Secondary Students' Performance on Piagetian Projective and Euclidean Spatial Tasks

Four tasks involving Piaget's Euclidean and projective space were administered to a total of 99 students in Grades 8, 10, and 12: Task 1, Volumes of Revolution; Task 2, Geometric Sections; Task 3, Folding Patterns; and Task 4, Projection of Shadows. A scalogram analysis indicated that the tasks scaled in increasing order of difficulty in the following order: Task 1, Task 4, Task 2, and Task 3. These results did not support Piaget's position that projective and Euclidean concepts develop concurrently. Also, significant differences between task performance with regard to gender were found for Tasks 3 and 4. Significant differences between task performance and grade level for Tasks 1 and 4 were found. Standardized achievement test performance and task performance relationships were significant in 3 of the 16 analyses.     

The Relation of Social Support and Coping to Positive Adaptation to Breast Cancer

Survivors of childhood cancer are at risk of compromised physical and psychological functioning as a result of disease and treatment. However, survivors experiencing similar physical problems vary considerably in their self-reported Quality of Life (QOL) raising questions about the processes underlying adjustment and maintenance of QOL. Seventy seven survivors of either Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (ALL) or tumours of the Central Nervous System (CNS) completed a standardised measure of QOL and semi-structured interview. Based on theoretical assumptions that QOL reflects a difference between what survivors can, and would like to be able to do, interviews were coded for reports of discrepancies and any coping strategy employed. Survivors of tumours of the CNS reported worse QOL and more discrepancies than survivors of ALL. A significant relationship was found between QOL measured by questionnaire and number of reported discrepancies. Five kinds of strategies to reduce discrepancies were identified: changing activity, devising a “plan of action”, emotional denial, making social comparisons, and seeking social support. Survivors who reported neither discrepancies nor strategies had better QOL than those who reported both discrepancies and strategies or discrepancies but no strategies. Data are discussed in terms of rehabilitation of survivors of childhood cancer.     

Bounded Identities: Women and Religion in Colonial Brazil, 1550–1750

This article examines the creation of women's gender identity in the religious discourse of colonial Brazil and documents the creation of two separate norms—one for elite women and another for slave, lower-class, and mixed-race women. The Roman Catholic Church, closely linked with the Portuguese monarchic state and its colonial ambitions, transmitted both norms in religious guidebooks, missionary letters and sermons. This summary centers on the defining role for women in marriage, and indicates that the epoch of colonial Brazil is particularly important for feminist study. With the increasingly disparate perspectives on women from Late Antiquity, the Humanists, and Counter-Reformation theologians, this early modern era saw conflicted discourse concerning traditional gender roles.     

Walking the Walk While Thinking About the Talk: Embodied Interpretation of Metaphorical Narratives

Two sets of experiments examined people’s embodied understanding of metaphorical narratives. Participants heard one of two stories about a romantic relationship; either one that was successful or one that was not, that initially described it in metaphorical terms as “Your relationship was moving along in a good direction” or nonmetaphorical terms as “Your relationship was very important to you.” Participants were then blindfolded and attempted to accurately walk, or imagine walking, to a marker 40 feet away while they thought about the story they just heard. People who heard about the successful metaphorical story walked longer and further than those presented with the unsuccessful relationship story. But these walking and imagining differences disappeared when the critical metaphorical statement “moving along in a good direction” was replaced by a nonmetaphorical expression. These findings, and those from another set of experiments, suggest that people’s understanding of metaphorical narratives is partly based on their embodied simulations of the metaphorical actions referred to in these stories.     

A distant mirror: Memories of parents and friends across childhood and adolescence

Memories that were easily accessible (i.e., quickly retrieved in a memory‐fluency task) of Italian university students were assessed. They were from four periods of life: preschool, elementary school, middle school, and high school/university. Half of the participants were instructed to recall only memories involving parents, and the other half memories involving friends. Across age at the time of remembered events, only memories of friends increased in frequency. For parental memories (but not friend memories), the proportion with negative affect increased over age, especially for males. There were also differences related to whether memories were episodic or generic. It was concluded that memories of different periods of childhood and adolescence can serve as a reflective mirror for developmental changes in parent–child and friendship relationships.     

A Heideggerian Phenomenology Approach to Higher Education as Workplace: A Consideration of Academic Professionalism

Heidegger’s early works provide his most important contribution to our understanding of being, while his discussion of the effects of technology on that being in his later works is one of his best known contributions. I use his phenomenological approach to understanding the workplace and then, from a range of potential applications, choose to describe the functioning of higher education as a workplace for academic professionals. Heidegger seemingly fails to offer a subtle approach to what is labouring, or to whether there is a substantive difference between labouring and working. To find such approaches I draw upon work of both Marcuse and Arendt which specifically relates to these distinctions.