Youth mentoring: The American Dream comes to the UK?

This paper examines the ways in which the North American experience has influenced youth mentoring programmes in the UK and focuses on the theoretical assumptions about young people which have underpinned mentoring interventions. A more critical approach to this North American 'legacy' is required if the value of this form of intervention is to be accurately assessed. The paper argues that an over-reliance by mentoring interventions on developmental paradigms has curtailed their capacity to take account of the wider social context in which young people are making their transitions to adulthood. It is suggested that alternative theoretical frameworks which address the complexity and multiplicity of youth transitions hold more promise for understanding and theorising the role of mentoring in the UK setting. A recent Scottish study of informal mentoring processes attempted to open up these theoretical possibilities by using a framework which recognised young people as active participants and agents. This study revealed that a range of models of mentoring may be in place within informal mentoring relationships. The paper argues that findings from this study demonstrated a need for a more critical approach to the 'classic notion' of mentoring as exclusively a one to one relationship between an adult and a young person. Since mentoring is now a highly popular form of intervention with 'socially excluded' young people these questions about the theoretical base for the concept require urgent attention.     

Narcissism, eroticism, and envy in the supervisory relationship.

Supervision takes place in a framework of time, place, and duration agreed upon by teacher and student. But beyond the formal arrangements of supervision lie a host of behaviors that express conscious and unconscious fears and wishes that are aroused in student and teacher by their meetings. This paper focuses on supervisors' motivations for teaching, and the ways in which their narcissistic vulnerabilities and their feelings for their students may influence the frame of supervision and its outcome.     

Rhetoric and Dialectic from the Standpoint of Normative Pragmatics

Normative pragmatics can bridge the differences between dialectical and rhetorical theories in a way that saves the central insights of both. Normative pragmatics calls attention to how the manifest strategic design of a message produces interpretive effects and interactional consequences. Argumentative analysis of messages should begin with the manifest persuasive rationale they communicate. But not all persuasive inducements should be treated as arguments. Arguments express with a special pragmatic force propositions where those propositions stand in particular inferential relations to one another. Normative pragmatics provides a framework within which varieties of propositional inference and pragmatic force may be kept straight. Normative pragmatics conceptualizes argumentative effectiveness in a way that integrates notions of rhetorical strategy and rhetorical situation with dialectical norms and procedures for reasonable deliberation. Strategic effectiveness should be seen in terms of maximizing the chances that claims and arguments will be reasonably evaluated, whether or not they are accepted. Procedural rationality should be seen in terms of adjustment to the demands of concrete circumstances. Two types of adjustment are illustrated: rhetorical strategies for framing the conditions for dialectical deliberation and rhetorical strategies for making do with limitations to dialectical deliberation.     

An assessment of social validity trends in applied behavior analysis

Research articles published during the first 31 years of Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis were assessed for reports of social validity measures. Two measures of social validity (treatment outcome and treatment acceptability) were assessed for each article. In addition, articles were assessed for the incorporation of analog versus naturalistic settings. Overall, treatment outcome and acceptability measures were reported in less than 13% of articles. In addition, studies conducted in naturalistic settings were more likely to report social validity measures than studies conducted in analog settings. Possible reasons for the deficit in the reporting of social validity measures and potential outcomes of this deficit are discussed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Behavioral skills training to increase interview skills of adolescent males in a juvenile residential treatment facility

Some studies suggest that acquiring employment following release from prison may reduce recidivism; however, few studies have evaluated procedures for teaching job-related skills to adolescents in residential detention facilities. Stocco et al. (2017) used behavioral skills training (BST) to improve interview skills of college students. The current study used a nonconcurrent multiple baseline design across participants to evaluate the extent to which BST improved interview skills for 7 adolescents who had been adjudicated for sexual offenses. Results show that BST increased appropriate responses to interview questions for 4 students and BST plus modifications (i.e., stimulus and response prompts) increased correct responding to questions for the other 3. In addition, BST increased appropriate questions, correct posture, and smiling, and decreased fidgeting for all 7 students. We briefly discuss the social implications of teaching interview skills to adjudicated adolescents, as well as the limitations of the findings.     

Non-directive play therapy as a means of recreating optimal infant socialization patterns

The paper proposes that non-directive play therapy recreates conditions similar to those created between a carer and infant during normal development. By the heightening in therapy of essentially normal developmental processes the child with harmful or inadequate relationship experiences is enabled to rework and reintegrate these into normal interactiv patterns. Ways are reviewed in which non-directive play therapy exemplifies important attachment properties in an individual's primary relationships, and recreates healthy carer-infant patterns of interaction such as topicsharing, face-to-face interactions, mutuality and symbolic play, in order to bring about therapeutic change. This primary corrective function is similar to other responsive therapeutic approaches, but it is argued that a particular strength of non-directive play therapy lies in its inherent flexibility and responsiveness to the individual child, which resembles normal infant socialization with a sensitive carer.     

When Good Feelings Turn Mixed: Affective Dynamics and Big Five Trait Predictors of Mixed Emotions in Daily Life

In this study, we examine how daily life fluctuations in positive affect (PA) and negative afect (NA) relate to mixed emotions—that is, simultaneous positive and negative feelings. We utilised three experience sampling studies (total N = 275), in which participants reported their affect 10 times each day for up to 14 days. Because people generally experience fairly stable moderate levels of PA in daily life, we proposed that mixed emotions would typically occur when NA increases and overlaps with, but does not entirely eliminate, PA. Accordingly, within individuals, we found that mixed emotions in daily life were more strongly predicted by changes in NA and the occurrence of negative events than by changes in PA and positive events. At the between-person level, individuals with more variable NA, more stable PA, and higher trait Neuroticism scores experienced higher average levels of mixed emotions. Further, we found evidence that the average magnitude of NA increases may partially mediate the association between Neuroticism and mixed emotions. We also found that positive predictors of mixed emotions are negative predictors of individuals' within-person PA/NA correlations—that is, affective synchrony. Our findings elucidate trait predictors and affective dynamics of daily life mixed emotions, which appear closely intertwined with NA variability. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Functional belief and judgmental belief

Synthese - A division between functional (animal) belief, on the one hand, and judgmental (reflective) belief, on the other, is central to Sosa’s two-tier virtue epistemology. For Sosa, mere...