Sibling attachment: The development of a new infant-based measure (SPPIR)

This paper describes a new infant-based measure for assessing infant attachment to a sibling during a modified strange situation procedure. Research has demonstrated that young siblings often form a special relationship and that they prefer to interact with one another rather than with an unfamiliar peer. Also it has been shown that older siblings can respond appropriately to the distress of an infant. Research on relationships has moved from frequency counts of discrete behaviours towards more global measures of the ways in which behaviour is organized. These have tended to focus upon the older child as caregiver or the influence of the mother-child relationship on child-child interaction during the strange situation. The main findings of previous studies are presented. This paper describes a new method for measuring sibling attachment. Advantages of the new scoring system over previous procedures are that it utilizes ethological attachment theory, it is infant-based, it allows for a variety of infant reactions to reunion with the older sibling, and it focuses on overall patterns of behaviour rather than tallies of frequences.     

Functional Impulsivity and Speeded Ability Test Performance

The current study examines the influence of functional impulsivity on speeded ability test performance. As predicted, functional impulsivity was positively related to number of items attempted (i.e., speed), but its impact on total score was more complex. In particular, analysis of the relations between ability, functional impulsivity and accuracy revealed evidence of a suppressor effect. Specifically, functional impulsivity was found to be negatively related to accuracy, but only after ability differences were controlled. Taken as whole, the current results suggest functional impulsivity may influence test‐taking behavior, but it likely does not result in a systematic influence on observed scores. Directions for further research needed to clarify these relations are discussed.     

Users of secondary school‐based counselling services and specialist CAMHS in Wales: A comparison study

Background: The increasing prevalence of mental health issues in young people has contributed to a rise in the provision of school‐based counselling services in the UK. Between 2008/09 and 2010/11, data were collected from users of secondary school‐based counselling services in Wales. Aims: To identify the characteristics of users of school‐based counselling services in Wales – including demographics, referral pathways, presenting issues, and predominant issues – and how they compare to users of specialist CAMHS in Wales and Welsh secondary school pupils in general. Method: Data were collected on 10,687 episodes of counselling. School counsellors completed a client record sheet after each counselling episode and submitted these to their Local Authority. Collated results were then compared to matched data from Welsh specialist CAMHS and Welsh secondary schools data. Results/findings: A typical user of a secondary school‐based counselling service in Wales was female, of white ethnicity, and from the ‘middle’ school years. There was a marked under‐representation of users from BME backgrounds. Users were most often referred by school staff, and the most common presenting issues were family‐related, anger, and behaviour‐related. Conclusions: There was a higher proportion of females accessing school‐based counselling services than males. This was in direct contrast to data from specialist CAMHS and possible explanations for this are discussed. The under‐representation of BME populations suggested that there were some equality issues associated with accessing these services. Implications for practice: Future research should explore equality issues associated with young people from BME backgrounds accessing intervention services.     

Testimony,testimonial belief,and safety

Philosophical Studies - Can one gain testimonial knowledge from unsafe testimony? It might seem not, on the grounds that if a piece of testimony is unsafe, then any belief based on it in such a way...     

A Closer Look at Reactions to Realistic Recruitment Messages

Recently there has been a great deal of interest among consumer and behavioral judgment researchers on how immediate affective reactions influence overall evaluations. The current study seeks to determine whether immediate affective reactions to organizational attributes warrant the attention of recruitment researchers as well. Using a customized web‐based computer program that elicits immediate affective reactions to organizational previews, the study finds that overall evaluations of the organization are influenced more by the average intensity of immediate affective reactions experienced during the message than by the relative balance of positive and negative information contained in the message. Results suggest that practitioners using realistic information need to be more concerned about the average intensity of recipients' reactions than about the relative balance of positive or negative information.     

Exploring levels of face familiarity by using an indirect face-matching measure

An experiment is reported in which participants matched complete images of unfamiliar, moderately familiar, and highly familiar faces with simultaneously presented images of internal and external features. Participants had to decide if the two images depicted same or different individuals. Matches to internal features were made faster to highly familiar faces than both to moderately familiar and to unfamiliar faces, and matches to moderately familiar faces were made faster than to unfamiliar faces. For external feature matches, this advantage was only found for "different" decision matches to highly familiar faces compared to unfamiliar faces. The results indicate that the differences in familiar and unfamiliar face processing are not the result of all-or-none effects, but seem to have a graded impact on matching performance. These findings extend the earlier work of Young et al (1985 Perception 14 737-746), and we discuss the possibility of using the matching task as an indirect measure of face familiarity.     

Are emotions perceptions of value (and why this matters)? A review essay of Christine Tappolet’s Emotions,Values, and Agency

In Emotions, Values, and Agency, Christine Tappolet develops a sophisticated, perceptual theory of emotions and their role in wide range of issues in value theory and epistemology. In this paper, we raise three worries about Tappolet's proposal.