Ahmed Alnajjar

This paper investigated the psychosocial problems experienced by university students in the UAE and Egypt using the modified Mooney Problem Check List (MPCL). The sample included seventy four students from a University in the UAE and one hundred students from a University in Egypt. Inferential statistical analysis showed that gender and cultural variable influenced some of the problems experienced by the university students. The Kaiser Criterion Principal Component revealed the structure of three factors that impact the experience of the students; a factor inherent in the psychosocial problems, a gender-related factor and a factor connected with economic conditions. On the whole, a transcultural understanding of psychosocial problems is instrumental to promoting better academic performance and social well-being among Arab students.

Global disability is increasingly being associated with stress, anxiety and depression. As a corollary, studies have associated these psychological conditions with worry. Based on these considerations, it had been suggested that research on the content of worry can contribute to better understanding the role of worry in anxiety disorders. Towards this end, this paper investigated the extent of worrying and the contents of worry thoughts among students in the United Arab Emirates University using Wells' (1994) Anxious Thoughts Inventory (AnTI). The study further tested whether the sex, age, or marital status of the students influenced their extent of worrying. The findings consistently showed that the students only sometimes experienced social and meta-worry and almost never indulged in health worry. Furthermore, the extent and content of worry were not specific to the sex, age, or marital status of the participants. On the whole, worrying was more of

In this paper, we argue that Vygotsky’s psychological research paradigm is a research epistemology,
methodology, and ontology of theory and practice that attempts to build a psychology grounded within the social-historical  and cultural setting in which he/she evolved. Vygotsky’s whole enterprise was to establish a concrete
human psychology committed to investigate how human nature changes, conceiving human development not
just as quantitative, cumulative and linear, but also as qualitative, transformative change. In this outlook,
contradiction leads to new contradictions, not necessarily “equilibrium”. The dialectical concepts of
contradiction, development and transformation were fundamental to Vygotsky’s psychology. Vygotsky never
had time, of course, to realize the desire expressed in his critique of the crisis of psychology that psychology
needs its own Das Kapital. This paper will outline the main features of Vygotsky’s dialectical approach to
understanding human higher mental functions.Two Vygotskian concepts are discussed in depth. The concept of development is conceived not only as quantitative, but also qualitative change, and the concept of contradiction
were viewed as the engine of both natural and historical change. Development and contradiction are pictured
together as organizing, creative forces that drive the higher mental functions and activities. By bringing
development and contradiction in conjunction with cultural historical theory and activity theory, we aim to offer
a picture of the Soviet psychologist's indebtedness to historical dialectical materialist philosophy.

Psychology by no means holds the “secret” of human affairs, simply because this “secret” is not of a
psychological order. Georges Politzer, 1929, p. 170.In the 1920s, a vision arose which was to captivate the
Soviet psychologists’ imagination for the next six decades: the vision of molding a new man for a new society as
rationally ordered as the Marxian view of society. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human,
social, and natural sciences, this vision perpetuated a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human
nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Indeed, the question of
molding a new human being was very soon to dominate the debates which took place in the early 1920s and
1930s. It was in the course of these debates that the foundations of the cultural-historical theory were laid in
psychology for carrying forward the vision of molding a new human being for a new society. This new society
will create a new human being, “In the future society, psychology will indeed be the science of the new man.
Without this perspective of Marxism and the history of science would not be complete. But this science of the
new man will still remain psychology. Among the prominent psychologists who seriously confronted that agenda
in his writings is Lev Vygotsky, he stated that “man … is social person - an aggregate of social relations,
embodied in an individual (psychological functions built according to social structure)" (1989, p. 66).
Vygotsky’s ideas are rooted in Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks. Marx put the Sixth Thesis on Feuerbach to the
test in his critique of Maine (Henry Sumner Maine, 1875). Marx's conception of the social individual as an
ensemble of social relations became the kernel of Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory. Vygotsky, like Marx,
moved away from the conception of the individual as a self-contained agency and grounded his theory on Marx's
conception of the social individual as an ensemble of social relations. Social individuals do not simply produce
the means and conditions of their own lives and live under these conditions but produce the conditions under
which they live. Vygotsky engaged in developing a theoretical framework to the two-sided reality of social
individuals as not merely subject to their life conditions but simultaneously creating them. The ethnological
notebooks were in circulation in Moscow as early as 1923. In sum, the Ethnological Notebooks is perhaps as
important for cultural-historical psychologists as the Method of political economy is for economists. It is
suggested that the Ethnological Notebooks should be reexamined for their implications for most present-day
debates on Vygotsky's cultural-historical psychology.

This paper examined the vocational interest of grades 9 and 12 students in the United Arab Emirates, using the Emirates Scale for Vocational Interest (ESVI), which is an Arabic version of the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (KOIS). After confirming the reliability of the ESVI, it was administered to a total sample consisted of 796 students, 428 of whom were from the ninth grade and 368 from the twelfth grade. The ninth grade sample consisted of 166 males and 262 females, whereas the twelfth grade sample consisted of 187 males and 262 females. The age of the participants ranged from 13 to 19 years of age. The results showed that, the participants had diverse vocational interests with greater preference for activities that see them in jobs typical of helping others, understanding nature and solving problems, being creative and productive, working with electronics, participating in outdoor work activities and promoting security and public order. The respondents least prefer doing activities that are characteristic of clerical, literary and persuasive jobs. There were significant differences in the preferred activities of the participants, according to grade level and sex relative to some subscales, which reflects a wider influence of potential factors in the environment in a society that is at the intersection of tradition and modernity. This paper contributes vital inputs to the very much needed knowledge base, required for career exploration and vocational guidance in the school setting.

This paper investigated the extent to which isolation, collective connectedness, and relational connectedness shaped the phenomenon of loneliness in the UAE using an Arabic version of the UCLA loneliness scale. The participants were drawn from six populations in the country comprising largely of UAE nationals. Research data was collected by means of a survey and was analyzed using the quantitative method. The findings revealed that the feeling of being isolated was rarely experienced by the participants although the feeling of being relationally and collectively connected was sometimes a part of their experience. The occasional restriction of the individual from being social gregariousness however, appear to be normative when seen against the social and cultural background. The UAE is at the intersection of tradition and modernity but being rooted in tradition serves as a cushion against the insecurity of loneliness as it situates the individual within a gamut of traditional social networks and support groups. The findings reinforce the view that loneliness is both a contradictory and fundamental phenomena of human existence. Even among the happiest people, they can sometimes feel lonely too.

This paper is a descriptive exploration of the prescriptive aspect of the learning style hypothesis which posits the need to understand the learning styles of students in order to match these with the appropriate approaches to learning. Accordingly, this paper investigated the learning styles of senior high school students using the Honey-Mumford Learning Style Questionnaire (LSQ). The findings showed that all of the different learning styles measured by the LSQ were preferred by students with greater preferences leaning towards the activist and pragmatist styles. This trend did not significantly differ according to the school, sex, or age of the respondent. Just knowing the preferred learning styles of the students would be of no value in itself unless seen in terms of its implication to teaching or instruction. In which case, this paper took the stance that learning is a process of knowledge co-construction. Knowledge co-construction can have the potential to impact student learning in real terms by way of epistemic games that offer the opportunity for students to leverage the advantage of their learning styles and experiences.

The interdisciplinary field of Leadership Studies has emerged in recent years at several well-known universities as a major or minor course of study at the Undergraduate level. The success of these multidisciplinary programs depends importantly on an ability to creatively think outside the box and challenge the classical – and still all too common – framing in our universities as institutions structured into independent disciplines. This paper describes one attempt at meeting this objective. It assesses the lessons learned over the past five years in the development and teaching of Leadership and Society at United Arab Emirates University. As a practical matter, it offers academic curriculum planners a model for a full multidisciplinary leadership bachelor program and describes some administrative and academic conditions and requirements essential to successfully implement a program in this exciting and critical new field.

The practice of combining both positively and negatively worded statements on a scale is one of the suggested means of reducing acquiescence bias. The literature, however showed mixed results with regard to the outcomes of this practice and called for further validation studies. Based on these premises, this study examined the item wording effect on the factor structure of the Arabic version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale. The participants included samples from six populations in the United Arab Emirates who were differentiated into groups according to sex, age, and marital status. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was used to determine the underlying structure of the scale and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was used to ascertain the validity of the outcomes. The internal reliability of the scale was confirmed in all the three groups of participants and the results showed that the scale reflected two main factors clearly divided by positively and negatively worded items. To avoid the effect of distorting the structure on account of item wording, it is incumbent on the designer of a scale to prudently determine the necessity of using negatively worded items in consideration of the context of the research and the evaluation setting.

This paper investigated the manner by which students of the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) coped with stress and determined the influence of demographic factors on the coping strategies used by students in an academic setting. The sample consisted of 197 undergraduate Emirati students from the university who were differentiated according to sex, age, year level, and marital status. The study used the Arabic version of the CISS that was formulated and validated by Hamid and Musa (2012) which is a semantic and contextualization adaptation of the CISS. Data gathering was done by means of the survey and the collected data was quantitatively analyzed. The results showed that the students depended on a repertoire of coping mechanisms which were either used frequently or sparingly regardless of sex, age, year level, or marital status. The findings depict a culturally endemic outlook of student coping in the context of the universal phenomenon of university education which makes it differ from the picture of coping among students in other cultural circumstances. On the basis of the extent to which coping strategies were used, the students of the UAEU can be better seen as contingent or repertorial copers.

This paper investigated the dynamics of test-taking, relative to the extent to which college students in the United Arab Emirates, employed test-taking strategies, before the test; in managing their time for the test; during the test; and after the test. This paper applied the test-taking strategy scale, developed by Dodeen (2008), who called for additional applications, to validate the scale using different samples, from different educational levels. All in all, a total of 549 students from different colleges in the United Arab Emirates University, participated in the survey. The findings showed that, the students employed a wide variety of test-taking strategies and responded to tests, either proactively or reactively, depending on the degree of preparation that they have. It was also evident that, the extent of use of test-taking strategies was crucial to the preparation and actual test action. On the whole, the dynamics of test-taking, among the students can be shaped by the confluence of a number of factors, but having greater control over circumstances generated by the inevitability of test-taking, can likely translate to better performance, when reinforced by proper skills in test taking.