Effective professionals engaged in reflective practice: A response to Kidd et al.

Training for careers guidance is undergoing rapid and radical change. The Employment Department's January 1995 invitation to bid for pilot programmes for work-based, competency training represents a sharp contrast to the off-the-job academic training which has, for the past 20 years, been located in higher education. An informed debate and well-founded empirical findings would contribute to the constructive management of these changes. However, Kidd et al.'s (1994) research on careers officers' use of theory in guidance interviews is criticised as being seriously flawed. Questions are posed regarding their conceptual framework, several aspects of their methodology, and their apparent lack of awareness of directly relevant theory and research.     

Witnessed aggression: influence of an observer's sex and values on aggressive responding.

Two experiments investigated the effects of the presence of an observer on aggressive responding. In one experiment, male subjects observed by a male aggressed more than those observed by a female. When the male observer was removed from the situation, subjects' level of aggressiveness more closely matched the level manifested by the opponent. The removal of the female observer had little effect on the subjects' behavior. In the second experiment, the male or female observer of the subject's behavior was disguised as a member of an organization with explicit values (aggressive or pacifistic) regarding the use of aggression. In this case, significant differences in aggression were associated with the observer's values but not the observer's sex. Following the departure of the observer, the shock settings of subjects in the two aggressive-value observer groups showed a signifcant decrease. The average shock setting of subjects in the two pacifistic-value observer groups remained at about the same level. In sum, the results indicated that the subjects' aggressive behavior was apparently a function of their expectations of approval for such behavior, based on the inferred or explicit values of the observer. The results were further discussed in terms of social learning theory.     

Sensory features and the reduction of imaginal interference

Interference generated among the sensory features of PA stimulus words is not eliminated by processing at the imaginal level. This experiment was planned to test the reverse possibility. Will interference generated by similar imaginal referents be eliminated by sensory overlap between the stimuli and their responses? Thus, stimulus words did or did not evoke similar images, pairs did or did not share initial letters, and lists were acquired either under an instructional set t o form interacting images or to repeat the items aloud. The results indicated that the imagery strategy was superior to the repetition strategy in all conditions, and that stimulus interference was statistically eliminated when pairs shared the same initial letters. The findings were interpreted as consistent with a levels of processing conceptualization.     

The Social Instigation and Control of Physical Aggression

Forty male undergraduates were subjects in an experiment testing persuasibility under conditions of aggression and nonaggression. Social pressure (aggressive or pacifist) was used to persuade subjects to administer either an intense shock or a mild shock, via an electrode, to opponents. Subjects were also tested alone and in the mere presence of an audience. Aggressive social pressure significantly increased shock settings toward a nonaggressive opponent. Pacifistic social pressure significantly decreased aggression against an unmitigating aggressive opponent. The social pressure manipulation influenced the subjects' subsequent alone behavior in the former, but not the latter case. Mere audience presence mildly facilitated aggressive responding toward both types of opponents.     

Differential reinforcement of low rates of responding (DRL) to reduce dysfunctional social behaviors of a head injured man

Differential reinforcement of low rates of responding (DRL) is a technique in which a positive reinforcer is delivered at the end of a specific interval if a target behavior has occurred at a criterion rate. Traditionally, it has been used in educational settings to manage classroom behaviors. Recently, therapists have begun to use DRL to reduce the rates of a variety of behaviors in non-educational settings. In this study, DRL was part of a behavioral intervention to reduce dysfunctional verbal and physical behaviors of a head-injured young man. The complete intervention program included DRL, changing criteria, and token reinforcement. Over a period of 15 weeks, the intervention resulted in reductions in behaviors in both categories from high rates to near-zero rates.     

Patterns of emotional availability between mothers and young children: Associations with risk factors for borderline personality disorder

Emotional availability (EA) characterizes a warm, close relationship between caregiver and child. We compared patterns (clusters) of EA on risk factors, including those for borderline personality disorder (BPD). We sampled 70 children aged 4 to 7 years from low socio‐economic backgrounds: 51% of whose mothers had BPD. We coded filmed interactions for EA: mothers' sensitivity, structuring, non‐intrusiveness, non‐hostility, and children's responsiveness to, and involvement of, mothers. We additionally coded children's over‐responsiveness and over‐involvement. Using person‐centred analyses, we identified four clusters: high functioning, low functioning, asynchronous (mothers above average on two of four dimensions and children below), and below average. Mothers in the low‐functioning cluster had lower income, less social support, more of the borderline feature of negative relationships, and more depression than did mothers in the high‐functioning cluster. The children in the low‐functioning group had more risk factors for BPD (physical abuse, neglect, and separation from, or loss of caregivers, and negative narrative representations of the mother–child relationship in their stories) than did children in the high‐functioning group. The asynchronous group included older girls who were over‐responsive and over‐involving with their mothers in an apparent role reversal. Interventions targeting emotional availability may provide a buffer for children facing cumulative risks and help prevent psychopathology.

Highlights

• This paper investigated how mother‐child emotional availability (warmth and closeness) relates to risk factors for borderline personality disorder, including mother‐child role reversal.
• In filmed mother‐child interactions, low emotional availability was associated with risk for borderline personality disorder and role reversal was more likely for older girls.
• Findings support the cumulative risk hypothesis and may inform interventions to improve mother‐child emotional availability to prevent the development of psychopathology.

     

Isolated words enhance statistical language learning in infancy

Infants are adept at tracking statistical regularities to identify word boundaries in pause-free speech. However, researchers have questioned the relevance of statistical learning mechanisms to language acquisition, since previous studies have used simplified artificial languages that ignore the variability of real language input. The experiments reported here embraced a key dimension of variability in infant-directed speech. English-learning infants (8-10 months) listened briefly to natural Italian speech that contained either fluent speech only or a combination of fluent speech and single-word utterances. Listening times revealed successful learning of the statistical properties of target words only when words appeared both in fluent speech and in isolation; brief exposure to fluent speech alone was not sufficient to facilitate detection of the words' statistical properties. This investigation suggests that statistical learning mechanisms actually benefit from variability in utterance length, and provides the first evidence that isolated words and longer utterances act in concert to support infant word segmentation.     

Interactions between statistical and semantic information in infant language development

Infants can use statistical regularities to form rudimentary word categories (e.g. noun, verb), and to learn the meanings common to words from those categories. Using an artificial language methodology, we probed the mechanisms by which two types of statistical cues (distributional and phonological regularities) affect word learning. Because linking distributional cues vs. phonological information to semantics make different computational demands on learners, we also tested whether their use is related to language proficiency. We found that 22-month-old infants with smaller vocabularies generalized using phonological cues; however, infants with larger vocabularies showed the opposite pattern of results, generalizing based on distributional cues. These findings suggest that both phonological and distributional cues marking word categories promote early word learning. Moreover, while correlations between these cues are important to forming word categories, we found infants' weighting of these cues in subsequent word-learning tasks changes over the course of early language development.