The alchemy of facilitation revealed through individual stories and collective narrative

Facilitation is a key ‘ingredient’ in the success and sustainability of communities of practice. Yet, little attention has been given to in situ experiences of facilitators of these communities. This paper takes up the challenge to explore these experiences using reflective stories written by seven TATAL (Talking about Teaching and Learning) facilitators (the authors) from different disciplines in five different Australian universities. The authors’ collaborative analysis of their experiences suggests reframing the role of facilitator to include the role of alchemist, a promoter of transformation. This reframing has the potential to change the way higher education community of practice facilitators think about and enact their role. The story-based reflective process used in this self-study could also be used by facilitators to investigate their own practice, as a component of facilitator education programmes or by academics and researchers in other contexts who seek a participatory, collaborative approach to evaluate their practice.     

Do difficulties with emotions inhibit help-seeking in adolescence? The role of age and emotional competence in predicting help-seeking intentions

We examined whether adolescents who are poor at identifying, describing, and managing their emotions (emotional competence) have lower intentions to seek help for their personal-emotional problems and suicidal ideation, as observed in adult studies. We also examined whether age moderated the relationship between competence and help-seeking. Two hundred and seventeen adolescents completed measures of emotional competence, help-seeking, hopelessness, and social support. Results indicated that adolescents who were low in emotional competence had the lowest intentions to seek help from informal sources (i.e., family and friends) and from some formal sources (e.g., mental health professionals), and the highest intentions to seek help from no-one. There was one important age-related qualification: difficulty in identifying and describing emotions was associated with higher help-seeking intentions amongst young adolescents but lower intentions among older adolescents. Social support, hopelessness, and sex could not entirely explain these relationships. Thus, even those who had high quality social support had less intention to use it if they were low in emotional competence.     

Differential effects of task and reinforcement variables on the performance of three groups of behavior problem children

In a test of Quay's model of differential response tendencies in three basic dimensions of discordant behavior, 36 delinquent boys divided into three behavior groups — Conduct Disorder, Personality Disorder, Inadequate-Immature — del were compared on a verbal paired-associate task under four conditions of task structure: neutral and emotional content, simplicity and complexity; and two reward conditions: material and verbal. Predictions were that the Conduct Disorder and Inadequate-Immature group would perform optimally under conditions of simple emotional task structure and material reward as opposed to the Personality Disorder group, who would demonstrate optimal performance under verbal reinforcement and reflect an interaction effect for task complexity and emotionality. Results confirmed the basic hypothesis of differential responsiveness as a function of subject variables. Directions of the differences indicated that task variables also produced critical effects.     

Seventeen-month-olds appeal to false beliefs to interpret others' referential communication

Recent studies have demonstrated infants' pragmatic abilities for resolving the referential ambiguity of non-verbal communicative gestures, and for inferring the intended meaning of a communicator's utterances. These abilities are difficult to reconcile with the view that it is not until around 4 years that children can reason about the internal mental states of others. In the current study, we tested whether 17-month-old infants are able to track the status of a communicator's epistemic state and use this to infer what she intends to refer to. Our results show that manipulating whether or not a communicator has a false belief leads infants to different interpretations of the same communicative act, and demonstrate early mental state attribution in a pragmatic context.     

Feeling Good,but Lacking Autonomy: Closed-Mindedness on Social and Moral Issues in New Religious Movements

According to previous research, New Religious Movements (NRMs) seem to have a positive effect on the mental health of members who join NRMs with some previous affective, cognitive or other vulnerabilities. The present study investigates the other, less positive, side of the psychology of NRMs, i.e. elements that may be an obstacle to optimal development, such as rigidity and low autonomy. In comparison to non-NRM members, members of various NRMs in Belgium (N = 120) were found to be low in quest religious orientation (Altemeyer and Hunsberger, Int J Psychol Religion 2:113–133, 1992), to privilege conservation values to the detriment of openness to change values (Schwartz, Advances in experimental social psychology (vol 25, pp. 1–65). Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1992), to show submissiveness to authority in hypothetical situations (projective measure), and to highly moralize judgments of transgression relative to conventional domains (Turiel, The development of social knowledge: Morality and social convention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Discussion points out the idea that rigidity and restriction of autonomy may be the price to be paid for the structuring role NRMs play with regard to previous vulnerabilities.

The limits of newborn's grasping to detect texture in a cross-modal transfer task

Three experiments were conducted to investigate human newborns’ ability to perceive texture property tactually, either in a cross-modal transfer task or in an intra-modal tactual discrimination task. In Experiment 1, newborns failed to tactually recognize the texture (smooth vs. granular) of flat objects that they had previously seen, when they held flat objects. This failure was mainly due to a lack of intra-modal tactual discrimination between the two objects (Experiment 2). In contrast, Experiment 3 showed that newborns were able to tactually recognize the texture of previously seen surfaces when they held volumetric objects. Taken together, the results suggest that cross-modal transfer of texture from vision to touch stem from a peripheral mechanism, not a central mechanism. Grasping only allows newborns to perceive the texture of volumetric but not flat objects. As a consequence, this study reveals the limits of newborns’ grasping to detect and process information about texture. The results also suggest that more mature exploratory procedures, such as the “lateral motion” procedure exhibited by adults [Lederman, S. J., & Klatzky, R. (1987). Hand movements: A window into haptic object recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 19, 342–368], might be necessary for detecting the texture of flat objects in newborn infants.     

Making disjunctions exclusive

This work examines how people interpret the sentential connective "or", which can be viewed either inclusively (A or B or both) or exclusively (A or B but not both). Following up on prior work concerning quantifiers (Bott & Noveck, 2004; Noveck, 2001; Noveck & Posada, 2003), which shows that the common pragmatic interpretation of "some", some but not all, is conveyed as part of an effortful step, we investigate how extra effort applied to disjunctive statements leads to a pragmatic interpretation of "or", or but not both. Experiment 1 compelled participants to wait for three seconds before answering, hence giving them the opportunity to process the utterance more deeply. Experiments 2 and 3 emphasized "or", either by visual means ("OR") or by prosodic means (contrastive stress) as another way to encourage participants to apply more effort. Following a relevance-theoretic line of argument, we hypothesized that conditions encouraging more processing effort would give rise to more pragmatic inferences and hence to more exclusive interpretations of the disjunction. This prediction was confirmed in the three experiments.     

Perception of object shape and texture in human newborns: evidence from cross-modal transfer tasks

The present research investigates newborn infants' perceptions of the shape and texture of objects through studies of the bi-directionality of cross-modal transfer between vision and touch. Using an intersensory procedure, four experiments were performed in newborns to study their ability to transfer shape and texture information from vision to touch and from touch to vision. The results showed that cross-modal transfer of shape is not bi-directional at birth. Newborns visually recognized a shape previously held but they failed to tactually recognize a shape previously seen. In contrast, a bi-directional cross-modal transfer of texture was observed. Taken together, the results suggest that newborn infants, like older children and adults, gather information differently in the visual and tactile modes, for different object properties. The findings provide evidence for continuity in the development of mechanisms for perceiving object properties.