Dropping-in: the unexamined encounter

The paper seeks to initiate some discussion and debate on the widespread practice within Further Education and Higher Education counselling services of offering brief initial meetings to students during a 'walk in' hour. As counselling services with limited resources struggle to meet the challenge of increasing numbers and increasing severity of disturbance among the student population, this paper puts forward the view that nevertheless, cutting down on a full assessment session may not be the best response. While the author is aware of the considerable thought and ingenuity applied to this area by HE and FE colleagues, and the wide variety of practice which is emerging, the purpose of this paper is to focus specifically on the practice of the 'drop-in'. This term refers to an initial meeting which runs from anything between 5 minutes and half an hour, does not require a prior appointment and is differentiated in this paper from other responses such as emergency slots, duty hours or full initial assessment interviews. A further paper, in collaboration with colleagues from a number of different institutions, will aim to research the impact of a range of pre-assessment interventions on clients, counsellors, the counselling service and the institution. In the light of the generally brief counselling offered within the HE and FE setting, the generally late adolescent client group and the growing concern about student mental health, some clinical and service issues are explored. The paper then discusses the impact of the drop-in at the level of the institution, arguing that it has a powerful symbolic function, albeit in fantasy, of offering staff a quick solution to difficult-to-manage anxiety and distress. Going further, the suggestion is made that the arrival of the drop-in can be seen as part of a much wider unconscious attack on thinking that is taking place within educational institutions generally, where a place for the kind of thought and reflection offered by psychological therapies is being relentlessly squeezed out. A much fuller debate on the largely unexamined practice of the drop-in is called for.     

Schema Theory: A Critical Appraisal and Reevaluation

The authors replicated and extended results from the gunfight paradigm (A. Welchman, J. Stanley, M. Schomers, R. Miall, & H. Bulthoff, 2010a) in which participants moved faster when reacting to the perceived initiation of an opponent compared to initiating an action themselves. In addition to replicating these movement time effects, the authors found that time to peak velocity, peak velocity, and movement-endpoint dispersions were similarly impacted. The findings are discussed in terms of a triggering mechanism involved in ballistic and internally generated movements.     

The ironic impact of activists: Negative stereotypes reduce social change influence

Despite recognizing the need for social change in areas such as social equality and environmental protection, individuals often avoid supporting such change. Researchers have previously attempted to understand this resistance to social change by examining individuals' perceptions of social issues and social change. We instead examined the possibility that individuals resist social change because they have negative stereotypes of activists, the agents of social change. Participants had negative stereotypes of activists (feminists and environmentalists), regardless of the domain of activism, viewing them as eccentric and militant. Furthermore, these stereotypes reduced participants' willingness to affiliate with ‘typical’ activists and, ultimately, to adopt the behaviours that these activists promoted. These results indicate that stereotypes and person perception processes more generally play a key role in creating resistance to social change. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Limitations for Change Detection in Multiple Gabor Targets

We investigate the limitations on the ability to detect when a target has changed, using Gabor targets as simple quantifiable stimuli. Using a partial report technique to equalize response variables, we show that the log of the Weber fraction for detecting a spatial frequency change is proportional to the log of the number of targets, with a set-size effect that is greater than that reported for visual search. This is not a simple perceptual limitation, because pre-cueing a single target out of four restores performance to the level found when only one target is present. It is argued that the primary limitation on performance is the division of attention across multiple targets, rather than decay within visual memory. However in a simplified change detection experiment without cueing, where only one target of the set changed, not only was the set-size effect still larger, but it was greater at 2000 msec ISI than at 250 msec ISI, indicating a possible memory component. The steepness of the set-size effects obtained suggests that even moderate complexity of a stimulus in terms of number of component objects can overload attentional processes, suggesting a possible low-level mechanism for change blindness.     

Valence and vertical space: Saccade trajectory deviations reveal metaphorical spatial activation

Concepts of positive and negative valence are metaphorically structured in space (e.g., happy is up, sad is down). In fact, coupling a conceptual task (e.g., evaluating words as positive or negative) with a visuospatial task (e.g., identifying stimuli above or below fixation) often gives rise to metaphorical congruency effects. For instance, after reading a positive concept, visual target processing is facilitated above fixation. However, it is possible that tasks requiring upwards and downwards attentional orienting artificially strengthen the link between vertical space and semantic valence. For this reason, in the present study the vertical axis was uncoupled from the response axis. Participants made eye movements along the horizontal axis after reading positive or negative affect words, while their saccade movement trajectories were recorded. Based on previous research on saccade trajectory deviation, we predicted that fast saccade trajectories curve towards the salient segment of space, whereas slow saccade trajectories would curve away from the salient segment. Examining saccadic trajectories revealed a pattern of deviations along the vertical axis consistent with the metaphorical congruency account, although this pattern was mainly driven by positive concepts. These results suggest that semantic processing of valence can automatically recruit spatial features along the vertical axis.     

Learning procedures and goal specificity in learning and problem-solving tasks

This experiment set out to examine the influence of two task variables (instructional procedure and goal specificity) on learning and problem-solving performance. A 2 × 2 between-subjects design was used. Twenty-four undergraduate students were asked to think aloud as they learned eight Word for Windows text editing operations, each implemented as a keyboard shortcut. Two instructional procedures were used, instructions presented either as lists or as paired statements. ''List'' groups required fewer trials than ''pairs'' groups to learn the operations, and relied more extensively upon rehearsal procedures, while ''pairs'' groups tended to use elaborative inference more frequently. Analyses of problem-solving solution times revealed no differences between the groups, although the no-goal groups tended to complete the tasks faster than the goal groups. Verbal protocols indicated that ''list'' groups tended to rely upon phonological cues to recover operation names, and made more phonological errors in recovering operation names. ''Pairs'' groups recalled more about the functions of the operations than the ''list'' groups. We conclude that different instructional procedures may lead to subtle, but important, differences in how information is encoded, represented, and recovered, and that individuals who perform to similar standards may not share the same understanding of the task in question.     

Is laughter the best medicine?

Abstract

One hundred patients with chronic arthritis were interviewed and completed questionnaires about coping, well-being and their use of humour. A comparison of patients scoring high or low on each of 3 measures of humour showed that those who reported they used humour least, had most difficulty recognising it and valued it least. They also reported more depressive symptoms and lower personal self-esteem. Regressions showed that depression was best predicted by the inactive use of humour in coping. and to a lesser extent, pain intensity. Cluster analysis of data on general coping strategies showed that valuing humour distinguished two-thirds of patients who were relatively normal and cautiously optimistic, from the other third, where the outlook was negative and hopeless. Those with a more positive view tended to be younger, less disabled, in less pain and with several social advantages on a number of indicators. However they also had a longer duration of disease. Two-thirds of patients said they were able to laugh when in pain but those most able to do this had less intense pain during the previous week. Furthermore the most disabled arthritis patients found laughter to be a most effective strategy. The research has implications for preventing depression and coping with disability.     

Perceived Emotional Intelligence,Stress Reactivity,and Symptom Reports: Further Explorations Using the Trait Meta-Mood Scale

We examined the relationship between perceived emotional intelligence (PEI), measured by the Trait Meta-Mood Scale (TMMS), and psychophysiological measures of adaptive coping. The TMMS assesses perceived ability to (a) attend to moods (Attention), (b) discriminate clearly among moods (Clarity), and (c) regulate moods (Repair). Study 1 showed significant positive associations between PEI and psychological and interpersonal functioning. In Study 2, skill at mood Repair was associated with less passive coping and perceptions of repeated laboratory stressors as less threatening; Clarity was related to greater increases in negative mood, but lower cortisol release during repeated stress. In Study 3, Repair was associated with active coping and lower levels of rumination; Attention was associated with lowered cortisol and blood pressure responses to acute laboratory challenges. These findings suggest that psychophysiological responses to stress may be one potential mechanism underlying the relationship between emotional functioning and health.     

A critical evaluation of the use of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) in health psychology

With the burgeoning use of qualitative methods in health research, criteria for judging their value become increasingly necessary. Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is a distinctive approach to conducting qualitative research being used with increasing frequency in published studies. A systematic literature review was undertaken to identify published papers in the area of health psychology employing IPA. A total of 52 articles are reviewed here in terms of the following: methods of data collection, sampling, assessing wider applicability of research and adherence to the theoretical foundations and procedures of IPA. IPA seems applicable and useful in a wide variety of research topics. The lack of attention sometimes afforded to the interpretative facet of the approach is discussed.