Psychological skills and mindfulness training effects on the psychological wellbeing of undergraduate music students: An exploratory study

This study explored the efficacy of psychological skills and mindfulness training intervention on the psychological wellbeing of undergraduate music students. Participants were undergraduate music students (n = 36) from the Department of Music at a South African university, 21 of whom were elected to take the psychological skills and mindfulness training intervention. Data on their self-reported psychological wellbeing, psychological skills, mindfulness and performance anxiety levels were collected pre-and post-intervention. The analysis applied non-parametric procedures to determine changes in students’ psychological wellbeing after the seven-week intervention programme. Findings suggest improvements in psychological wellbeing, psychological skills, mindfulness and performance anxiety with training. Psychological skills and mindfulness training may have benefits to the psychological wellbeing of music students.     

The Post-National Constellation: Habermas and ``the Second Modernity'

For some years now, Jürgen Habermas, possibly the most influential European philosopher of today, has been producing a growing number of publications on world politics. In the historical context of the collapse of bipolarity and the advent of the triad, along with the punitive wars in the Gulf and Yugoslavia, he is very far from being alone: Jacques Derrida and Noberto Bobbio,Michael Walzer and John Rawls, to name only the most forceful, have also been thinking out loud about the new political configurations beyond the nation-state. The characteristic feature of Habermas’s thought is to perceive a radically new historical configuration, which he calls a‘post-national constellation’ and which would justify the development of a new political project, as a transition to a new cosmopolitan law. In what follows, I examine the precise modalities that are supposed to transform his philosophical design into political and legal arrangements, attempting to dissect the Habermasian vision of a post-Cold War politics better adapted to the challenges of the new century, and to throw light on the ideology behind it, as a prolegomenon to the larger project Habermas invites us to undertake. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.