Elementary teachers' perceptions of stressful events and stress-related teaching practices

This study examined the relationships between stressful circumstances and self-reported teaching practices among 223 elementary teachers. Nine factors were identified as time control, relationships, curriculum concerns, students' motivation, career advancement, class size, role conflict, interference, and job security. The four stress reaction factors identified were burnout, reduction in work load, tolerance, and disengagement.     

Control and legacy as functions of perceived criticality in major incidents

This paper outlines a model that captures the experiences of 28 Senior Officers who have managed some of the most significant police incidents in the UK in the past 5 years. The process for capturing the model rests on ‘pragmatic psychology’ (Fishman, 1999; Alison, West & Goodwill, 2003), a paradigm that recognizes practitioners' experiences as a central component of research and policy development. We utilized a set of connected electronic notebooks to enable each critical incident manager to log their experiences and views of the case that they managed. As each individual logs this information, it is simultaneously distributed to all participants. Thus, information is rapidly shared, stimulating further thought and discussion. Following the initial knowledge‐sharing phase, participants reorder the material into themed categories that can then be scored against specific criteria (in this case ‘impact’ and ‘ease’). This session revealed that senior officers consider a combination of two co‐occurring issues as most significant in defining the ‘criticality’ of the incident: (i) how direct an impact the facet has on the enquiry at hand; and (ii) whether that issue will influence how the service will be judged (by the community, the victims and the media). These issues were perceived as the most complex and difficult to deal with. We argue that this perception is a joint function of perceived lack of control alongside the belief that judgment and blame regarding the incident will ultimately reside with them as managers. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

No One Wants to Look Cheap: Trade‐Offs Between Social Disincentives and the Economic and Psychological Incentives to Redeem Coupons

Existing research on price deals has largely demonstrated positive financial and nonfinancial consequences of obtaining a deal. In contrast, the research reported here suggests that certain price deals—in this case, coupons—can also produce negative social consequences, such as creating an impression of cheapness or stinginess. Decisions to redeem coupons are shown to involve a trade‐off between the social incentives to avoid coupons and competing economic and psychological incentives to redeem coupons. Consumers strategically adjusted their decision in response to factors that changed the relative strength of these incentives; specifically, they avoided coupons when they were concerned that coupon use would lead to negative social consequences but redeemed coupons when the circumstances reduced these concerns. Although decisions to refuse a coupon might violate principles of economic rationality, it is argued that such decisions are nevertheless functional as they serve important social goals. In this sense, it can be smarter for consumers to forgo a deal rather than obtain one.     

Pupil Diameter May Reflect Motor Control and Learning

Non–luminance-mediated changes in pupil diameter have been used since the first studies by Darwin in 1872 as indicators of clinical, cognitive, and arousal states. However, the relation between processes involved in motor control and changes in pupil diameter remains largely unknown. Twenty participants attempted to compensate random walks of a cursor with a computer mouse to restrain its trajectory within a target circle while the authors recorded their pupil diameters. Two conditions allowed the authors to experimentally manipulate the motor and cognitive components of the task. First, the step size of the cursor's random walk was either large or small leading to 2 task difficulties (difficult or easy). Second, they instructed participants to imagine controlling the cursor by moving the mouse, but without actually moving it (task modality: imagined movement or real movement condition). Task difficulty and modality allowed the authors to show that pupil diameters reflect processes involved in motor control and in the processing of feedback, respectively. Furthermore, the authors also demonstrate that motor learning can be quantified by pupil size. This noninvasive approach provides a promising method for investigating not only motor control, but also motor imagery, a research field of growing importance in sports and rehabilitation.     

Poorer divided attention in children born very preterm can be explained by difficulty with each component task,not the executive requirement to dual-task

Children born very preterm (VP, ≤ 32 weeks) exhibit poor performance on tasks of executive functioning. However, it is largely unknown whether this reflects the cumulative impact of non-executive deficits or a separable impairment in executive-level abilities. A dual-task paradigm was used in the current study to differentiate the executive processes involved in performing two simple attention tasks simultaneously. The executive-level contribution to performance was indexed by the within-subject cost incurred to single-task performance under dual-task conditions, termed dual-task cost. The participants included 77 VP children (mean age: 7.17 years) and 74 peer controls (mean age: 7.16 years) who completed Sky Search (selective attention), Score (sustained attention) and Sky Search DT (divided attention) from the Test of Everyday Attention for Children. The divided-attention task requires the simultaneous performance of the selective- and sustained-attention tasks. The VP group exhibited poorer performance on the selective- and divided-attention tasks, and showed a strong trend toward poorer performance on the sustained-attention task. However, there were no significant group differences in dual-task cost. These results suggest a cumulative impact of vulnerable lower-level cognitive processes on dual-tasking or divided attention in VP children, and fail to support the hypothesis that VP children show a separable impairment in executive-level abilities.     

Gestational age and gender influence on executive control and its related neural structures in preterm-born children at 6 years of age

Within preterm-born children, being born male and at a lower gestational age (GA) have both been associated with a heightened risk for developmental difficulties. However, in this population little is known about the combined effect and the influence of these risk factors on cortical structures and executive control. In the present study, 58 preterm-born children (GA ranging from 24.0 to 35.1 weeks) were administered the computerized Child Attention Network Task at 6 years of age. Brain magnetic resonance imaging was performed and analyzed using Voxel-Based Morphometry (VBM) in all children. At a behavioral level, boys born <28 weeks of GA had significantly less executive control than preterm-born girls <28 weeks (p = .001) and preterm-born boys ≥28 (p = .003). The reduced executive control in preterm-born boys <28 weeks gestation was related to lower cortical densities in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). The current study links the higher incidence of reduced executive control in preterm-born boys to a higher degree of prematurity (low GA) and identifies brain structural abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex related to these deficits. The implications of these results are discussed.     

Transgender and anxiety: A comparative study between transgender people and the general population

Background: Anxiety disorders pose serious public health problems. The data available on anxiety disorders in the transgender population is limited by the small numbers, the lack of a matched controlled population and the selection of a nonhomogenous group of transgender people.

Aims: The aims of the study were (1) to determine anxiety symptomatology (based on the HADS) in a nontreated transgender population and to compare it to a general population sample matched by age and gender; (2) to investigate the predictive role of specific variables, including experienced gender, self-esteem, victimization, social support, interpersonal functioning, and cross-sex hormone use regarding levels of anxiety symptomatology; and (3) to investigate differences in anxiety symptomatology between transgender people on cross-sex hormone treatment and not on hormone treatment.

Methods: A total of 913 individuals who self-identified as transgender attending a transgender health service during a 3-year period agreed to participate. For the first aim of the study, 592 transgender people not on treatment were matched by age and gender, with 3,816 people from the general population. For the second and third aim, the whole transgender population was included.

Measurements: Sociodemographic variables and measures of depression and anxiety (HADS), self-esteem (RSE), victimization (ETS), social support (MSPSS), and interpersonal functioning (IIP-32).

Results: Compared with the general population transgender people had a nearly threefold increased risk of probable anxiety disorder (all p < .05). Low self-esteem and interpersonal functioning were found to be significant predictors of anxiety symptoms. Trans women on treatment with cross-sex hormones were found to have lower levels of anxiety disorder symptomatology.

Conclusions: Transgender people (particularly trans males) have higher levels of anxiety symptoms suggestive of possible anxiety disorders compared to the general population. The findings that self-esteem, interpersonal functioning, and hormone treatment are associated with lower levels of anxiety symptoms indicate the need for clinical interventions targeting self-esteem and interpersonal difficulties and highlight the importance of quick access to transgender health services.     

An evaluation of scanpath-comparison and machine-learning classification algorithms used to study the dynamics of analogy making

In recent years, eyetracking has begun to be used to study the dynamics of analogy making. Numerous scanpath-comparison algorithms and machine-learning techniques are available that can be applied to the raw eyetracking data. We show how scanpath-comparison algorithms, combined with multidimensional scaling and a classification algorithm, can be used to resolve an outstanding question in analogy making—namely, whether or not children’s and adults’ strategies in solving analogy problems are different. (They are.) We show which of these scanpath-comparison algorithms is best suited to the kinds of analogy problems that have formed the basis of much analogy-making research over the years. Furthermore, we use machine-learning classification algorithms to examine the item-to-item saccade vectors making up these scanpaths. We show which of these algorithms best predicts, from very early on in a trial, on the basis of the frequency of various item-to-item saccades, whether a child or an adult is doing the problem. This type of analysis can also be used to predict, on the basis of the item-to-item saccade dynamics in the first third of a trial, whether or not a problem will be solved correctly.