Sensory Awareness Mindfulness Training in Coaching: Accepting Life’s Challenges

Sensory Awareness Mindfulness Training is a new set of skills to help clients approach a better life/work equilibrium by balancing cognitive and emotional brain activities. This is achieved through regular connection with one’s senses and focusing non-judgementally on the ‘here and now’ experience of life. The exercises are neither difficult to teach nor to learn; it is, however, necessary for the practitioner and student to enter into a regular routine of implementation for change to occur. Mindfulness is, in a nutshell, a way of being, a new life-style. Research shows that mindfulness interventions have resulted in significant improvements in a range of conditions such as anxiety, depression, stress disorders, chronic pain, psoriasis and relapse prevention, to mention but a few. This article gives a brief overview of using mindfulness interventions in the arena of coaching. It also focuses and describes one small pilot project where Sensory Awareness Mindfulness Training is applied and evaluated.

ALTERING THE MAGNITUDE OF DELAY DISCOUNTING BY PATHOLOGICAL GAMBLERS

The present study explored the delay discounting of future and past monetary rewards by pathological gamblers. Using a multiple baseline design, following repeated exposure to choices between smaller immediate and larger delayed consequences, participants completed a relational responding task that attempted to alter the psychological functions of irrelevant stimuli and to affect subsequent delay discounting. Results support previous literature on the discounting of delayed consequences by pathological gamblers, illustrate that the discounting of past rewards occurs in a similar fashion to the well‐documented literature on the discounting of future rewards, and that magnitude of discounting can be altered.     

Executive career management: Switching organizations and the boundaryless career

There has been little research examining executives who change jobs by specifically following these individuals both before and after their employer changes. By incorporating research on the boundaryless career [Arthur, M. B., & Rousseau, D. M. (Eds.). (1996). The boundaryless career: A new employment principle for a new organizational era. New York: Oxford University Press; Sullivan, S. E., & Arthur, M. B. (2006). The evolution of the boundaryless career concept: Examining physical and psychological mobility. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 69, 19-29] and applying Frank’s theory of relative standing (1985), this study examined factors that may cause executives to change jobs in the context of managing their careers. Our findings revealed that factors, such as age and compensation, were related to the likelihood of job movements as well as declining organizational health. Post-hoc analyses also indicated that executive job-changers received significantly greater increases in total compensation and were more likely to receive increases in organizational status.     

Linking obsessional beliefs to OCD symptoms in older and younger adults

There are many open questions about the phenomenology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in the elderly, and theories about the development of OCD have rarely been applied to older populations. The current study uses structural equation models to evaluate the relationship between obsessional beliefs and OCD symptoms across young and older adult age groups in a large community sample (aged 18-93; N=335), and to examine whether subjective concerns about cognitive decline partially mediate this relationship. Results support partial mediation, and follow-up analyses suggest that the pattern of relationships among subjective cognitive concerns, obsessional beliefs and OCD symptoms is invariant for younger and older adults, but older adults report relatively greater levels of subjective cognitive concerns.     

Efficacious Surroundings: Temple Space and Buddhist Well-being

This essay argues that the prospect of health and well-being from a Buddhist perspective must take into account an understanding of religiosity as a process of becoming, a culturally and contextually defined praxis of what and who it is we are and would like to become. It is in this process of becoming that a space of healing is made possible. It is not simply that Buddhist temple space is ‘good’ in some sort of clinical manner, but rather that it is active in its will to achieve a space of becoming healthy and whole.

Real-time comprehension of wh- movement in aphasia: evidence from eyetracking while listening

Sentences with non-canonical wh- movement are often difficult for individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia to understand (, inter alia). However, the explanation of this difficulty remains controversial, and little is known about how individuals with aphasia try to understand such sentences in real time. This study uses an eyetracking while listening paradigm to examine agrammatic aphasic individuals' on-line comprehension of movement sentences. Participants' eye-movements were monitored while they listened to brief stories and looked at visual displays depicting elements mentioned in the stories. The stories were followed by comprehension probes involving wh- movement. In line with previous results for young normal listeners [Sussman, R. S., & Sedivy, J. C. (2003). The time-course of processing syntactic dependencies: evidence from eye movements. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 143-161], the study finds that both older unimpaired control participants (n=8) and aphasic individuals (n=12) showed visual evidence of successful automatic comprehension of wh- questions (like "Who did the boy kiss that day at school?"). Specifically, both groups fixated on a picture corresponding to the moved element ("who," the person kissed in the story) at the position of the verb. Interestingly, aphasic participants showed qualitatively different fixation patterns for trials eliciting correct and incorrect responses. Aphasic individuals looked first to the moved-element picture and then to a competitor following the verb in the incorrect trials. However, they only showed looks to the moved-element picture for the correct trials, parallel to control participants. Furthermore, aphasic individuals' fixations during movement sentences were just as fast as control participants' fixations. These results are unexpected under slowed-processing accounts of aphasic comprehension deficits, in which the source of failed comprehension should be delayed application of the same processing routines used in successful comprehension. This pattern is also unexpected if aphasic individuals are using qualitatively different strategies than normals to comprehend such sentences, as under impaired-representation accounts of agrammatism. Instead, it suggests that agrammatic aphasic individuals may process wh- questions similarly to unimpaired individuals, but that this process often fails to facilitate off-line comprehension of sentences with wh- movement.     

California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory: further factor analytic examination

The stability of the factor structure of the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory was re-examined using a convenience sample of 800 undergraduate students from nursing (n=520 first bachelors' and n=185 second bachelors' students) and biology (n=95) enrolled in introductory courses in their majors at a 4-yr. mid-Atlantic public university. Ages ranged from 17 to 54 years (M = 23.0, SD = 5.9), with 92 men and 707 women (1 missing). 685 participants identified themselves as Euro-American, 65 as African American, 9 as Hispanic, 26 as Asian, and 11 as "Other" (4 missing). The inventory developed by Facione in 1994 is a 75-item, forced-choice, adjective checklist, yielding seven subscores and a total score assessing testees' disposition toward critical thinking. A principal components factor analysis did not replicate the original factor structure of seven factors but supported the stability of a four-factor structure which had emerged in previous work by Walsh and Hardy and by Kakai. When the 75 original items were reduced to 25, the explained variance for the inventory improved from 27% to 44.95%. Thus, further investigation and continued refinement is warranted.     

Classroom Interactions: Gender of Teacher,Gender of Student,and Classroom Subject

An observational study investigated the effects of gender of teacher, gender of student, and classroom subject (mathematics vs. English literature/language) on teacher–student interactions. A total of 597 high school students (294 males and 303 females) and 36 teachers (28 males and 8 females) were observed in either 18 mathematics classes or 18 literature/language classes. Students and teachers were predominately Caucasian, with the majority of students from a lower- or middle-class background. Observations were coded using the interactions for sex equity in classroom teaching (INTERSECT) observational instrument. It was found that female mathematics teachers, male literature/language teachers, and female literature/language teachers tended to interact somewhat more with male students than with female students. This tendency was not the result of male students having initiated more direct verbal interactions with teachers.     

Effects of parent training on parent and child behavior using procedures based on functional analyses

We evaluated the effects of parent training for four children whose aberrant behaviors were maintained by social positive or negative reinforcement. Interventions were based on the behavioral function of the problem behavior. Child participants were four children (ages 3 to 5 years) who had developmental delays and exhibited significant aberrant behaviors (tantrums and aggression). The children's mothers were the parent participants. The children's behavior improved as a function of the parents' performance. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.