Legal responsibilities for educational psychologists

This paper considers the legal responsibilities of educational psychologists which fall mainly in relation to pupils with special educational needs. The first section introduces the work of educational psychologists, with some discussion of the professional and ethical difficulties posed by many aspects of their practice. An outline of the legal framework for their work in the England and Wales is provided, as an example of the application of those professional and ethical issues in practice, followed by and outline of potential areas of legal challenge and their implications. Reference is finally made to problems being experienced in policy, principle and practice arising from the tensions and dilemmas inherent in the legislation.     

Facial attractiveness and personal-social development

The relationship between physical attractiveness and personal-social development was examined. The entire third, fourth, and fifth grade school population (N=440) was administered a self-concept and peer acceptance measure. School pictures of these children were then rated into attractive and unattractive groups (N = 84). Three separate three-factor (sex X attractiveness X grade) analyses of variance indicated attractive children were more socially accepted than their unattractive peers and had higher self-concepts.     

Perceptions of a University Environment by Social-Political Action Leaders

Leaders of campus social-political action groups were compared with the leaders of four other categories of student leaders on the basis of perceptions of the prevailing campus environmental press as measured by the College and University Environment Scales. Significant differences among the five categories of group leaders were observed on four scales of the inventory. Three of the scales, Community, Awareness, and Scholarship, appeared to differentiate social-political activists from leaders of other types of campus groups. Significant differences between liberal and conservative leaders of social-political action groups were also observed on three scales of the CUES and between male and female leaders across all group categories on four scales.     

Failures of explaining away and screening off in described versus experienced causal learning scenarios

Causal Bayes nets capture many aspects of causal thinking that set them apart from purely associative reasoning. However, some central properties of this normative theory routinely violated. In tasks requiring an understanding of explaining away and screening off, subjects often deviate from these principles and manifest the operation of an associative bias that we refer to as the rich-get-richer principle. This research focuses on these two failures comparing tasks in which causal scenarios are merely described (via verbal statements of the causal relations) versus experienced (via samples of data that manifest the intervariable correlations implied by the causal relations). Our key finding is that we obtained stronger deviations from normative predictions in the described conditions that highlight the instructed causal model compared to those that presented data. This counterintuitive finding indicate that a theory of causal reasoning and learning needs to integrate normative principles with biases people hold about causal relations.     

Dwelling in Possibility: Response to Willock and Cornell

This response to the commentaries by Drs. Willock and Cornell explores themes raised in their commentaries related to regression, containment, and unconscious processes in analyses that feature intergenerational trauma. In addition, this response seeks to elaborate on how a psychoanalyst and patient might respond clinically to the “errand” presented to them by previous generations that “haunt” the treatment as ghosts.     

Bridging the intention–behavior gap: Inducing implementation intentions through persuasive appeals

The potential of using implementation intentions—action plans that link a critical situational cue to a specific goal-directed behavior—to bridge the intention–behavior gap in consumer behavior has been limited by the practice of using explicit instructions to induce the construct. In two studies, we therefore tested the effectiveness of an indirect, persuasive strategy that benefits from the positive consequences of implementation intentions by ‘mimicking’ their underlying psychological processes. Experiment 1 showed that a strategy presenting vivid information on critical cues and appropriate behavioral responses affected mental imagery. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this strategy affected actual purchase behavior.