Leadership and Adolescent Girls: A Qualitative Study of Leadership Development

This research investigated youth leadership experiences of adolescent girls who participated in a comprehensive feminist-based leadership program. This qualitative study utilized a grounded theory approach to understand changes that occurred in 10 female adolescent participants. The words of the participants revealed that initially they viewed leadership in traditional terms and were hesitant to identify themselves as leaders or to see themselves included within their concepts of leadership. Following the program their view of leadership expanded and diversified in a manner that allowed for inclusion of themselves within it. They spoke with greater strength and confidence and felt better positioned and inspired to act as leaders. Participants identified having examples of women leaders, adopting multiple concepts of leadership, and participating in an environment of mutual respect and trust as factors that contributed to their expanded conceptualization.     

Reflective practice framework for TESOL teachers: one teacher’s reflective journey

Just as in the field of general education, scholars within the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) have also struggled to come to a consensus as to how reflective practice should be operationalized with many different approaches suggesting a retrospective approach to questioning about practice. As a result, many of these approaches have led to a type of routinization of reflection. Worried about such routinization of reflection, Farrell developed a more holistic approach to reflective practice that recognizes the spiritual, moral, and emotional aspects of reflection, as well as the usual retrospective questions about practice. This paper outlines a case study of the reflections of one experienced TESOL teacher teaching in South Korea using Farrell’s framework for reflecting on practice that included reflections on his philosophy, principles, theory, practice, and beyond practice. The results revealed three common themes of approachability, art-oriented conceptions, and curiosity that emerged in all aspects of his reflection as uniquely influential parts of a larger whole. Thus, Farrell’s holistic framework for teacher reflection employed in this study provided multiple filters through which these various parts could be viewed.     

A study of syntactic processing in aphasia II: neurological aspects

This paper presents the results of a study of the effects of left hemisphere strokes on syntactically-based comprehension in aphasic patients. We studied 42 patients with aphasia secondary to left hemisphere strokes and 25 control subjects for the ability to assign and interpret three syntactic structures (passives, object extracted relative clauses, and reflexive pronouns) in enactment, sentence-picture matching and grammaticality judgment tasks. We measured accuracy, RT and self-paced listening times in SPM and GJ. We obtained magnetic resonance (MR) and 5-deoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG PET) data on 31 patients and 12 controls. The percent of selected regions of interest (ROIs) that was lesioned on MR and the mean normalized PET counts per voxel in ROIs were calculated. In regression analyses, lesion measures in both perisylvian and non-perisylvian ROIs predicted performance. Patients who performed at similar levels behaviorally had lesions of very different sizes, and patients with equivalent lesion sizes varied greatly in their level of performance. The data are consistent with a model in which the neural tissue that is responsible for the operations underlying sentence comprehension and syntactic processing is localized in different neural regions in different individuals.     

Bilingual corpus callosum variability

Magnetic resonance imaging was used to produce midsagittal images of the corpus callosum of 19 right-handed adult male and female subjects. The preliminary findings of this study indicate that significant adaptation in the anterior midbody of the corpus callosum has occurred to accommodate multiple language capacity in bilingual individuals compared to monolingual individuals. The main interpretation of this finding is that the precentral gyrus is involved in bilingual faculty adaptation assuming a role consistent with the somatotopical input to areas dedicated to the mouth, and input to association tracts connecting the premotor and supplementary motor cortices. This paper discusses possible implications to neuroscientists, second language educators, and their students.     

Line at shape-from-shadow border tested with stereo

Kennedy and Bai (2000 Perception 29 399-408) argued incorrect border polarity blocked perception of faces in shape-from-shadow 'Mooney faces' with dark lines at the contour, a display inspired by Hering. Their hypothesis was tested with several displays, notably binocular gratings made of lines of dots. The stereo-induced depth involved a shadow falling on two surface planes. Most of a dark-dotted (shadow) region appeared to be on one surface, but a strip of dark dots at the shadow's border appeared to be on another-to the fore or rear. Control conditions involved 'negative' images (white dots). Subjects saw the shadowed object as easily in dark-dotted images with stereo depth as in an image with uniform depth for all the dots, and more readily than in the negatives. Our results favour the border-polarity hypothesis.     

The role of motivation in the age-related positivity effect in autobiographical memory

Abstract— This study reveals that older adults have a positivity effect in long-term autobiographical memory and that a positivity bias can be induced in younger adults by a heightened motivation to regulate current emotional well-being. Three hundred nuns, ages 47 to 102 years, recalled personal information originally reported 14 years earlier. They did so under experimental conditions that repeatedly primed them to focus on their current emotional states or on their memory accuracy, or that provided no instructional focus (control condition). Both older control participants and participants who were focused on emotional states showed a tendency to remember the past more positively than they originally reported in 1987. In contrast, both younger control participants and participants who were focused on accuracy tended to remember the past more negatively than originally reported.     

Looking at perspective pictures from too far, too close, and just right

A central problem for psychology is vision's reaction to perspective. In the present studies, observers looked at perspective pictures projected by square tiles on a ground plane. They judged the tile dimensions while positioned at the correct distance, farther or nearer. In some pictures, many tiles appeared too short to be squares, many too long, and many just right. The judgments were strongly affected by viewing from the wrong distance, eye height, and object orientation. The authors propose a 2-factor angles and ratios together (ART) theory, with the following factors: the ratio of the visual angles of the tile's sides and the angle between (a) the direction to the tile from the observer and (b) the perpendicular, from the picture plane to the observer, that passes through the central vanishing point.     

Konrad Bloch, 12 January 1912 - 15 October 2000

Konrad Bloch was a man of strong ethical principles. In personality, he was soft-spoken, kind, and generous. His home in Lexington, Massachusetts, with Lore, his wife of more than sixty years, his daughter, Susan, and son, Peter, was at the center of a joyous family life.     

Legal and psychological implications in the assessment of sexual consent in the cognitively impaired population

The question of competency to consent to sexual activity in the cognitively impaired population continues to be a difficult assessment issue. Problems center on inconsistent legal and clinical criteria, current inadequate methods of psychological assessment, and the need to promote basic human rights, while protecting people from harm. The purpose of this study was twofold. First, the problems inherent in the psychological assessment of competency to consent to sexual activity are discussed with an emphasis on problems defining consent competency. Second, the utility of a neuropsychological test battery in assisting with the assessment of the ability to consent to sexual activity was examined. Findings indicated that executive measures of neuropsychological assessment were primarily associated with competency to consent to sexual activity. It is important that these neuropsychological measures were more accurate in categorizing competent and noncompetent individuals than methods currently in use. This suggests that sexual consent assessments in the forensic arena should include neuropsychological testing and that current methods are insufficient.