Students' Journey Through a Trauma Studies Educational Program: A Northern Irish Perspective

This article presents the findings of a qualitative research study that explored the experiences of part-time students who completed a BSc(Hons) trauma studies program in Northern Ireland. Data collection involved semistructured interviews with seven students. Findings indicated a journey through the program during which students experienced both challenges and opportunities for development. Such challenges included responses to emotive content and barriers to sharing in classroom-based dialogues. Moreover, participants felt the program enhanced their knowledge as well as the supportive services they provided to those who had experienced a trauma. Findings suggest that participants who had experienced a personal trauma appeared to be drawn to this program.     

Aging and the Accessibility of Performed and To-Be-Performed Actions

In young adults information designated for future enactment is more readily accessible from memory than information not intended for enactment (e.g. Goschke & Kuhl, 1993). We examined whether this advantage for to-be-enacted material is reduced in older adults and thus whether attenuated action accessibility could underlie age-associated declines in prospective remembering. Young and older adults showed an equivalent increase in accessibility (faster recognition latencies) for to-be-enacted items over items intended for verbal report. Both age groups also showed increased accessibility for actions performed at encoding compared with verbally encoded items. Moreover, these effects were non-additive, suggesting similarities in the representation of completed and to-be-completed actions.     

Blame Conformity: Leading Eyewitness Statements can Influence Attributions of Blame for an Accident

The present experiment examined whether attributions of blame for an incident can be shifted between individuals as a result of a leading eyewitness statement. Participants watched a video of an accident involving two men and then read either a non‐leading eyewitness statement that blamed no one for the accident or a leading eyewitness statement that blamed one of the two men for the accident. Participants' attributions of blame for the accident were then assessed either immediately or after a 1 week delay. Regardless of the time delay, just over one‐third of participants who read a leading statement subsequently blamed the same person as the eyewitness. In contrast, less than 4% of participants who read a non‐leading statement blamed one of the men. This research is the first to demonstrate blame conformity, where blame for an incident can be shifted between individuals as a result of a leading eyewitness statement. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The solace of radicalism: Self-uncertainty and group identification in the face of threat

From uncertainty–identity theory, it was hypothesized that where people feel their self-relevant values and practices are under threat, self-uncertainty strengthens identification with “radical” groups, and either has no effect on or weakens identification with “moderate” groups. Since this hypothesis was tested on Australian students, who prefer to identify with moderate groups, the context-specific expectation was for that preference to disappear under uncertainty. This prediction was confirmed by a laboratory experiment in which self-uncertainty and group radicalism were manipulated in a 2 × 2 design (N = 82); the preference to identify with a moderate over a radical group disappeared under uncertainty because uncertainty strengthened identification with the radical group. This effect was directly mirrored in people's intentions to engage in specific group behaviors, and behavioral intentions were mediated by identification. The research is framed by a discussion of the relationship between uncertainty and social extremism, and implications for future research are noted.     

Transcending tradition

In recent years, the renewed presence of religion in the European societies has inspired a number of intellectuals on a popular as well as academic level to critically engage with religion. The aim of this article is to give a contribution to this debate. In contrast to the rather reductive and objectifying accounts of religion offered in much of the contemporary critique, I argue that a relevant and constructive critique of religion is most effectively achieved when undertaken from within the religious tradition itself. As an example of an internal critical resource in the Christian tradition, I seek to explore the idea of a continuous revelation through the Holy Spirit, pointing to the self-exceeding nature of every living tradition and thus to our need and duty continuously to engage in a constructive critical reinterpretation of the tradition.     

Changes in Attitudes and Self-Confidence in the Women's and Gender Studies Classroom: The Role of Teacher Alliance and Student Cohesion

Previous research provides evidence that women's and gender studies (WGS) classes are successful in helping students to develop more egalitarian gender role attitudes, appreciation and acceptance of diversity, awareness of sexism and other social inequities, and agentic self-confidence in both women and men. The mechanisms by which these changes take place were the focus of this study. WGS students (n = 328) from 23 classes on four college campuses participated. Results indicated that (a) student readiness (positive WGS class expectations and capacity for positive interpersonal relationships) predicted the development of alliances with teachers and cohesion with classmates, (b) alliance and cohesion were associated with changes toward more egalitarian attitudes, (c) cohesion was associated with increases in confidence, and (d) links between student readiness and change were mediated by alliance and cohesion developed within the WGS classroom.     

Object substitution masking and its relationship with visual crowding

Object substitution masking (OSM) occurs when the perceptibility of a brief target is reduced by a trailing surround mask typically composed of four dots. Camp et al. (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41, 940–957, 2015) found that crowding a target by adding adjacent flankers, in addition to OSM, had a more deleterious effect on performance than expected based on the combined individual effects of crowding and masking alone. The current experiments test why OSM and crowding interact in this way. In three experiments, target-flanker distance is manipulated whilst also varying mask duration in a digit identification task. The OSM effect—as indexed by the performance difference between unmasked and masked conditions—had a quadratic function with respect to target-flanker distance. Results suggest it is OSM affecting crowding rather than the converse: Masking seems to amplify crowding at intermediate target-distractor distances at the edge of the crowding interference zone. These results indicate that OSM and crowding share common mechanisms. The effect of OSM is possibly a consequence of changes to the types of feature detectors which are pooled together for target identification when that target must compete for processing with a trailing mask in addition to competition from adjacent flankers.