Resisting self-compassion: Why are some people opposed to being kind to themselves?

Although self-compassion is associated with positive emotions, resilience, and well-being, some people resist recommendations to treat themselves with kindness and compassion. This study investigated how people’s personal values and evaluations of self-compassionate behaviors relate to their level of self-compassion. After completing measures of trait self-compassion and values, participants rated how they would view themselves after behaving in a self-compassionate and self-critical way. Overall, participants associated self-compassion with positive attributes that connote emotional well-being, yet only those who were low in trait self-compassion associated self-compassionate responding with negative attributes that involve low motivation, self-indulgence, low conscientiousness, and poor performance. Participants’ endorsement of basic values was not meaningfully related to their evaluations of self-compassionate vs. self-critical behaviors or to self-compassion scores. We propose that self-compassion might operate as an instrumental value insofar as those high vs. low in self-compassion differ in their beliefs about whether self-compassion affects performance-related outcomes positively or negatively.     

In Search of the ‘Angels of Death’: Conceptualising the Contemporary Nurse Healthcare Serial Killer

Focusing specifically upon nurses who commit serial murder within a hospital setting, this paper aims to establish insights into this particular subcategory of healthcare serial killer. In addition, the paper aims to test the usefulness of an existing checklist of behaviours among this group of serial murderers. Drawing upon existing lists of healthcare serial killers produced by other scholars as well as legal records and an online news archive, we identified and researched healthcare serial killer nurses, collating socio demographic and criminological data and applying the aforementioned checklist to each case. Our findings suggest that to date, the label ‘healthcare serial killer’ has been applied in too loose a manner, making the understanding of this phenomenon problematic. In further refining the definition and identifying the socio‐demographic and criminological characteristics of the victims, perpetrators and crimes, we have developed more specific and therefore useful insights for practitioners and identified a potentially useful checklist which, with revisions, could contribute towards preventative strategies and interventions. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Quality of Life from an Evolutionary Perspective

Quality of Life (QoL) is a multi-dimensional concept that includes: a) the long-term sustainability of the earth; b) good health, education, welfare; and c) the psychological state of wellbeing. This article, which introduces a special issue on QoL from an evolutionary perspective, shows how modern evolutionary science provides a “toolkit” for studying all aspects of QoL.     

Examining the role of working memory resources in following spoken instructions

This study investigated the involvement of working memory (WM) in following spoken instructions using concurrent tasks designed to disrupt components of the Baddeley and Hitch WM model [Baddeley, A. D., & Hitch, G. J. (1974). Working memory. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 8, pp. 47–89). New York, NY: Academic Press]. In each of three experiments, participants were presented with sequences of instructions to be either verbally repeated or physically performed using relevant objects. Backward counting, articulatory suppression, and eye closure during instruction encoding all disrupted recall, and also impaired recall of the linkage between movements and objects. Recall of actions was more accurate when they were physically enacted than repeated verbally, an advantage that was not affected by concurrent tasks. These findings indicate that aspects of the recall of spoken instructions including the binding of constituent movements to objects draw on multiple WM resources. The benefits of physical enactment of the instructed sequence do not appear to depend on the components of WM investigated in these studies.     

Teachers’ awareness in identifying microaggressive behaviors within the K-12 classroom

In the field of education, teachers are sentries for maintaining proper decorum, upholding school policies, and maintaining a social justice classroom, free of adversarial behaviors. While the premise of proper social and academic student engagement is expected, teachers are not always aware of or able to respond to inappropriate social interactions. This qualitative study using a narrative inquiry approach investigates and portrays the levels of awareness and decision-making processes teachers possess when addressing microaggression and microaggressive behaviors. Five public school teachers from varying grade levels in a culturally diverse school district participated in semi-structured, in-depth interviews for this study. Emergent themes included: (a) awareness and recognition of microaggression as related to bullying, (b) microaggression as denigrating behavior directed toward others, and (c) microaggression with the school discipline framework. Findings suggest that teachers often lack awareness of microaggression as a concept distinct from bullying. But when the distinction is evident, teachers understand how microaggression can be a precursor to bullying which, if proactively addressed within the school discipline framework, may result in preventing bullying incidents before they start. Teachers were interested in receiving targeted professional development and adjusting school discipline policy to consider microaggression a unique concept. Guidance is offered to support educators, schools, and districts as clear guidelines and policies are established pertaining to identifying and addressing microaggression within the school community, thereby ensuring social and behavioral awareness.

     

How Female Disclosure Recipients React to Women Survivors: The Impact of Rape Acknowledgment and Rejection of Rape Myths

Sex Roles - Because female rape survivors who are listened to and believed have been found to have fewer difficulties, it is essential that researchers examine factors that influence the social...     

School Connectedness and STEM Orientation in Adolescent Girls: The Role of Perceived Gender Discrimination and Implicit Gender-Science Stereotypes

Sex Roles - Girls and women continue to be underrepresented in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), and this underrepresentation has been partly attributed to gendered...