Academic Performance of High School Students as a Function of Mental Capacity,Cognitive Style,Mobility‐Fixity Dimension,and Creativity

The purpose of this study is to explore how creativity and the cognitive variables (mental capacity, cognitive style & mobility‐fixity dimension) can explain academic performance of high school students. Students at a high school in Maturin (Venezuela) were tested to determine creativity (Torrance Tests), cognitive variables and academic performance. Results based on multiple regression analyses showed that the mobility‐fixity dimension was the most consistent predictor of academic performance, by explaining a significant amount of the variance in Spanish, English, Geography, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, Mathematics, Physics and the Mean score. Creativity scores explained a significant amount of the variance in Spanish, Geography, Earth Science and the Mean score. It appears that the mobility‐fixity dimension and creativity although related, perhaps represent different aspects of academic performance.     

Examining Satisfaction of Older Home Owners with Intergenerational Homesharing

We surveyed 252 homeowners in three midwestern cities about their satisfaction with intergenerational homesharing, using a 21-question survey with 5 satisfaction-with-life dimensions. The purpose of this study was to see if homeowners would report changes in these satisfaction dimensions as a result of taking part in homesharing. An additional purpose was to see if there were age differences, gender differences, and length-of-match differences in satisfaction. Across the five satisfaction dimensions of the survey, 94% of the responses indicated that older participants' lives had either stayed the same or improved due to involvement in intergenerational homesharing. Results suggest that younger homeowners (ages 50 to 69) reaped more financial benefits from homesharing, probably because the purpose of their homesharing match was for the collection of rent. Older homeowners (age 70 and older), who are more likely to be looking for companionship and assistance, reported significantly greater satisfaction than younger homeowners in the dimensions of health, well-being and social activities. Males reported being significantly better off than females in the areas of well-being and health. No differences based on length of homesharing match were found. These data are generally consistent with previous survey work conducted on intergenerational homesharing, suggesting that homesharing is a viable housing option for older homeowners. Given that verbal reports may not be consistent with behavior, the collection of direct observation outcome data on homesharing is recommended for future research on homesharing.     

“A GREATEST MIRACLE”: STANLEY CAVELL,MORAL PERFECTIONISM,AND THE ASCENT INTO THE ORDINARY

What to make of “the ordinary,”“the everyday,” and their common “eventfulness”? What to think of what Veena Das, in her recent book Life and Words, prefaced by Stanley Cavell, has called our need to “descent into the ordinary”? Is there a parallel figure of “ascent,” again, into the same “ordinary,” that we might we want to juxtapose with it and that resembles the motif of “change,” even “conversion,” that Cavell analyzes at some length in The Claim of Reason and throughout his oeuvre as a whole? And what could be our reasons for doing so? This essay will draw on Cavell's reading of Ibsen's work in the volume Cities of Words to spell out what such an “ascent” might mean.     

Intellective and Non-Intellective Factors in a Classroom Test

Twenty-four Japanese to 24- 26-month-old children, having seldom been baby-sat, were observed in the revised Ainsworth's strange situation procedure. Observed were eight kinds of attachment behavior to mother and a female stranger. Children showed attachment behaviors to the stranger: in episode 3 (both mother and the stranger were present), all of them looked at the stranger, one-fourth of them approached and showed toys to her, and in episode 4 (only the stranger was present), about two-thirds of the Ss looked at her, one-half of them showed toys, and one-third of them approached her. However, there were qualitative differences between attachment behaviors to the stranger and those to mother: in episode 3, more children exhibited speaking, approaching, and showing, and in episodes 2 and 4 (only one of them was present), speaking, looking, showing, and approaching, to mother than to the stranger.     

Changes in Family Structure After a Renal Transplant

Two girls (9 and 10 years old) and one male adolescent (19 years old) with chronic renal failure (CRF) were studied along with their families in order to evaluate their family structure before (4–5 weeks) and after (3–5 weeks) a renal transplant from a live donor. After the renal transplant there was a close association between the donor and the recipient that led to the creation of an alliance or the reinforcement of an alliance already present before the transplant. This may favor a family disruption or a better family equilibrium depending upon whether the donor ranked highest in the family hierarchy and was already in a rigid alliance with the patient before the transplant. It is suggested that the study and diagnosis of the family structure before the renal transplant may help to: (a) select the most suitable donor candidate from a biological as well as psychological point of view so as to allow a better possibility of success in the structural functioning of the family after the transplant; (b) predict changes that will appear within the family after the transplant, which in turn may alert the personnel to detect changes in the family structure as early as possible; and (c) offer more rapid therapeutic assistance to bring the family back to a functional level within its social framework.     

Participatory management: Maintaining staff performance in a university housing cooperative

To apply behavior analysis to normal adults in non institutional settings, we may have to encourage their participation in the design and implementation of behavioral technology. This study evaluates a technology by which the members of a student housing cooperative manage their own staff with a minimum of supervision by one of the program designers. This staff management system consisted of prompts, self-reports, spot checks, and contingent rent reductions. Six resident staff members performed substantially more of their assigned tasks when this system was used. In addition, the management system was acceptable to the members, was affordable, and maintained high levels of staff performance during a 5-year follow-up. Participation by the members in the design and implementation of this system appears to have been useful in helping the behavior analysts to develop an unusually durable management system.     

Early trauma and narcissism—autism bipolarity1

The analyst makes a series of considerations taken a posteriori from the analysis of a small number of patients. These patients have saved themselves from an early narcissistic catastrophe by developing precocious mental processes, while affective relationships rudimentarily repeat the impact with the original trauma. Primitive defences, essentially denial and vertical splitting, dissociate the tear in the psyche and structure a narcissism–autism bipolarity, revealed in aspects of the character which oblige the patient to automatically repeat a single matrix of experience. In therapy, it is necessary to construct a rst time of the trauma, by pending and linking threads of the primary relationship and strengthening them in the analytic relationship. This reconstruction of the background, a screen to project what had originally been rejected, is the prerequisite for coming out, in deferred action, from the hold of the pathological identifications. The author dedicates particular attention to the undifferentiated background, the nature‐environment torn by the trauma, and to the need to reconstruct this fabric of experience in the analytical relationship, as a fundamental element to the recomposition of the dissociated nuclei. In the clinical case, the analyst describes in particular how the analyst's words encounter an unbridgeable gap, a failure in the capacity for representation when opening the autistic nucleus. Through a regression lasting for about a year, a patient was able to live the experience of primitive agonies and that of an unbearable helplessness and, at the same time, was able to feel how the analyst supported her sense of existence. Subsequently, the patient was able to give shape, through visual images, to deep states of being and start the process of metabolising and symbolising the trauma.