Assessing pupil concerns about transition to secondary school

Background. The primary–secondary transition can negatively affect pupils' emotional and psychological adjustment. However, methods for assessing concerns regarding secondary school are limited. A reliable and valid measure of transition‐related concerns would be useful both in evaluating and shaping the content and delivery of universal and targeted transition support programmes. Aims. To assess the validity of a quantitative self‐report measure of school concerns as an assessment tool during the primary–secondary school transition. Sample. A UK sample of 147 Year 6 primary school pupils and 263 Year 7 secondary school pupils. Method. Self‐reports of school concerns and school liking as well as self‐reported and peer assessments on a range of psychological adjustment measures were collected. Results. The School Concerns Questionnaire (SCQ) showed good reliability at primary and secondary school. Secondary concerns reduced significantly post‐transition. Three factors emerged from an exploratory factor analysis of the SCQ and the pattern of results was replicated for post‐transition concerns. Pupils with higher school concerns at secondary school reported reduced liking of school and reduced trust and respect for teachers. The SCQ was associated with generalized anxiety and female gender both pre‐and post‐transition. Peer problems and depression were associated with pre‐ and post‐transition concerns, respectively. Conclusions. The SCQ is a simple to complete, reliable, and valid tool for assessing primary–secondary transition concerns. It could serve a valuable role in the evaluation and development of universal and targeted school‐based initiatives that aim to promote positive secondary transition.     

The Cost of Caring? Emotional Labour,Wellbeing and the Clergy

Although members of the clergy experience working conditions that have been associated with “emotional labour”, little is known about the impact of this aspect of the job role on wellbeing. This study examined relationships between emotional labour and psychological distress and intrinsic job satisfaction in 188 UK-based clergy. Also investigated were the potential moderating effects of social support and training in counselling skills. Findings revealed significant associations between emotional labour and both psychological distress and job satisfaction. Evidence was found that counselling training and a wider social network may protect clergy from the negative impact of emotional labour, but social network size may also be a risk factor for wellbeing. Further research should examine the impact of emotional labour on clergy, and the factors that might help them manage this more effectively.     

The making of careers, the making of a discipline: Luck and chance in migrant careers in geriatric medicine

The geriatric specialty, unpopular among most UK born and trained medical graduates, provided an opportunity for career development and achievement for those doctors whose training had been non-standard for a variety of reasons. Migrant doctors who have played a substantive role in the UK National Health Service since its inception made an important contribution to the building of that specialty, at the same time building their own careers. This paper draws on oral history interviews with the UK trained pioneers of geriatric medicine and with South Asian overseas trained doctors who entered the geriatric specialty in the middle decades of the twentieth century. It critically reviews the literature of skilled migration, specifically in terms of ‘brain drain’ and ‘push–pull’, focusing on historical and socio-cognitive communities and emphasizes the contribution of individual narratives of career development in the lives of migrants. Focusing on the use of luck and chance in accounts it suggests that although such terms are indicative of chance upon opportunity, they also suggest a role for agency in career development in contexts which were not auspicious. The outcome, for those interviewed, was regarded positively in career terms, but also had a significant part to play in the development of the career of the specialty of geriatric medicine and in the lives of the marginalized people for whom they developed a service.     

Virtual human analogs to rodent spatial pattern separation and completion memory tasks

Spatial pattern separation (SPS) and spatial pattern completion (SPC) have played an increasingly important role in computational and rodent literatures as processes underlying associative memory. SPS and SPC are complementary processes, allowing the formation of unique representations and the reconstruction of complete spatial environments based on partial spatial information. We present two novel computerized navigational tasks as human analogs of well-established rat SPS and SPC tasks. Results from these tasks show that human participants are sensitive to increasing SPS and SPC demands. Specifically, memory accuracy decreased with decreasing separation distance between target and foil locations in the SPS task and with decreasing number of distal spatial cues in the SPC task. These tasks set the stage for valuable future directions, including the use of these tasks with imaging and clinical populations.     

Personality,age, and fluid intelligence

A total of 383 participants (aged 19 to 66 years) completed the Raven's Progressive Matrices, the Myers‐Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation‐Behavior (FIRO‐B), and the California Psychological Inventory‐434 (CPI‐434). Results showed that IQ was positively correlated with perceiving (MBTI), control (FIRO‐B), intellectual efficiency (CPI‐434), achievement via independence (CPI‐434), and negatively correlated with sensing (MBTI), internality (CPI‐434) and norm‐favouring (CPI‐434), supporting the majority of the hypotheses. Participants' age was correlated with many measures, particularly intelligence and accounted for a third of the variance in IQ scores. Limitations are considered.     

Positive overgeneralization and Behavioral Approach System (BAS) sensitivity interact to predict prospective increases in hypomanic symptoms: a behavioral high-risk design

Recent work has identified Behavioral Approach System (BAS) sensitivity as a risk factor for the first onset and recurrence of mood episodes in bipolar disorder, but little work has evaluated risk factors for the prospective development of hypomanic symptoms in individuals at risk for, but without a history of, bipolar disorder. The present study used a prospective behavioral high-risk design to evaluate the impact of positive overgeneralization, a cognitive correlate of risk for hypomania, on hypomanic symptoms in individuals with high vs. moderate BAS sensitivity, but without a history of mood elevation. Hierarchical linear regressions indicated that upward positive overgeneralization and BAS sensitivity interacted to predict increased levels of hypomanic symptoms at follow-up, controlling for initial hypomanic symptoms. The pattern of this interaction was such that positive overgeneralization predicted higher levels of hypomanic symptoms among high-BAS, but not moderate-BAS, individuals. Thus, the self-reported tendency to experience grandiose increases in confidence following success may confer additional risk for mood elevation among individuals already at risk for developing bipolar disorder. Potential implications for prevention and treatment are discussed.     

Reallocating attention during multiple object tracking

Wolfe, Place, and Horowitz (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 14:344?C349, 2007) found that participants were relatively unaffected by selecting and deselecting targets while performing a multiple object tracking task, such that maintaining tracking was possible for longer durations than the few seconds typically studied. Though this result was generally consistent with other findings on tracking duration (Franconeri, Jonathon, & Scimeca Psychological Science 21:920?C925, 2010), it was inconsistent with research involving cuing paradigms, specifically precues (Pylyshyn & Annan Spatial Vision 19:485?C504, 2006). In the present research, we broke down the addition and removal of targets into separate conditions and incorporated a simple performance model to evaluate the costs associated with the selection and deselection of moving targets. Across three experiments, we demonstrated evidence against a cost being associated with any shift in attention, but rather that varying the type of cue used for target deselection produces no additional cost to performance and that hysteresis effects are not induced by a reduction in tracking load.     

Neural theory for the perception of causal actions

The efficient prediction of the behavior of others requires the recognition of their actions and an understanding of their action goals. In humans, this process is fast and extremely robust, as demonstrated by classical experiments showing that human observers reliably judge causal relationships and attribute interactive social behavior to strongly simplified stimuli consisting of simple moving geometrical shapes. While psychophysical experiments have identified critical visual features that determine the perception of causality and agency from such stimuli, the underlying detailed neural mechanisms remain largely unclear, and it is an open question why humans developed this advanced visual capability at all. We created pairs of naturalistic and abstract stimuli of hand actions that were exactly matched in terms of their motion parameters. We show that varying critical stimulus parameters for both stimulus types leads to very similar modulations of the perception of causality. However, the additional form information about the hand shape and its relationship with the object supports more fine-grained distinctions for the naturalistic stimuli. Moreover, we show that a physiologically plausible model for the recognition of goal-directed hand actions reproduces the observed dependencies of causality perception on critical stimulus parameters. These results support the hypothesis that selectivity for abstract action stimuli might emerge from the same neural mechanisms that underlie the visual processing of natural goal-directed action stimuli. Furthermore, the model proposes specific detailed neural circuits underlying this visual function, which can be evaluated in future experiments.     

Evaluative conditioning may occur with and without contingency awareness

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is considered to play an important role in the attitude formation. One of the ongoing debates in this field concerns the impact of contingency awareness (i.e., awareness of the contingent relationship between conditioned and unconditioned stimulus, CS–US) on the EC occurrence. Despite the claims that EC does not require awareness of CS–US contingencies, the recent studies have claimed just the opposite. However, a number of methodological issues can be raised to undermine those claims. In two experiments, we tried to eliminate potential faults and sought to learn whether EC occurs with or without contingency awareness of either US identity or US valence. We report significant EC effects both with and without contingency awareness. These results provide support for the claim that the EC effects might be produced by independent mechanisms linked to awareness. We also argue that those mechanisms are differently captured by available measures of EC.