Working With Immigrant Students in Schools: The Role of School Counselors in Building Cross‐Cultural Bridges

School counselors are poised to play a significant role within comprehensive school counseling programs in addressing the needs of immigrant children in schools. The authors describe how school counselors can have a positive impact on the adjustment of immigrant students by building cross‐cultural bridges through the use of cross‐cultural simulations and activities. Los consejeros escolares se encuentran en una buena posición para jugar un papel significativo dentro de los programas exhaustivos de consejería escolar que tratan las necesidades de los niños inmigrantes en las escuelas. Los autores describen cómo los consejeros escolares pueden tener un impacto positivo en la adaptación de los alumnos inmigrantes por medio de la construcción de puentes interculturales a través del uso de simulaciones y actividades interculturales.     

Traces of the Person: Max Scheler’s and Paul Ricoeur’s Attempts on Personal Ethics

To encounter a fellow-being does not mean only to see her face, to notice the color of her eyes, but to meet her eyes and to be addressed by her. Who one is irreducible to any objective property or value, and likewise cannot be comprehended through propositional statements in the manner of “talking about …” something. Rather, such comprehension demands an account of giving way to the appearance of the other as other. This account, prominently linked to E. Levinas’ “ethics as first philosophy,” has also been developed as phenomenological personalism. While Max Scheler developed his “Ethical Personalism” within his material Value Ethics, his Philosophy of Fellow-Feeling and in his late Philosophical Anthropology of human spirit, Paul Ricoeur develops his personalism through different approaches: from his early attempts on need and desire as the affective basis of our values to the perspective on the particular way we lead our lives in narratively constituting our personal identity, and finally to his concept of recognition. Reconstructing personalism as a philosophy of discovering the other person in her otherness and as a concept of social practice are the aims of this paper.     

Some contributions of a psychological approach to the study of the sacred

ABSTRACT

This paper examines some of the contributions psychology is making to the study of the sacred and its role in human functioning. The focus here is not on the ontological reality of the sacred, but rather perceptions of the sacred. We suggest that psychological theory and research on this topic offers: a clarification of the meaning of the sacred; new knowledge about sanctification – the process through which people come to perceive the sacred in daily life; a response to criticisms about the scientific study of the sacred; a sharper perspective on the meanings of religion and spirituality; a method for measuring sanctification; knowledge about the ways perceptions of the sacred predict important aspects of human behavior, and; an understanding of the sacred as a product of psychological, social, institutional, cultural, and situational forces. We conclude that the sacred represents a vital phenomenon of interest for religious and spiritual study.     

Early social attention impairments in autism: social orienting, joint attention, and attention to distress

This study investigated social attention impairments in autism (social orienting, joint attention, and attention to another's distress) and their relations to language ability. Three- to four-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 72), 3- to 4-year-old developmentally delayed children (n = 34), and 12- to 46-month-old typically developing children (n = 39), matched on mental age, were compared on measures of social orienting, joint attention, and attention to another's distress. Children with autism performed significantly worse than the comparison groups in all of these domains. Combined impairments in joint attention and social orienting were found to best distinguish young children with ASD from those without ASD. Structural equation modeling indicated that joint attention was the best predictor of concurrent language ability. Social orienting and attention to distress were indirectly related to language through their relations with joint attention. These results help to clarify the nature of social attention impairments in autism, offer clues to developmental mechanisms, and suggest targets for early intervention.     

Is word perception in a second language more vulnerable than in one's native language? Evidence from brain potentials in a dual task setting

We assessed the effect of additional tasks on language perception in second-language and native speakers. The N400 component of the event-related potential was recorded to spoken nouns that had to be judged for synonymity with a preceding word, while additional choice responses were required to visual stimuli. In both participant groups N400 was delayed as a function of temporal overlap with the additional task. In second-language speakers there was a global delay of N400 independent of additional task load and a decrease of accuracy at highest overlap. These findings are interpreted within a single channel account of language perception.     

Visual search in typically developing toddlers and toddlers with Fragile X or Williams syndrome

Visual selective attention is the ability to attend to relevant visual information and ignore irrelevant stimuli. Little is known about its typical and atypical development in early childhood Experiment 1 investigates typically developing toddlers' visual search for multiple targets on a touch-screen. Time to hit a target, distance between successively touched items, accuracy and error types revealed changes in 2- and 3-year-olds' vulnerability to manipulations of the search display. Experiment 2 examined search performance by toddlers with Fragile X syndrome (FXS) or Williams syndrome (WS). Both of these groups produced equivalent mean time and distance per touch as typically developing toddlers matched by chronological or mental age; but both produced a larger number of errors. Toddlers with WS confused distractors with targets more than the other groups; while toddlers with FXS perseverated on previously found targets. These findings provide information on how visual search typically develops in toddlers, and reveal distinct search deficits for atypically developing toddlers.     

Effects of trainer reputation and trainees' need for cognition on training outcomes

The authors examined the effects of trainer reputation and trainees' need for cognition on training outcomes. Participants (N = 75) read a sheet describing a trainer as either effective or ineffective or they were given no information. Participants then viewed a videotaped lecture, evaluated the lecture, and completed a self-efficacy scale and knowledge test. The authors did not find an interaction of trainer reputation and need for cognition on clarity ratings. Participants with low need for cognition were influenced by the trainer reputation, whereas participants with high need for cognition were not. Self-efficacy mediated the relationship between the interaction of trainer reputation and need for cognition on declarative knowledge.     

What makes counting count? Verbal and visuo-spatial contributions to typical and atypical number development

Williams Syndrome (WS) is marked by a relative strength in verbal cognition coupled with a serious impairment in non-verbal cognition. A strong deficit in numerical cognition has been anecdotally reported in this disorder; however, its nature has not been systematically investigated. Here, we tested 14 children with WS (mean age=7 years 2 months), 14 typically developing controls individually matched on visuo-spatial ability (mean age=3 years 5 months) as well as a larger group of typically developing controls (mean age=3 years 4 months) on two tasks to assess their understanding that counting determines the exact quantity of sets (cardinality principle). The understanding of the cardinality principle in children with WS is extremely delayed and only at the level predicted by their visuo-spatial MA. In this clinical group, only language accounted for a significant amount of the variance in cardinality understanding, whereas in the normal comparison group only visuo-spatial competence predicted the variance. The present findings suggest that visuo-spatial ability plays a greater role than language ability in the actual development of cardinality understanding in typically developing children, whereas the opposite obtains for the clinical group.