An embodied perspective on judgements of written reflective practice for professional development in Higher Education

This paper gives an embodied perspective on the use of judgements of reflective practice and reflective writing for professional development in Higher Education. Programmes for professional development in Higher Education and recognition processes for academics have become prevalent in the UK and internationally. These programmes and processes often assume, implicitly or explicitly, development or evidencing as a ‘reflective practitioner’ through pieces of reflective writing which is then judged against competencies or attainments. However, this focus on reflective practice and reflective writing is not always critical, and does not examine the different theoretical and practical interpretations of what it means to reflect, or the impact of assessing such reflections. Taking an embodied stance allows a new view into a contested area that is more habitually connected with cognitive rather than corporeal processes.     

The effect of context on the silver ceiling: a role congruity perspective on prejudiced responses

Three studies examined role incongruity as a source of age bias in hiring decisions. Building on previous research demonstrating contextual variation in prejudice, the authors predicted that prejudiced responses emerge particularly in contexts where group stereotypes misalign with the requirements of social roles. Findings indicate that (a) older workers are particularly penalized in occupational contexts that are quickly changing, (b) older workers are perceived as less adaptable than younger workers, and (c) the tendency to prefer younger than older workers more for a dynamic than a stable company is mediated by perceptions of adaptability. Finally, adaptability perceptions better predicted hiring bias than did global evaluations of older people and levels of contact with older people. These experiments provide initial evidence that perceived fit to roles is a determinant of contextual variation in prejudiced responses.     

Reviving inert knowledge: analogical abstraction supports relational retrieval of past events

We present five experiments and simulation studies to establish late analogical abstraction as a new psychological phenomenon: Schema abstraction from analogical examples can revive otherwise inert knowledge. We find that comparing two analogous examples of negotiations at recall time promotes retrieving analogical matches stored in memory—a notoriously elusive effect. Another innovation in this research is that we show parallel effects for real-life autobiographical memory (Experiments 1–3) and for a controlled memory set (Experiments 4 and 5). Simulation studies show that a unified model based on schema abstraction can capture backward (retrieval) effects as well as forward (transfer) effects.     

Children of schizophrenic women: Early factors predictive of schizophrenia

The present report reviews some findings of a 20-year longitudinal study of Danish children at risk for schizophrenia. Early factors predictive of later schizophrenia in high-risk children, including infant temperament and the effect of perinatal complications, are reviewed. In addition, the role of maternal absence as a stressor is examined. Findings related to sex differences in the vulnerability of high-risk children to later pathology are discussed. Possible interactions of these factors and maternal psychopathology are briefly explored.     

Regulatory Fit,Processing Fluency,and Narrative Persuasion

For millennia, people have used narratives to inform and persuade. However, little social psychological research addresses how and when narrative persuasion occurs, perhaps because narratives are complex stimuli that are difficult to vary without significantly changing the plot or characters. Existing research suggests that regulatory fit and/or processing fluency can be varied easily and in ways completely exterior to narrative content but that nonetheless affect how much narratives engage, transport, and persuade. We review research on narrative transportation and persuasion and then discuss regulatory fit and its relationship to processing fluency. Afterward, we discuss how regulatory fit and processing fluency may affect psychological engagement, transportation, and persuasion via narratives.     

Adjusting for the correspondence bias: Effects of causal uncertainty, cognitive busyness, and causal strength of situational information

This research examined the conditions under which people who have more chronic doubt about their ability to make sense of social behavior (i.e., are causally uncertain; [Weary and Edwards, 1994] and [Weary and Edwards, 1996]) are more likely to adjust their dispositional inferences for a target’s behaviors. Using a cognitive busyness manipulation within the attitude attribution paradigm, we found in Study 1 that higher causal uncertainty predicted increased correction of dispositional inferences, but only when participants had sufficient attentional resources to devote to the task. In Study 2, we found that higher-causal uncertainty predicted greater inferential correction, but only when the additional information provided a more compelling alternative explanation for the observed behavior. Results of this research are discussed in terms of their relevance to the Causal Uncertainty (Weary & Edwards, 1994) and dispositional inference models.     

Repressive adaptation in children with cancer: a replication and extension.

Prior research has shown a higher incidence of a repressive adaptive style in children with cancer. To explore whether repressive adaptation in this population is premorbid or reactive, adaptive style was assessed longitudinally in children with cancer at the time of diagnosis and at 6 months and 1 year after diagnosis. Comparison groups included healthy children and children with other serious but nonmalignant chronic illnesses. At diagnosis, children with cancer showed a higher incidence of a repressive adaptive style than healthy children, and the incidence of repressive adaptation remained stable over time. Children with other chronic illnesses also showed levels of repressive adaptive style comparable to the cancer group. These findings suggest a shift toward repressiveness in response to the diagnosis of cancer that is then maintained over time and necessitate further examination of the health consequences of adaptive style in this population.