John H Shaver, Radim Chvaja, Laure Spake, Anushé Hassan, Jainaba Badjie, Andrew M Prentice, Carla Cerami, Rebecca Sear, Mary K Shenk, Richard Sosis
Objectives: Human childrearing is cooperative, with women often able to achieve relatively high fertility through help from many individuals. Previous work has documented tremendous socioecological variation in who supports women in childrearing, but less is known about the intracultural correlates of variation in allomaternal support. In the highly religious, high-fertility setting of The Gambia, we studied whether religious mothers have more children and receive more support with their children.
Methods: We randomly sampled 395 mothers and 745 focal children enrolled in the Kiang West (The Gambia) Longitudinal Population Study cohort. Structured interviews asked mothers who and how often people invest in their children, and about their religious practices. Data were collected at participants' homes on electronic tablet-based long-form surveys and analyzed using the Bayesian hierarchical models.
Results: Religiosity was weakly associated with women's higher age-adjusted fertility. Maternal religiosity was negatively related to maternal investment in focal children, but positively associated with total allomaternal support. Specifically, a woman's religiosity was positively associated with allomaternal support from matrilineal kin, other offspring, and affinal kin, but unrelated to paternal, patrilineal, and non-kin investment.
Conclusions: These results suggest that higher fertility among religious mothers may be supported by high levels of investment from biological and affinal kin. Matrilineal kin, other siblings, and affinal kin seem to be the most responsive to a woman's religiosity. Our findings cast doubt on interpretations of women's religious behaviors as signals of fidelity, and instead suggest they may be part of strategies to enable collective allomaternal resources and higher relative fertility.
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Introduction: Locus of control (LoC) refers to one's expectation that life outcomes and (mis)fortune are driven largely by one's own actions or abilities (internal LoC) or by external factors (e.g., powerful others, chance; external LoC). There is a large literature demonstrating an association between internal LoC and positive mental health outcomes. However, this research is conducted mostly in high-income, Global North settings, with limited consideration of cross-cultural variability. This short report explores how LoC relates to mental health when considered in a less-studied context: in a setting of stark structural violence and in relation to supernatural agents.
Methods: I conducted a community-based survey in rural Haiti (n = 322) that assessed sent spirit-related locus of control (LoC-S) and mental health.
Results: Among individuals experiencing higher levels of daily stressors, depressive and anxiety symptoms were high regardless of LoC-S. However, for individuals facing low-to-moderate daily stressors, external LoC-S (believing one does not have control in relation to sent spirits) was associated with lower depressive and anxiety symptoms, though this interaction did not hold for anxiety after controlling for covariates. Though initially a nonintuitive finding, I contextualize this outcome in relation to ethnographic work in Haiti, showing that the ability to explain misfortune via the supernatural world can serve as a form of blame displacement.
Conclusion: In a context where extreme structural violence means that individuals realistically have little control over their lives, an external LoC better reflects lived experience, helping explain the association with better mental health outcomes.
导言:控制感(LoC)是指一个人对生活结果和(不幸)命运的预期,主要由自己的行为或能力(内部控制感)或外部因素(如强大的他人、机遇;外部控制感)驱动。有大量文献表明,内部 LoC 与积极的心理健康结果之间存在关联。然而,这些研究大多是在高收入、全球北方的环境中进行的,对跨文化变异性的考虑有限。这篇简短的报告探讨了在一个研究较少的背景下,LoC 与心理健康的关系:在一个结构性暴力严重的环境中,以及与超自然因素的关系:我在海地农村地区进行了一项基于社区的调查(n = 322),评估了与精神相关的控制感(LoC-S)和心理健康:结果:在日常压力较大的人群中,抑郁和焦虑症状较高,与 LoC-S 无关。然而,对于面临中低度日常压力的人来说,外部LoC-S(认为自己无法控制寄灵)与较低的抑郁和焦虑症状相关,尽管在控制了协变量后,这种交互作用在焦虑方面并不成立。虽然最初的发现并不直观,但我将这一结果与海地的人种学工作联系起来,表明通过超自然世界来解释不幸的能力可以作为一种责任转移的形式:结论:在极端的结构性暴力环境中,个人实际上几乎无法控制自己的生活,外部的 "LoC "能更好地反映生活经验,有助于解释与更好的心理健康结果之间的联系。
{"title":"Locus of Control and Mental Health: Human Variation Complicates a Well-Established Research Finding.","authors":"Bonnie N Kaiser","doi":"10.1002/ajhb.24147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.24147","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Introduction: </strong>Locus of control (LoC) refers to one's expectation that life outcomes and (mis)fortune are driven largely by one's own actions or abilities (internal LoC) or by external factors (e.g., powerful others, chance; external LoC). There is a large literature demonstrating an association between internal LoC and positive mental health outcomes. However, this research is conducted mostly in high-income, Global North settings, with limited consideration of cross-cultural variability. This short report explores how LoC relates to mental health when considered in a less-studied context: in a setting of stark structural violence and in relation to supernatural agents.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>I conducted a community-based survey in rural Haiti (n = 322) that assessed sent spirit-related locus of control (LoC-S) and mental health.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Among individuals experiencing higher levels of daily stressors, depressive and anxiety symptoms were high regardless of LoC-S. However, for individuals facing low-to-moderate daily stressors, external LoC-S (believing one does not have control in relation to sent spirits) was associated with lower depressive and anxiety symptoms, though this interaction did not hold for anxiety after controlling for covariates. Though initially a nonintuitive finding, I contextualize this outcome in relation to ethnographic work in Haiti, showing that the ability to explain misfortune via the supernatural world can serve as a form of blame displacement.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>In a context where extreme structural violence means that individuals realistically have little control over their lives, an external LoC better reflects lived experience, helping explain the association with better mental health outcomes.</p>","PeriodicalId":50809,"journal":{"name":"American Journal of Human Biology","volume":" ","pages":"e24147"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141983792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}