Response of Methodist Preachers to Foot and Mouth Disease

In-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of eight Methodist preachers who led Harvest Festival services during the autumn of 2001 in areas where the harvest of flock and herd had been destroyed by foot and mouth disease. The data draw attention to both good practice and to bad practice in the ministry of preaching and pastoral engagement.     

The Face-Space Typicality Paradox: Understanding the Face-Space Metaphor

Some recent accounts of human face processing use the idea of 'face space', considered to be a multi-dimensional space whose dimensions correspond to ways in which faces can vary. Within this space, 'typicality' is sometimes taken to reflect the proximity of a face to its local neighbours. Intuitions about the distribution of faces within the space may suggest that the majority of faces will be 'typical' in these terms. However, when typicality measures are taken, researchers very rarely find that faces cluster at the 'typical' end of the scale. In this short note we attempt to resolve this paradox and point out that reasoning about high dimensional distributions requires that some specific assumptions are made explicit.     

Smiles in face matching: Idiosyncratic information revealed through a smile improves unfamiliar face matching performance

Unfamiliar face matching is a surprisingly difficult task, yet we often rely on people's matching decisions in applied settings (e.g., border control). Most attempts to improve accuracy (including training and image manipulation) have had very limited success. In a series of studies, we demonstrate that using smiling rather than neutral pairs of images brings about significant improvements in face matching accuracy. This is true for both match and mismatch trials, implying that the information provided through a smile helps us detect images of the same identity as well as distinguishing between images of different identities. Study 1 compares matching performance when images in the face pair display either an open-mouth smile or a neutral expression. In Study 2, we add an intermediate level, closed-mouth smile, to identify the effect of teeth being exposed, and Study 3 explores face matching accuracy when only information about the lower part of the face is available. Results demonstrate that an open-mouth smile changes the face in an idiosyncratic way which aids face matching decisions. Such findings have practical implications for matching in the applied context where we typically use neutral images to represent ourselves in official documents.     

The Nurturing Program: An Intervention for Parents of Children with Special Needs

Evidence-based psychosocial family interventions enhancing empathy and empowerment are particularly beneficial to families of children who have developmental disabilities. This study assessed the effectiveness of an intervention called the Nurturing Program for Parents and Their Children with Special Needs and Health Challenges (SNHC). Eighty-seven families were enrolled and randomly assigned to a control or treatment group. Forty-six families in the control group received individualized case management (CM) services and forty-one families in the treatment group were assigned to 12 sessions of the SNHC curriculum along with case management services. Before and after the intervention, participants in both conditions completed the Adult and Adolescent Parenting Index-2 assessing parents’ attitudes toward child rearing and the Family Empowerment Scale (FES) measuring family empowerment. Caregivers in the intervention condition improved in empathy towards children’s needs, F(1, 54)?=?4.52, p?=?.04; and all families, both control group and treatment group, improved their attitudes towards the use of corporal punishment by posttest, F(1, 54)?=?6.56, p?=?.013. Also, all caregivers increased in their empowerment over the course of the intervention, F(1, 50)?=?13.28, p?=?.001. Attrition, 22–26% among CM and 51–56% among SNHC+CM, limited generalizability as did participants not completing all SNHC sessions. Despite these limitations, findings suggest that early interventions catering to families of children with developmental disabilities have a positive impact on parenting. To varying degrees, both conditions provided caregivers with tools that positively affected the quality of the parent–child relationships and promoted empowerment.     

Peer review of teaching (PRoT) in higher education – a practitioner’s reflection

Peer review of teaching (PRoT) is recommended to both develop and assure the quality of teaching practices in Higher Education. An institutional implementation of a peer review process can be viewed as a genuine desire to improve teaching quality or as an instrument of accountability and performativity. There are many approaches to the peer review of teaching operating. This article documents the impact, advantages and disadvantages of direct participation in three peer review of teaching processes.     

A case for taking the dual role of counsellor-researcher in qualitative research

There is ongoing debate about whether the challenges of practice-based research in counselling, with clients’ discourses providing the raw data, can be overcome. This article begins by considering the argument of whether taking a dual role of counsellor-researcher within case study research is a legitimate qualitative approach. A case example using sand-tray in short-term therapy with adults from a pluralistic perspective is provided to demonstrate how the challenges of the dual role can be managed to produce effective research findings. It is suggested that this approach closes the gap between research and practice to produce findings that are highly relevant to the counselling context. The ethical considerations of taking a dual role of counsellor-researcher are considered, and opportunities and challenges when adopting this approach are identified.     

Response of colony mice to intruders with different fighting experience

Six male mice placed in a large, moderately complex enclosure formed a stable dominance hierarchy in which two mice defended adjacent floor areas and the remaining four mice were subordinate and did not form territories. Intruder mice with winning or losing experience in prior paired encounters, or those with no fighting experience, were introduced individually into the colony for 30 minute periods. These intruders were attacked by the dominant members of the colony, and the fighting outcomes were strongly dependent upon the fighting experience of the intruder. Intruders with losing or no fighting experience engaged in little mutual fighting with residents, were easily defeated, and terminated attacks by engaging in subordinate behaviors. Intruders with winning experience fought vigorously with residents, attacked and, in many cases, defeated residents. These results suggest that relatively little winning experience gained in earlier paired encounters may be sufficient to overcome the various fighting advantages enjoyed by a dominant territorial holding member of a colony.     

An ecological analysis of knowing by wielding.

The ecological approach to perception, as developed by James Gibson, is described and applied to how one knows, by means of the haptic perceptual system, various properties of hand-held objects. Four sets of experiments are reviewed in which subjects reported on the extent, orientation, shape, and fractional components of unseen objects wielded freely. For each task, an invariant specific to the object property in question is identified in the structured arrays of rotational moments and strains produced by the act of wielding. Results are discussed in relation to the concepts of attention and stimulation, as reformulated by the ecological approach, and the general theory of perception as information pickup.     

Sex differences in the lateralized processing of facial emotion

Two reaction time tasks were administered to male and female normal subjects, involving judgments of facial emotion. In the Word-Face task, judgments of similarity or difference of a centrally presented emotion word and an emotional face presented in the left or right visual field were required, and in the Face-Face task, comparisons of a centrally presented and a laterally presented emotional face were required. Results were significant for the matching trials only. Reaction times to negative emotions were faster overall than to positive emotions, and an Emotional Valence by Visual Field interaction was found such that reaction times were faster for negative emotions in the left visual field and for positive emotions in the right visual field. This interaction was significant for the female but not the male subjects, although similar patterns were observed in both sexes. Further, an interaction of Gender, Task, and Emotional Valence was found, such that the two tasks had opposite effects for the two sexes. The Face-Face task appeared to inhibit the performance of the male subjects and facilitate the performance of the female subjects in terms of reaction time. It was suggested that specifying the target emotion by an emotional face elicits a greater emotional response on the part of the subject than specification by a word, and that this emotional elicitation may result in a reactive inhibition in the male subjects and in an elaboration of the emotional response in the female subjects.