychology, 2013
The objective of this study was to examine the cross-cultural differences of the PANSS across six... more The objective of this study was to examine the cross-cultural differences of the PANSS across six geo-cultural regions. The specific aims are (1) to examine measurement properties of the PANSS; and (2) to examine how each of the 30 items function across geo-cultural regions.
International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 2010
Families migrating out of a war zone are often perceived as the lucky ones because they escape at... more Families migrating out of a war zone are often perceived as the lucky ones because they escape at least some of the devastating consequences of war. Nevertheless, we know little about the relative developmental effects of war for refugees and domestic survivors. This inquiry addresses that gap by focusing on how two groups of young people sharing a traditional culture used narrating as a tool to make sense of the circumstances of their post-war environments. The analysis presented in this paper draws on narratives by 64 young people whose experiences with war began when they were babies and children in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH), 38 youth whose families remained in BiH and 26 who migrated to the United States. Analyses based cultural–historical activity theory reveal major differences in how these Bosnian Muslim youth growing up in diverse post-war circumstances narrated conflicts. The pattern of results indicates, for example, that the U.S. participants focused on how things work in society and an orientation to other people more than themselves, while BiH participants focused critically on adults in their society and on their own personal identity clarifications. Such uses of narrating to mediate self-society relations differ from those expected in research assuming universal orientations, such as an adolescent emphasis on identity, or assuming that traditional cultural mores organize experience. The study underscores the need for ongoing research to examine the context-sensitive nature of development. Implications for future research in normative and problematic situations are discussed.▶ Youth separated by war perceive and interpret conflicts in terms of the present circumstances where they live. ▶ Bosnian youth separated by war (some living in Sarajevo and some the United States) perceive and interpret conflict differently in spite of their shared ethnic and religious origins. ▶ This study offers evidence for defining culture in terms of present situations as much as past affiliations or histories. ▶ The design and analysis of this study offer insights for future inquiry into within-group diversity.
Background: Debate persists with regard to how best to categorize the syndromal dimension of nega... more Background: Debate persists with regard to how best to categorize the syndromal dimension of negative symptoms in schizophrenia. The aim was to first review published Principle Components Analysis (PCA) of the PANSS, and extract items most frequently included in the negative domain, and secondly, to examine the quality of items using Item Response Theory (IRT) to select items that best represent a measurable dimension (or dimensions) of negative symptoms. Methods: First, 22 factor analyses and PCA met were included. Second, using a large dataset (n = 7187) of participants in clinical trials with chronic schizophrenia, we extracted items loading on one or more PCA. Third, items not loading with a value of ≥0.5, or loading on more than one component with values of ≥ 0.5 were discarded. Fourth, resulting items were included in a non-parametric IRT and retained based on Option Characteristic Curves (OCCs) and Item Characteristic Curves (ICCs). Results: 15 items loaded on a negative domain in at least one study, with Emotional Withdrawal loading on all studies. Non-parametric IRT retained nine items as an Integrated Negative Factor: Emotional Withdrawal, Blunted Affect, Passive/Apathetic Social Withdrawal, Poor Rapport, Lack of Spontaneity/Conversation Flow, Active Social Avoidance, Disturbance of Volition, Stereotyped Thinking and Difficulty in Abstract Thinking. Conclusions: This is the first study to use a psychometric IRT process to arrive at a set of negative symptom items. Future steps will include further examination of these nine items in terms of their stability, sensitivity to change, and correlations with functional and cognitive outcomes.
Schizophrenia Bulletin, 39, S239, 2013
Social cognition is a key area of study in schizophrenia and assesses affect perception, social p... more Social cognition is a key area of study in schizophrenia and assesses affect perception, social perception, attributional style and theory of mind (ToM). Deficits in social cognition are linked to social dysfunction producing impaired communication and community functioning. The present study analyses the deficits of individuals with schizophrenia in three areas of social cognition using a dynamic image toolkit of tasks of Emotion Processing, ToM and Attributional Style. This study also assesses psychometric properties of a video-based DSCB.
European Psychiatry, 2015
Schizophrenia Research, 153, S341, 2014
Building upon Vygotsky’s (1934) theorizing regarding the disturbance of the concept formation fun... more Building upon Vygotsky’s (1934) theorizing regarding the disturbance of the concept formation function in individuals suffering from schizophrenia, we conducted a 12 week-long narrative study which explores differences in concept formation and integration across various context of individual’s life. The study was conducted with adults hospitalized at a large psychiatric hospital in New York City due to symptoms of schizophrenia. In order to explore the function of concept formation – operationalized in this study in terms of narrators’ use and integration of evaluative elements across narrative dimensions – we asked the participants to narrate in response to a series of prompts varied for author-purpose-audience stances over time (i.e., letter to a friend outside of the hospital vs. letter to a doctor at the hospital). The data reveal pronounced differences in narrative length, use of psychological states, use of causal connectors, and overall greater complexity in narratives towards the other-oriented genres and social context of others with significant power.Findings from this study indicate that individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia are able to vary their narrative responses across diverse context indicating flexibility of cognitive functions and suggesting avenues for the future narrative based cognitive interventions.
European Psychiatry, 2015
Recent empirical research highlights that the social and cultural development of migrants often i... more Recent empirical research highlights that the social and cultural development of migrants often involves what Du Bois (1990) termed “double consciousness” – the articulation of two (or more) cultural meaning systems, often simultaneously. Research on multicultural development confirms that migrants are often able to operate using multiple cultural codes, navigate across diverse cultures, form flexible self-identities, and effectively manage the process of living in multiple cultural settings.
Prompted by socio-cultural changes engendered by cyberspace, this study sought to answer the question: When employed across diverse cultural landscapes, does active use of language leads to stable, long-term changes in socio-cognitive complexity – defined as the capacity to construe people, objects, and ideas in culturally appropriate multidimensional ways?
The results suggest that rather than experiencing a “culture clash” of being torn between multiple cultural frameworks, migrant youth gradually build socio-cognitive complexity. Socio-cognitive complexity, in turn, allows migrants to coordinate diverse ways of interpreting interpersonal interactions across bicultural and monocultural social contexts.
Refugee children and youth migrating long distances to safety often amass an abundance of experie... more Refugee children and youth migrating long distances to safety often amass an abundance of experience during their journey. However, what they frequently lack are the curricular components of interpretation and structured interaction that typically characterize more formal educational approaches and help students transform experience into learning. We propose harnessing the context embedded experiences specific to migration via a set of narrative-based curriculum practices that can lead to the integration of refugee experiences and toward the development of transnational cognitive styles.
The educational practices described in this work are grounded in Bruner’s (1960) spiral curriculum pedagogy, which views learning as a process of iterative conceptual development mediated via context-embedded activities. According to this view, transnational cognitive development among young refugees is a process that takes place within a broader socio-cultural framework, not solely in an individual’s mind. Within this framework, we emphasize the role of language actively employed as a narrative across technologically mediated everyday activities in shaping the experiences of young refugees on the road and giving meaning to their everyday activities.
Kingston Creative Exchange (KCX) is a project jointly funded by The Martin Architecture and Desig... more Kingston Creative Exchange (KCX) is a project jointly funded by The Martin Architecture and Design Workshop (MADWORKSHOP) which supports technological craftsmanship in the arts and design and Pratt Institute. The goal of the overall project is to provide a creative space for the exchange of design practices between the local artisans and young people of Kingston, NY via developmental curriculum implemented by Pratt interdisciplinary design team. The aim of the curriculum is to engage a group of students from Kingston High School in a series of community situated design workshops spanning over five weeks. We hope that their participation in the workshops will lead to an increased understanding of locally situated design practices (as they relate to space, objects, and concepts) that specifically draw on historical and contemporary resources of Kingston NY.
Through their involvement in the curriculum young people will engage in the following activities: interior design, process of mold-casting as it pertains to slip-casted ceramics and soap production, as well as communication design about the products created. The primary objective of the curriculum is to enable young people to engage in a design practice (perhaps for the first time) and thereby begin to grasp the often-subtle structure of that particular design practice. Understanding the structure of a practice permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully. For example, having grasped the subtle structure of a sentence, the child very rapidly learns to generate many other sentences based on this model though different in content from the original sentence learned. We see this logic as also extending to the practices of art and design.
Theoretically, the activities described as part of this curriculum are grounded in Lev Vygotsky’s (1978) and Jerome Bruner’s (1960) spiral curriculum pedagogy, which views learning as a process of iterative conceptual development mediated via context-embedded activities. On this view, learning does not solely and exclusively happen within the mind of an individual. Learning is a dialectical process situated in meaningful activities with more capable peers (in this case local artisans). By engaging young people in the structured design practices within a professional workshop, we aim to provide a space within which more capable peers will introduce young people to ways of doing (material activities) and ways of thinking (symbolic activities) that accompany their art and design practices. According to the theoretical point of view advanced by this project, both ways of doing and ways of thinking related to a professional practice emerge from situated structured activities that are carried out in collaboration with more capable peers.
Finally, we view the everyday activities of young people within design workshops as holding latent developmental potentials. By means of educational practices specifically planned to encourage an analytical perspective towards the practices of design, we seek to engage developmental pathways among young people and hopefully provide them with a meaningful point of entry into carriers in art and design.