Adolescents who need help the most are the least likely to seek it: the relationship between low emotional competence and low intention to seek help

It has been found that university students who were the least skilled at managing their emotions also had the lowest intention of seeking help from a variety of nonprofessional sources (e.g. family and friends). The present study sought to extend these findings by focusing on adolescents, examining a larger number of emotional competencies, and exploring the possibility that social support explains the relationship between emotional competence and help-seeking. A total of 137 adolescents (aged 16-18) completed an anonymous survey that assessed social support, emotional competencies, and intention to seek help from a variety of professional and nonprofessional sources. As expected, adolescents who were low in emotional awareness, and who were poor at identifying, describing, and managing their emotions, were the least likely to seek help from nonprofessional sources and had the highest intention of refusing help from everyone. However, low emotional competence was not related to intention to seek help from professional sources (e.g. mental health professionals). The significant results involving nonprofessional sources were only partially explained by social support, suggesting that even adolescents who had high quality support were less likely to make use of that support if they were low in emotional competence.     

Mandated Supervision: An Intervention for Disciplined Professionals

Mandated supervision with disciplined mental health professionals is defined and discussed. In the absence of empirical support for supervision in this context, sources of theoretical support are provided. Risks, benefits, and implications for practice for supervisors are also discussed.     

Teaching Exodus as “Problem Text”

This essay explores how one might use the “problem” of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart as a learning opportunity in the classroom. The author identifies two pedagogical aims: (1) cultivating more sophisticated, critical readers of the Bible; and (2) helping students reflect on the contextual nature of interpretation. The essay discusses in some detail various ways of teaching the text, including an exercise in close reading, examination of sources, and a selective study of the history of interpretation. It also explores various lessons to be learned from these exercises, and addresses applicability of the approaches to other teaching contexts. An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the “Problem Texts” group of the consultation “Teaching the Bible in the 21st Century,” held at the Wabash Center in Crawfordsville, Indiana.     

Predicting adult responses to infant distress: Adult characteristics associated with perceptions,emotional reactions,and timing of intervention

This study examined adult characteristics associated with different responses to infant distress. One hundred eighty‐eight parents viewed four 20‐second segments of videotape in which a 4‐week‐old infant was either (a) fussing mildly, (b) fussing vigorously, (c) crying, or (d) crying vigorously. Participants rated their emotional reactions and perception of cry characteristics following each segment. Participants then viewed a 4‐minute videotape depicting the same infant progressing from calm to vigorous crying, and indicated when they would intervene to pick up the infant. Relatively high levels of empathy and extraversion and low levels of conscientiousness were associated with more sensitive responses to infant distress. Infant‐rearing attitudes had a strong impact on response patterns as well, suggesting that education may be an effective means of increasing parental sensitivity. ©2003 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health.     

Space Trumps Time When Talking About Objects

The nature of the relationship between the concepts of space and time in the human mind is much debated. Some claim that space is primary and that it structures time (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) while others (cf. Walsh, 2003) maintain no difference in status between them. Using fully immersive virtual reality (VR), we examined the influence of object distance and time of appearance on choice of demonstratives (this and that) to refer to objects. Critically, demonstratives can be used spatially (this/that red triangle) and temporally (this/that month). Experiment 1 showed a pattern of demonstrative usage in VR that is consistent with results found in real‐world studies. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 manipulated both when and where objects appeared, providing scenarios where participants were free to use demonstratives in either a temporal or spatial sense. Although we find evidence for time of presentation affecting object mention, the experiments found that demonstrative choice was affected only by distance. These results support the view that spatial uses of demonstratives are privileged over temporal uses.     

Hemispheric Differences in Context Sensitivity During Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of contextual constraint on lexical ambiguity resolution in the cerebral hemispheres. A cross-modal priming variant of the divided visual field task was utilized in which subjects heard sentences containing homonyms and made lexical decisions to targets semantically related to dominant and subordinate meanings. Experiment 1 showed priming in both hemispheres of dominant meanings for homonyms embedded in neutral sentence contexts. Experiment 2 showed priming in both hemispheres of dominant and subordinate meanings for homonyms embedded in sentence contexts that biased a central semantic feature of the subordinate meaning. Experiment 3 showed priming of dominant meanings in the left hemisphere (LH), and priming of the subordinate meaning in the right hemisphere (RH) for homonyms embedded in sentences that biased a peripheral semantic feature of the subordinate meaning. These results are consistent with a context-sensitive model of language processing that incorporates differential sensitivity to semantic relationships in the cerebral hemispheres.