Transforming roles to support student development of academic literacies: a reflection on one team’s experience

Social work is a discipline that attracts students from diverse academic backgrounds. Many are first in family to attend university, and come to university through alternative pathways such as vocational education. As a result, there are higher levels of attrition compared to other disciplines, especially in the first year. To address this, and in keeping with a commitment to provide accessible education, one school of social work undertook a project to embed academic literacies into the curriculum. This paper used Gibb’s reflective process to explore how this was experienced by team members. Data were collected via staff focus groups at two different points in time across the project and compared. The reflection unpacked a number of tensions experienced by team members, including concerns about potential loss of resources as a result of academics adopting new roles, and concerns about implementing what was seen as Westernised academic skills which may not fit with students’ ways of thinking and creating knowledge. Overfull curricula and constant change also appeared to be of concern. The reflection highlighted that to achieve effective and sustainable change, action was required at multiple levels.     

Predicting Short‐Term Remembering as Boundedly Optimal Strategy Choice

It is known that, on average, people adapt their choice of memory strategy to the subjective utility of interaction. What is not known is whether an individual's choices are boundedly optimal. Two experiments are reported that test the hypothesis that an individual's decisions about the distribution of remembering between internal and external resources are boundedly optimal where optimality is defined relative to experience, cognitive constraints, and reward. The theory makes predictions that are tested against data, not fitted to it. The experiments use a no‐choice/choice utility learning paradigm where the no‐choice phase is used to elicit a profile of each participant's performance across the strategy space and the choice phase is used to test predicted choices within this space. They show that the majority of individuals select strategies that are boundedly optimal. Further, individual differences in what people choose to do are successfully predicted by the analysis. Two issues are discussed: (a) the performance of the minority of participants who did not find boundedly optimal adaptations, and (b) the possibility that individuals anticipate what, with practice, will become a bounded optimal strategy, rather than what is boundedly optimal during training.     

Impromptu Decisions to Deceive

This research furthers understanding of the factors that induce individuals to choose deception. Its goals were to expand and test a recent account of the cognition of deception, Activation–Decision–Construction–Action Theory (ADCAT), in a mock job interview inviting impromptu deception. Decisions to lie are hypothesized to depend on the truth and other information activated from long‐term memory by the social context. Activated information then guides evaluation of the likely costs of truth telling and benefits of deception; 166 college students participated in the job interview, who learned about the position and then adopted the role of job applicants. Afterward, participants shared their thoughts when responding to five questions from the interview. The most important findings are that the negative expectations of sharing truths and the positive expectations of sharing deceptions each account for unique variance in deciding to lie. Implications for lie reduction and detection are considered. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exploring the Relationship Between Deaf Identity Verification Processes and Self-Esteem

Past research has found that self-esteem in deaf individuals is predicted by variables such as the age they become deaf, the type of school they attend, whether they use sign language or another mode of communication, their parents’ hearing status, and their family’s socioeconomic status. This study applies identity control theory and examines the relationship between Deaf identity verification processes and self-esteem. The results show that, when controlling for variables known to relate to self-esteem, deaf individuals’ education and the degree of difficulty they have in verifying self-meanings in social situations are the only significant predictors of variance in self-esteem. The article discusses the study findings and considers the implications for identity control theorists and Deaf studies scholars.     

Mosques,Churches, and Civic Skill Opportunities in Indonesia

This article examines the role of houses of worship as institutions where individuals acquire civic skills that can be deployed for political participation in the world's largest Muslim‐majority democracy: Indonesia. Drawing on participant observation and interviews in Muslim, Protestant, and Catholic religious communities in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, this article investigates three questions: (1) What opportunities exist for individuals worshipping in Indonesian churches and mosques to develop and practice civic skills as part of their religious engagement? (2) Does civic skill opportunity vary across religious denominations? and (3) What factors might explain variation across different religious settings? The study shows that mosques offer fewer prospects for their worshippers to develop civic skills than do churches. These denominational differences can be explained by a house of worship's management practices, which are shaped by its degree of autonomy, style of worship, and the relative size of the religious denomination.     

Children's biobehavioral reactivity to challenge predicts DNA methylation in adolescence and emerging adulthood

A growing body of research has documented associations between adverse childhood environments and DNA methylation, highlighting epigenetic processes as potential mechanisms through which early external contexts influence health across the life course. The present study tested a complementary hypothesis: indicators of children's early internal, biological, and behavioral responses to stressful challenges may also be linked to stable patterns of DNA methylation later in life. Children's autonomic nervous system reactivity, temperament, and mental health symptoms were prospectively assessed from infancy through early childhood, and principal components analysis (PCA) was applied to derive composites of biological and behavioral reactivity. Buccal epithelial cells were collected from participants at 15 and 18 years of age. Findings revealed an association between early life biobehavioral inhibition/disinhibition and DNA methylation across many genes. Notably, reactive, inhibited children were found to have decreased DNA methylation of the DLX5 and IGF2 genes at both time points, as compared to non‐reactive, disinhibited children. Results of the present study are provisional but suggest that the gene's profile of DNA methylation may constitute a biomarker of normative or potentially pathological differences in reactivity. Overall, findings provide a foundation for future research to explore relations among epigenetic processes and differences in both individual‐level biobehavioral risk and qualities of the early, external childhood environment.     

Toward Developing Laboratory-Based Parent–Adolescent Conflict Discussion Tasks that Consistently Elicit Adolescent Conflict-Related Stress Responses: Support from Physiology and Observed Behavior

Parent–adolescent conflict poses risk for youth maladjustment. One potential mechanism of this risk is that stress in the form of increased arousal during conflict interactions results in adolescents’ impaired decision-making. However, eliciting consistent adolescent stress responses within laboratory-based tasks of parent–adolescent conflict (i.e., conflict discussion tasks) is hindered by task design. This limitation may stem from how conflict topics are assessed and selected for discussion. Within a sample of 47 adolescents (ages 14–17) and parents, we investigated whether a modified version of a conflict discussion task could elicit physiological (i.e., arousal) and behavioral (i.e., hostility) displays of adolescents’ conflict-related stress responses. We assessed parent–adolescent conflict via structured interview to identify topics for dyads to discuss during the task. We randomly assigned dyads to complete a 5-min task to discuss either a putatively benign topic (i.e., control condition) or a conflict topic while undergoing direct assessments of continuous arousal. Trained raters coded dyad members’ hostile behavior during the task. Adolescents in the conflict condition exhibited significantly greater levels of arousal than adolescents in the control condition. We observed an interaction between discussion condition and baseline conflict. Specifically, higher baseline conflict predicted greater hostile behavior for adolescents in the conflict condition, yet we observed the inverse relation for adolescents in the control condition. Our modified laboratory discussion task successfully elicited both physiological and behavioral displays of adolescent conflict-related stress. These findings have important implications for leveraging experimental paradigms to understand causal links between parent–adolescent conflict and adolescent psychopathology, and their underlying mechanisms.     

A Meta‐analytic and Conceptual Update on the Associations Between Procrastination and Multidimensional Perfectionism

The equivocal and debated findings from a 2007 meta‐analysis, which viewed perfectionism as a unidimensional construct, suggested that perfectionism was unrelated to procrastination. The present meta‐analysis aimed to provide a conceptual update and reanalysis of the procrastination–perfectionism association guided by both a multidimensional view of perfectionism and self‐regulation theory. The random‐effects meta‐analyses revealed a small to medium positive average effect size (r  = .23; k  = 43, N  = 10 000; 95% confidence interval (95% CI) [0.19, 0.27]) for trait procrastination and perfectionistic concerns and a small to medium negative average effect size (r  = ?.22; k  = 38, N  = 9544; 95% CI [?0.26, ?0.18]) for procrastination and perfectionistic strivings. The average correlations remained significant after statistically accounting for the joint variance between the two perfectionism dimensions via semi‐partial correlations. For perfectionistic concerns, but not perfectionistic strivings, the effects depended on the perfectionism measure used. All effects did not vary by the trait procrastination measure used or the respondent's sex. Our findings confirm that from a multidimensional perspective, trait procrastination is both positively and negatively associated with higher‐order perfectionism dimensions and further highlights the value of a self‐regulation perspective for understanding the cognitive, affective and behavioural dynamics that characterise these traits. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology