Applicability of a cognitive model of worry to children and adolescents

BackgroundIntolerance of uncertainly (IU), cognitive avoidance (CA) and positive beliefs about worry (PB) independently predict worry frequency in older adolescents and adults, and when targeted together in treatment produce significant reductions in both worry and anxiety in this age range. The present study addresses a gap in the literature by testing whether a cognitive model of excessive worry and anxiety incorporating these process variables is applicable to children and adolescents.MethodPrimary and secondary school students (n = 515; aged 7–19 years) completed modified self-report measures of worry frequency, anxiety, IU, CA and PB and a path analysis undertaken to test whether IU was a higher order variable for CA and PB and whether the relationship between IU/CA/PB and anxiety was mediated by worry frequency.ResultsSignificant (bivariate) correlations were observed between the measures of IU, PB, CA, worry and anxiety across the age range. However separate path models had to be fitted for children (aged 7–12 years) and adolescents (aged 13–19) with PB being dropped from the child model. CA was related to anxiety only through worry in children while IU showed direct paths to worry and anxiety in both children and adolescents.ConclusionsCognitive models of persistent worry in adults and older adolescents may, with some modification, have applicability to children. Further testing and refinement of these cognitive models of worry may lead to improvements in existing treatments for anxious youth.     

Counseling in the Philippines: Past,Present, and Future

The history of colonization and persistent attempts at self‐governance in the Philippines parallel the beginnings of counseling in the country, which were largely influenced by the United States. Because of the Guidance and Counseling Act of 2004 and the Psychology Act of 2009, counseling is on its way to professionalization and regulation. Counseling is growing in depth and credibility, as evidenced by applications in practice that are not only indigenous but powerfully relevant.     

Unemployed Adults’ Career Thoughts,Career Self‐Efficacy,and Interest: Any Similarity to College Students?

Little empirical knowledge about unemployed adults exists during a time when this group needs substantial career assistance. Because there is greater empirical understanding of college student career development compared with what is known about unemployed adults, a chi square and analyses of covariance were used to compare the career thinking, self‐efficacy, and interests of 169 unemployed adults seeking public job center assistance with that of 200 college students. Additionally, a diverse sample of 2,444 unemployed adults is demographically reviewed. Unemployed adults reported a higher level of Realistic interests and similar levels of negative career thinking and career decision‐making self‐efficacy compared with college students.     

Humour Perception and Creation between Parents and 3‐ to 6‐month‐old Infants

Humour and laughter are universal to the human psychological experience and have serious developmental and evolutionary implications. Despite the early emergence of laughter in infancy, infants have been largely ignored in the humour research and humour has been largely ignored in the infant research. The present study describes the emergence of humour perception and creation in a sample of 20 parent–infant dyads who were followed from ages 3‐to‐ 6 months. The study examined how infants discover that absurd nonverbal behaviour, known as ‘clowning’, is amusing in the context of social engagement with caregivers. Results indicate that parents primarily use clowning when attempting to amuse their infants and pair these behavioural absurdities with affective cues like smiling and laughing. As they got older, infants were more likely to laugh and smile in response to clowning. Infants' ability to create humor via clowning also increased with age, starting with simple shrieks at 3 months to imitating absurd actions by 5 months. These increases are partly potentially explained by accompanying increases in parental smiling, laughing and clowning in response to infant clowning. Future research should employ more diverse samples and experimentally investigate the role of parental affect and social referencing in infants' interpretation of absurd behavior. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do Teachers maintain their Expectation Bias for students? A longitudinal investigation

Whether teachers maintain their expectation bias for students over time is crucial for understanding self-fulfilling prophecy effects. However, the stability of teacher expectation bias has been largely ignored in the literature. We examined the stability of teacher expectation bias across a sample of teachers and the change trajectories of teacher expectation bias across high-, medium-, and low-expectation teacher groups across all teachers and in the curriculum areas of mathematics, Chinese, and English. Our analyses were based on two-year longitudinal data with four time points from 567 Chinese senior high school students and their 50 teachers. The results showed that across all teachers, teacher expectation bias at the individual student level was dynamic over time. That is, teachers seemed to adjust their initial expectation bias in the first few months but then maintained the adjusted expectation bias afterwards. However, when students moved from Grade 11 to Grade 12 (the last year of high school), teachers seemed to change their expectation bias again. The evidence from HLM analyses further supported these results. That is, all the high- and low-expectation teachers alleviated their initial expectation bias significantly in the first six months and then adhered to their adjusted expectation bias. However, when students moved to the last year of high school, some high- and low-expectation teachers’ expectation biases were volatile again. Nevertheless, most high- and low-expectation teachers (except for Chinese low-expectation teachers) tended to either over-estimate or under-estimate their students across two school years. Further, compared to Chinese and mathematics teachers, English teachers’ biases seemed to be even more stable. Our findings suggested that some teachers consistently over- or under-estimated their students over an extended time period and this could have implications for student outcomes.

     

Flourishing with Shared Vitality: Education based on Aesthetic Experience,with Performance for Meaning

Studies in Philosophy and Education - In this paper, I set an aspect of what it is to live a flourishing life against the backdrop of neo liberal trends that continue to influence educational...     

Parenting Sensitivity,Parental Depression and Child Health: The Mediational Role of Parental Self-Efficacy

This paper discusses the theoretical role of parental self-efficacy, or parents' beliefs in their competence and effectiveness in the parental role, as a mediator of relations between parent–child risk and parental sensitivity. Evidence is marshalled from studies of parenting in the contexts of maternal depression and child health risk to support the premise that parent–child characteristics affect parental sensitivity indirectly via their more direct impact on parental feelings of efficacy, and that parenting efficacy represents the ‘final common pathway’ in the prediction of parenting sensitivity. Also considered in this working model are specific social-contextual factors as independent contributors to parenting efficacy and as possible moderators of relations between parent–child characteristics and self-efficacy. Implications for intervention are discussed. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.