Accounting for achievement in parent-teacher interviews

This paper examines features of the talk in a number of teacher-parent interviews recently audio-recorded in a secondary school in Brisbane, Australia. The central topic of the talk is the academic achievement of the student. In offering accounts of the student's achievement, participants offer moral versions of themselves as parents and teachers. These institutional identities are oriented to and elaborated in the course and in the organisation of this talk. The student about whom the talk is done is present but largely silent, an overhearing audience to this talk. The analysis shows how parents and teachers talk two institutions, and the relation between them, into being.We wish to thank the participants in the interviews for their agreement to have the interviews audio-recorded.     

Infant sensitivity to shadow motions

Preferential looking experiments investigated 5- and 8-month-old infants' perception and understanding of the motions of a shadow that appeared to be cast by a ball upon a box. When all the surfaces within the display were stationary, infants looked reliably longer when the shadow moved than when the shadow was stationary, indicating that they detected the shadow and its motion. In further experiments, however, infants' looking was not consistent with a sensitivity to the shadow's natural motion: They looked longer at natural events in which the shadow moved with the ball or remained at rest under the moving box than at unnatural events in which the shadow moved with the box or remained at rest under the moving ball. These findings suggest that infants overextend to shadows a principle that applies to material objects: Objects move together if and only if they are in contact. In a final experiment, infants were habituated to a moving shadow that repeatedly violated one aspect of the contact principle. In a subsequent test they failed to infer that the shadow would violate another aspect of the contact principle. Instead, they appeared to suspend all predictions concerning the behavior of the shadow.     

Integrating Expressiveness and Instrumentality in Real-Life Settings: A New Perspective on the Benefits of Androgyny

Personality trait research has failed to substantiate a link between androgyny and well-being. Using an alternate, social context approach, the present study investigated (a) positive and negative aspects of situations in which expectations for androgynous behavior were salient (dual expectation situations), and (b) associations between gender role coping strategies and well-being in these situations. Interviews were conducted with 124 female and 70 male undergraduates, most of whom were African American (14%) or White American (81%). Participants reported significantly more negative aspects of the process of coping with dual expectation situations and more positive aspects of the outcomes of the situations. Androgynous coping strategies were associated with greater positive well-being and lesser negative well-being than were instrumental or indeterminate strategies. Well-being scores of expressive strategists were not significantly different from those of androgynous strategists.     

Needs, Wants and Goals: Wellbeing, Quality of Life and Public Policy

This paper considers the possible contribution of Quality of Life methods in international development policy and practice. It discusses the role of theories of human needs in how public policy makers and implementors might distinguish between ‘needs’ and ‘wants’. There is a good case for extending theories of human need to encompass social and psychological needs, but when we do so the ability of theory to distinguish between ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ begins to evaporate. Rather, by virtue of the core relationship between needs denial and harm, it is argued that a theory of human need can provide a framework for reasoning about what constitute needs. Empirical quality of life data can then assist policy makers to identify what constitute needs satisfiers in particular societal and cultural contexts. They also can provide important information to enable processes of public reasoning about the relative societal importance of different needs claims. The paper uses data generated through the application of two Quality of Life methods in Southern and Northeast Thailand, which were employed as part of a comprehensive study of the social and cultural construction of wellbeing in developing countries, to illustrate its arguments. The paper concludes that if routinely incorporated into local policy process, such quality of life methods have a possible contribution to make to effective democratic governance for development.     

What you see is what you want to see: Motivationally relevant stimuli can interrupt current resource allocation

Arousing stimuli, either threat-related or pleasant, may be selected for priority at different stages within the processing stream. Here we examine the pattern of processing for non-task-relevant threatening (spiders: arousing to some) and pleasant stimuli (babies or chocolate: arousing to all) by recording the gaze of a spider Fearful and Non-fearful group while they performed a simple “follow the cross” task. There was no difference in first saccade latencies. Saccade trajectories showed a general hypervigilance for all stimuli in the Fearful group. Saccade landing positions corresponded to what each group would find arousing, such that the Fearful group deviated towards both types of images whereas the Non-fearful group deviated towards pleasant images. Secondary corrective saccade latencies away from threat-related stimuli were longer for the Fearful group (difficulty in disengaging) compared with the Non-fearful group. These results suggest that attentional biases towards arousing stimuli may occur at different processing stages.     

Building and sustaining work engagement – a participatory action intervention to increase work engagement in nursing staff

This study evaluated whether a participatory action research intervention with nursing staff on acute care older people National Health Service wards in the United Kingdom was effective for increasing work engagement. Mediation analyses between job resources (social support, influence in decision-making), job demands, work-related needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness), and work engagement explored the presumed psychological mechanisms underlying the intervention. A non-randomized, matched control group, pretest, post-test design involved three intervention and five control wards. A significant decrease in relatedness, and a borderline significant decrease in competence, was observed in the intervention group compared to the control group, with no effect on work engagement (N = 45). Work-related needs mediated between resources and work engagement, supporting the job demands-resources model and self-determination theory as an underlying explanatory theory. Intervention implementation was difficult, highlighting the need for participant and organizational readiness for change, and strong management support. This is the first known study to apply participatory techniques to increase work engagement in nursing staff and explore the underlying explanatory psychological mechanisms, offering a novel means of taking work engagement research forward. Crucially, it highlights the challenges involved in intervention research and the importance of including evaluations of intervention implementation alongside statistical evaluations to avoid erroneous conclusions.     

Comparative longitudinal structural analyses of the growth and decline of multiple intellectual abilities over the life span.

Latent growth curve techniques and longitudinal data are used to examine predictions from the theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence (Gf-Gc theory; J. L. Horn & R. B. Cattell, 1966, 1967). The data examined are from a sample (N approximately 1,200) measured on the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery-Revised (WJ-R). The longitudinal structural equation models used are based on latent growth models of age using two-occasion "accelerated" data (e.g., J. J. McArdle & R. Q. Bell, 2000; J. J. McArdle & R. W. Woodcock, 1997). Nonlinear mixed-effects growth models based on a dual exponential rate yield a reasonable fit to all life span cognitive data. These results suggest that most broad cognitive functions fit a generalized curve that rises and falls. Novel multilevel models directly comparing growth curves show that broad fluid reasoning (Gf) and acculturated crystallized knowledge (Gc) have different growth patterns. In all comparisons, any model of cognitive age changes with only a single g factor yields an overly simplistic view of growth and change over age.     

Reciprocity in a Securely Attached Mother-Infant Dyad

This article describes the interactions between a highly attuned, sensitive mother, who had the capacity to achieve primary maternal preoccupation, and her infant during his first four months of life. The evolving secure attachment patterns discerned from weekly observations in a naturalistic setting correspond with Beatrice Beebe’s findings using microanalysis of mother-infant face-to-face interactions to predict the nature of the four-month infant’s emerging internal working model of attachment. Using a series of vignettes, the author illustrates how this mother-infant dyad were adept at coordinating their attention, affective responses, vocal rhythms, and touch in ways that seemed to promote feelings of mutual recognition and enjoyment for them both. The mother’s capacity for reflective functioning enabled her to imagine what her baby was feeling and to consistently comfort him, contributing to the formation of their secure mother-infant bond.     

Teachers as therapeutic agents: perceptions of a school-based mental health initiative

Teacher–child relationship building (TCRB) is a play-based professional development programme adapted from kinder training and filial therapy. Intended for early education teachers and students, TCRB is designed to strengthen the teacher–child relationship, improve student behaviour, enhance academic involvement and develop teachers' classroom management skills. In the current study, we utilised a phenomenological approach to examine teachers' perceptions of the initial implementation of TCRB through identifying individual and collective perspectives in the summation of themes. Findings indicated that the teachers perceived the TCRB model to be informative, well organised, appropriately structured and effective in enhancing teacher–child relationships, improving classroom management skills and reducing behavioural problems among child participants. Limitations of the study, implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

The intention‐superiority effect for naturally occurring activities: The role of intention accessibility in everyday prospective remembering in young and older adults

This study examined age differences in the accessibility of a single pool of naturally occurring intentions both before and after completion. Following Maylor, Darby, and Della Sala (2000), accessibility was measured in terms of the number of activities generated in a 4‐minute activity fluency task. Each participant undertook two such tasks. A prospective task in which they generated activities intended for completion during the following week and a retrospective task, 1 week later, in which they generated activities carried out over the previous week. In a partial replication of Maylor et al.'s findings, young, but not healthy older, adults generated more to‐be‐completed intentions than completed ones, demonstrating an intention‐superiority effect (ISE) for everyday activities. The absence of an ISE for older adults appeared to reflect the reduced accessibility of intentions prior to completion, rather than the impaired inhibition of fulfilled intentions. Moreover, both groups showed greater inaccessibility of completed than intended activities, thus demonstrating an intention‐completion effect for naturally occurring intentions that is preserved in healthy ageing (cf. Marsh, Hicks, & Bink, 1998). Despite showing a reduced accessibility of intended activities, older adults reported having completed a greater proportion of their intentions during the week than young adults. Moreover, there was a correlation between the ability to access intentions and the proportion of intentions completed only for young adults. These observations suggest that older adults' everyday prospective memory performance may be relatively less dependent on intention accessibility and more dependent on other factors. While there was no age difference in the reported use and effectiveness of external retrieval aids, older adults demonstrated a greater level of temporal organization in the production of their intentions in the fluency task. This is consistent with the possibility that older adults may have more structured daily lives and may be able to use information about the sequence of ongoing events to support superior everyday prospective remembering.