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Socializing With The Out-Group: Testing The Contact Hypothesis Among School Students In Bosnia And Herzegovina, Matthew Thomas Becker

Faculty and Student Publications

The purpose of this article is to test the contact hypothesis among self-identifying Bosniak, Croat, Serb, and Bosnian high school seniors in Bosnia and Herzegovina, using the Other-Group Orientation Scale (Roberts et al., 1999). This article finds that attending a ‘non-appropriate’ ethnic school statistically increases tolerance of out-group members, which conforms to the predictions of the contact hypothesis, originally put forth by Allport (1958). This field research also found that secondary schools are largely homogenous in the country, thus preventing high levels of cross-ethnic contact in schools, which was expected. This article represents the first post-war, countrywide quantitative testing of …

Disconnectivity Between Dorsal Raphe Nucleus And Posterior Cingulate Cortex In Later Life Depression, Toshikazu Ikuta, Koji Matsuo, Kenichiro Harada, Mami Nakashima, Teruyuki Hobara, Naoko Higuchi, Fumihiro Higuchi, Koji Otsuki, Tomohiko Shibata, Toshio Watanuki, Toshio Matsubara, Hirotaka Yamagata, Yoshifumi Watanabe

Faculty and Student Publications

The dorsal raphe nucleus (DRN) has been repeatedly implicated as having a significant relationship with depression, along with its serotoninergic innervation. However, functional connectivity of the DRN in depression is not well understood. The current study aimed to isolate functional connectivity of the DRN distinct in later life depression (LLD) compared to a healthy age-matched population. Resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) data from 95 participants (33 LLD and 62 healthy) were collected to examine functional connectivity from the DRN to the whole brain in voxel-wise fashion. The posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) bilaterally showed significantly smaller connectivity in the …

Disrupted Olfactory Integration In Schizophrenia: Functional Connectivity Study, Sara Kiparizoska, Toshikazu Ikuta

Faculty and Student Publications

Background

Evidence for olfactory dysfunction in schizophrenia has been firmly established. However, in the typical understanding of schizophrenia, olfaction is not recognized to contribute to or interact with the illness. Despite the solid presence of olfactory dysfunction in schizophrenia, its relation to the rest of the illness remains largely unclear. Here, we aimed to examine functional connectivity of the olfactory bulb, olfactory tract, and piriform cortices and isolate the network that would account for the altered olfaction in schizophrenia.

Methods

We examined the functional connectivity of these specific olfactory regions in order to isolate other brain regions associated with olfactory …

How Do Schools Affect Ethnic Saliency Levels Of Students In Bosnia And Herzegovina, Matthew Thomas Becker

Faculty and Student Publications

This article measures the role of schools in the ethnic socialization and identity formation processes of high school seniors in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) via ordinary least squares regression analysis and attempts to contribute to a better understanding of educational transitions in the postsocialist space and youth identity formation in a postconflict society. BiH has three ethnonational curricula (Bosniak, Croat, and Serb), each with an ethnocentric focus. Although nationality and school curricula are highly correlated in BiH, in the case of the Serbs, it was found that students who do not study the “appropriate” Serbian curriculum experienced a statistically significant …