Human Arenas

Accompanied by false information, mass media content is hindering efforts to cope with the current outbreak. Although the World Health Organization and other concerned bodies are notified regarding misinformation, myths and rumors are highly prevalent. This paper aims to highlight the misinformation and its potential impacts during the Covid-19 by using the Systematic Review Approach. The researcher randomly selected n = 35 research articles published from 2015 to 2020, witnessing the misinformation as a major concern during previous endemics and the current Covid-19 pandemic. Myths and rumors through traditional and new media platforms cause Xenophobia, LGBT Rights violations, and psychological disorders among the masses. Despite the efforts made by the World Health Organization, much more is required to nullify the impacts of misinformation and Covid-19. Therefore, the researcher recommended improved global healthcare policies and strategies to counteract against misinformation to mitigate the impacts of Covid-19.

The articles and commentaries in this special section of Human Arenas are based on presentations by four invited speakers at the 2022 Biennial International Seminar on the Teaching of Psychological Science (BISTOPS; www.bistops.org ). BISTOPS is designed to give 25–30 invited psychology teacher/researchers the opportunity to spend five days in Paris discussing research on various aspects of teaching psychological science, to exchange new research ideas, to create international research teams, and ultimately to generate empirical studies whose results will lead to evidence-based recommendations for promoting excellence in the teaching of psychology. Though written by North Americans about teaching psychology in North America, the articles are relevant for the teaching of psychology, and other disciplines, in many other parts of the world. That is because they deal with thorny questions about what teaching methods lead to the greatest long-term retention of new knowledge, about how we can disabuse our students of the misconceptions they bring with them to our courses, about whether and how we should try to protect students from potentially upsetting course content, and about how best to evaluate the quality of our teaching.

The article situates the Funds of Knowledge (FoK) approach and the Funds of Identity (FoI) theory in the context of the eco-functional perspective. It proposes to understand the “funds” as external factors of extra-cerebral organizations, as both refer to products of historically accumulated social labor. Furthermore, the article lays out that similar to the dynamic features of external factors in developing functional psychic organizations, funds of knowledge and identity have to be considered specific to a social and developmental context. It is found that Vygotsky’s concept of perezhivanie and Holzkamp’s concept of position-specificity may provide a valid framework for realization of this dynamic understanding of FoK and FoI.

The lowering of criminal liability of minors is a big issue that the Philippine society faces in the modern world. The upper and the lower house of Congress have their version of amending Republic Act 9344 known as the Juvenile Justice Welfare Act of 2006, primarily on Sect. 6 regarding the age of criminal liability of minors. The amendment envisages reducing the age of criminal liability from 15 to 9 years old because of the empirical observation and deduction that those involved in crimes are adults and even teenagers and children alike. The solution, therefore, of Congress is to brand children and youth in conflict with the law (CYCL) as criminals so that proper judicial measures and process could be implemented and so that the involvement of children and youth in crimes could be lessened if not prevented. One out of the many reasons in amending the law is that children and youth in conflict with the law, in the existing juvenile justice welfare act, could escape the penal system of judicial measures. This, in effect, could be used by syndicates in promoting their aberrant intentions and acts. In other words, children and teenagers could be used in criminal endeavors. Nevertheless, one might ask, will the plan of Congress help provide a solution to the problem? Alternatively, the plan is just to cover the real problem by blaming CYCL. Will it safeguard the interest of those criminally involved children and youth or the interest of those adults to take advantage of these poor’s innocence? Using the phenomenological lenses, this study attempts to understand the problem behind this pressing issue of our time by unfolding the richness of the term youth concerning Erik Erikson and Carl Rogers’ psychosocial concepts. Likewise, to lay down the reasons behind the creation of the Republic Act 9344 and the steps it has to address the problem on society to vis-à-vis the children and the youth. Finding a solution to the problem involving CYCL is not an individual exertion on the part of the government; it is an endeavor of every sector in the Philippines. Therefore, this study tries to look at the position and call of the Church in this phenomenon in Philippine history. In the end, may this study be a wakeup for thinkers, patriots, dreamers, positivists, social, and political scientists for further discussions and debates with a vision of helping the young who is the very future of the dearest Pearl of the Orient.

The article draws on posthumanist theorizing to critically inquire into and thereby specify the relational ethics ingrained in the dialectical praxis co-research approach of psychology from the standpoint of the subject (PSS). It departs from problematizing power imbalances manifest in participatory research with children, and argues that attempts to question the child/adult binary via the concept of ethical symmetry have failed to address this binary’s entanglement with power imbalances propelled by the researcher/researched as well as the human/posthuman binaries. In contrast, PSS’ co-research ethics, implicit to the concepts of conduct of everyday life and conflictual cooperation, clearly attends to the researcher/researched binary, but has little attended to the child/adult or the human/nonhuman binaries in explicit ways. Therefore, the article discusses how the posthumanist quest for fundamentally questioning human exceptionalism may inform psychological praxis co-research, by radically opening its inquiries up for ongoing renegotiations of deadlocking categories. It invites to co-explore what it means to be part of this world across all conceivable binaries. Implicitly, PSS already shares two central tenets with this posthumanist ethos of diffraction: its co-research strives for indeterminate and caringly speculative becomings, and it does so via the collective engagement in difference-enacting knowledge praxis. Finally, it is suggested that the concept of teleogenetic collaboration, as a specification of PSS’ co-research methodology, explicates these tenets. The concept calls for continuously finding out about one another’s knowledges and directionalities for future action from within everyday life, across all vital forces and across dialectical-materialist and new materialist theorizing.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown have been a seismic shock for youth in India, elevating their risk of mental health problems like depression. This cross-sectional study sought to measure the point prevalence levels of depression in university students (ages 19–25 years) from Maharashtra, India, during the peak of the first wave of the pandemic and lockdown, through an online opt-in survey. The BDI-II was self-administered by 783 respondents (males = 243; females = 540). Results indicated overall mild levels of depression (mean BDI = 16.48) and high point prevalence, with 51.8% (n = 406) of the population being symptomatic, of which 16.3% had severe, 17.9% had moderate, and 17.8% had mild levels of depression. No association was found with age, gender, educational level of participants, period of hostel stay, education, and occupational level of parents. Overall percentages of symptomatic women were higher, suggesting the gendered effects of the pandemic. This study explored the symptomatology of depression wherein “sadness,” “changes in sleep patterns,” and “concentration difficulties” emerged as the most commonly experienced symptoms. Symptom expression was found to vary with intensity and gender. Symptomatic men experienced significantly more cognitive symptoms like self-criticalness, punishment feelings, thoughts about past failures, and changes in sleep patterns, while symptomatic women felt significantly high “loss of energy.” No significant gender differences were seen in the experience of cognitive-affective symptoms. Possible reasons are discussed. Further exploration of the experiences of youth is essential to understand the full gamut of the pandemic’s impact on them.