Validating a “spurning scale” for nurses in Hong Kong

Based on a model on spumed helpers’ reactions, a spurning scale for nurses was constructed with items to assess the extent to which practicing nurses experience recurrent rejection of their help by patients and colleagues. Three approaches were employed to examine the validity of the scale: the relationship of the spurning scores with job satisfaction and turnover scores; the relationships of the spurning scores with burnout scores; and the relationships of the spurning scores with scores indicative of stress arising from interactions with one's patients, colleagues, and supervisor. Practicing nurses in Hong Kong (N = 212) who were enrolled in a refresher program of studies responded to a questionnaire containing the variables of interest. The results offered promising evidence for the validity of the scale.     

An “issue-focused” model for mental health consultation with groups of teachers

This paper presents and evaluates a model for group mental health consultation with teachers in which sessions are organized around mental health issues rather than cases. The rationale and advantages of the model are explicated and compared with other models of group consultation and group work with teachers. The model incorporates a heavy emphasis on educational preventive measures and is designed to simultaneously satisfy a wide range of consultee needs and to reduce anxiety and defensiveness. Consultant's preparations for the group sessions are highlighted so as to maximize their contribution to the participants' level of involvement, knowledge, skills, confidence, and objectivity. The different roles of the consultant during the session and the variety of techniques employed are described as they relate to group processes and consultation needs. Specific guidelines for the organization of consultation groups and training of group consultants are offered. Evaluation data based on feedback from participants in ten groups are included.     

A “new rhetoric” for a “new dialectic”: Prolegomena to a responsible public argument

This essay offers, as a counterpart to pragma-dialectical argument, a “new rhetoric” produced in the situated discourse of a public forum when a community addresses matters of common urgency and undertakes informed action. Such a rhetoric takes the principles of discourse ethics as its informing dialectic by identifying an interlocutor as one who is obligatedboth to argue effectively,and also to hold open, even reinforce, norms of communicative reason. Implications concerning the study of fallacies and theethos obligations of communicative reasoning are discussed.     

“Running on fumes”: emotional exhaustion and burnout of teachers following a natural disaster

This study reports on the emotional exhaustion and burnout of five teachers who acted as first responders when a large earthquake struck their city during school hours. Eighteen months after the earthquake, these teachers recounted, then discussed their earthquake experiences. Teachers used a mood meter (Brackett and Kremenitzer, Creating emotionally literate classrooms: an introduction to the RULER approach to social and emotional learning, Dude Publishing, New York, 2011) to indicate their core affect for three situations; in the early aftermath of the earthquake (recollected); at the time of the interview, and in their present teaching. They also completed a series of questionnaires, including the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (Watson et al. in J Pers Soc Psychol 54(6):1063–1070, 1988), and the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, Adapted for Teachers (Milfont et al. in Soc Indic Res 89(1):169–177, 2008.  https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-007-9229-9). The mood meter was a valuable tool for tracking the core affect of a group of teachers as a whole, over time and in different contexts. Generally, teachers showed improved core affect over time. However, the mood meter also revealed individual variations and differences in core affect over time and in different contexts. The findings revealed the individual nature of teachers’ current emotional exhaustion and burnout in response to the unique antecedents that each teacher experienced during this period. With a new and innovative use of the mood meter as part of the interview process, it has revealed insightful qualitative data for understanding and making sense of the teachers’ emotional responses and ways to interpret these. Overall, this study confirms the importance and value of within-teacher experiential research examining the experiences, emotional exhaustion and burnout of individual teachers.     

An “open-transformed scale” for correcting ceiling effects and enhancing retest reliability: The example of pain

The use of closed scales (with anchors at each end) to measure pain was found to produce ceiling effects characterized by a deceleration of ratings toward the upper end of the scale. This was consistent with previous research. Apart from producing nonlinear functions, the closed scale also limited test-retest reliability because of subjects’ tendencies to correct their distorted ratings in subsequent trials. However, an open-ended scale coupled with transformation of reported ratings into a decile scale virtually eliminated the ceiling effect, thus producing consistently linear functions and maximizing test-retest reliability. This finding may have implications for the measurement of other sensory and psychological phenomena, especially those in which the property evaluated varies in a continuous fashion.     

Moral Understandings: Alternative “Epistemology” for a Feminist Ethics

Work on representing women's voices in ethics has produced a vision of moral understanding profoundly subversive of the traditional philosophical conception of moral knowledge. 1 explicate this alternative moral “epistemology,” identify how it challenges the prevailing view, and indicate some of its resources for a liberatory feminist critique of philosophical ethics.     

Spatial cuing in a stereoscopic display: Evidence for a “depth-blind” attentional spotlight

This experiment explored whether attentional selection observed in a spatial cuing task is based on a representation that includes depth information or not. Targets were presented inside placeholders appearing at the samex,y location on a stereoscopic display, but on different depth planes, or at differentx,y locations on the same depth plane. A peripheral precue produced significant cuing effects in the latter but not in the former condition. In a control experiment, significant cuing effects were found for targets appearing at differentx,y coordinates within the fovea, confirming that the lack of cuing effects in the depth condition was not due to foveal presentation. Together, the results suggest that spatial selection in spatial cuing tasks operates on a representation that does not include depth information.     

Spatial cuing in a stereoscopic display: Evidence for a “depth-aware” attentional focus

Two experiments were conducted to explore whether attentional selection occurs in depth, or whether attentional focus is “depth blind,” as suggested by Ghiradelli and Folk (1996). In Experiment 1, observers viewed stereoscopic displays in which one of four spatial locations was cued. Two of the locations were at a near-depth location and two were at a far-depth location, and a single target was presented along with three distractors. The results indicated a larger cost in reaction time for switching attention inx,y and depth than inx,y alone, supporting a “depth-aware” attentional spotlight. In Experiment 2, no distractors were present, similar to the displays used by Ghiradelli and Folk. In this experiment, no effect for switching attention in depth was found, indicating that the selectivity of attention in depth depends on the perceptual load imposed on observers by the tasks and displays.     

“American” as a Proxy for “Whiteness”: Racial Color-Blindness in Everyday Life

This article discusses racial color-blindness as it relates to a modern strategy used by both Whites and People of Color (POC) to mask their discussions of race and privilege. People who endorse racial color-blindness tend to believe that race should not matter and currently does not matter in understanding individuals’ lived experiences. Therefore, racially color-blind individuals use strategies to justify their racial privilege and racist beliefs and attitudes. One such strategy is to use the term “American” as a proxy for “White” in describing instances of White privilege as norms and to hide discussions of race more generally. Study 1 findings show that there are many different socially constructed definitions for the term American. Study 2 findings reveal differences in definitions for American depending on an individual’s race and generational status.     

Cochrane Review as a “Warranting Device” for Reasoning About Health

Contemporary reasoning about health is infused with the work products of experts, and expert reasoning about health itself is an active site for invention and design. Building on Toulmin’s largely undeveloped ideas on field-dependence, we argue that expert fields can develop new inference rules that, together with the backing they require, become accepted ways of drawing and defending conclusions. The new inference rules themselves function as warrants, and we introduce the term “warranting device” to refer to an assembly of the rule plus whatever material, procedural, and institutional resources are required to assure its dependability. We present a case study on the Cochrane Review, a new method for synthesizing evidence across large numbers of scientific studies. After reviewing the evolution and current structure of the device, we discuss the distinctive kinds of critical questions that may be raised around Cochrane Reviews, both within the expert field and beyond. Although Toulmin’s theory of field-dependence is often criticized for its relativism, we find that, as a matter of practical fact, field-specific warrants do not enjoy immunity from external critique. On the contrary, they can be opened to evaluation and critique from any interested perspective.     

The “Extended Mind” Approach for a New Paradigm of Psychology

In this paper, I would like to propose the idea of “extended mind” for a new paradigm of psychology. Kohler (Integrative Psychology & Behavioral Science 44:39–57, 2010) correctly pointed out the serious problems of the machine paradigm, and proposed the “organic” view as a new paradigm. But the term “organic” signifying the processes inside the body, is inadequate to express the characteristic of human mind. The recent philosophy of mind suggests that the mind is realized neither only in the brain nor only in the body, but in the whole system of brain-body-environment, namely, in the “extended mind”. The characteristic of human mind resides in the interaction with the mediating tools, artifacts, and the humanized environment. We should propose an “extended mind approach” or an “ecological approach to humanized environment” as a new paradigm for a psychology.     

Anger as “seeing red”: Evidence for a perceptual association

Metaphor representation theory contends that people conceptualise their non-perceptual states (e.g., emotion concepts) in perceptual terms. The present research extends this theory to colour manipulations and discrete emotional representations. Two experiments (N=265) examined whether a red font colour would facilitate anger conceptions, consistent with metaphors referring to anger to “seeing red”. Evidence for an implicit anger-red association was robust and emotionally discrete in nature. Further, Experiment 2 examined the directionality of such associations and found that they were asymmetrical: Anger categorisations were faster when a red font colour was involved, but redness categorisations were not faster when an anger-related word was involved. Implications for multiple literatures are discussed.     

On a class of “impossible” figures: A new language for a new analysis

Multibar figures provide a class of illusions that have been used by psychologists as well as by artists like Escher. For scientific purposes one needs as precise a definition and analysis as possible for these figures. A first attempt at this has been made by Cowan (1974) with the theory of braids. The present work points out some semantic and technical problems not dealt with by Cowan, and proposes a new language for the study of multibar figures. This language is shown to be incomplete, and some further problems are reviewed.