Reflective writing: I wouldn’t start from here – examining a professional development initiative to enhance the scholarly activity of English HE in FE lecturers

This paper explores the nature of reflective writing through the experience of the researchers in running a series of writing workshops with a group of higher education practitioners working in a UK further education college. The focus here is on reflective writing, which was chosen to start the sequence of workshops, as it was perceived as a form of writing with which the participants would be familiar, given its role in the education and development of teachers within the sector. Our assumption was that this familiarity would facilitate the writing process and participants would readily respond by engaging in reflective writing. However, in practice this proved not to be the case, despite being introduced to a variety of different forms of writing over a series of workshops, it took the participants longer than we expected to begin to write. This led us to question our assumptions about the starting point for the writing workshops and what they might achieve. The paper draws on field notes made during the writing initiative and data gathered through focus groups and interviews with the participants, as well as extracts of their writing to examine their experiences. Different conceptualisations of reflective writing are identified and their implications are explored in relation to the participants’ engagement with writing and their experience of professional development.     

How person-centred counselling trainers understand and experience their role in the current British context

This article reports the findings of a qualitative study into the experience of person-centred training from the viewpoint of the trainer. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was the adopted approach. The researcher conducted a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with five person-centred trainers with experience across a range of settings. The findings demonstrate the commitment of person-centred trainers to a relational approach with the facilitation of individual potential at its heart. The intrinsically rewarding nature of the role is highlighted alongside its substantial demands. Participants demonstrated a primary identification with themselves as counsellor trainers rather than academics and some lack of reconciliation with current developments within counselling.     

Braiding Two Evidence-Based Programs for Families At-Risk: Results of a Cluster Randomized Trial

Child maltreatment is a significant public health problem best addressed through evidence-based parent-support programs. There is a wide range of programs with different strengths offering a variety of options for families. Choosing one single evidence-based program often limits the range of services available to meet the unique needs of families. This paper presents findings from a study to examine the systematic braiding of two evidence-based programs, Parents as Teachers and SafeCare at Home (PATSCH), with the goal to provide a more robust intervention for higher risk families. A cluster randomized effectiveness trial was conducted to examine if PATSCH improved parenting behaviors known to decrease the risk for child maltreatment compared to Parents as Teachers (PAT) Alone. Parents (N?=?159; 92 PAT Alone; 67 PATSCH) were enrolled to complete a baseline, 6-month and 12-month assessment. Results indicate the groups did not differ on number of environmental hazards in the home, parents’ health care decision-making abilities, child abuse potential, and physical assault over time. However, with regard to the potential for child abuse, the PATSCH group showed a decrease in nonviolence discipline and increase in psychological aggression compared to the PAT group. Further research is needed to better examine this concept and its implications for the field.     

Spiritual care in the last phase of life: a comparison between the Church of Sweden and the Church of Finland

This article deals with the Church of Sweden and the Church of Finland and their spiritual support for parishioners during their end-of-life phase. Support for the dying seemed uncommon in both countries, while most parishes offered support for the bereaved. The Finnish respondents expressed more confidence in their spiritual role than did the Swedes. This may have to do with the role of the churches in their respective countries and the varying geographies of death.     

Kin recognition loss following anesthesia in beetle larvae (Aleochara bilineata, Coleoptera, Staphylinidae)

Kin recognition is a complex cognitive process, where an individual should detect a phenotypic cue and compare it to an internal template, which might be genetically determined (i.e., innate or acquired). Kin recognition mechanisms will depend on whether previous encounters with kin are possible or not to form the individual internal template. When relatives have never met before, kin recognition is supposed to rely on recognition alleles (which allows the innate recognition of relatives bearing them), or on self-referent phenotype matching (the individual has formed a template using its own phenotype and recognizes as kin individuals which match it closely enough). Although self-referent phenotype matching is in theory the more likely explanation, it has not been possible so far to exclude experimentally the recognition alleles’ hypothesis. Here, we report that kin recognition in the solitary parasitoid larvae of Aleochara bilineata (Coleoptera; Staphylinidae) is suppressed following carbon dioxide anesthesia or chill-coma, both treatments known to cause a temporary amnesia. Treated larvae superparasitize indifferently hosts parasitized either by siblings or by non-kin larvae, while untreated larvae avoid hosts occupied by siblings. The two types of anesthesia thus suppress kin recognition, but their global effect on larvae is different. Chill-coma suppresses the ability to distinguish parasitized from unparasitized hosts and reduces parasitism rate, suggesting an aspecific impairment of sensory receptors or cognition. However, carbon dioxide narcosis only impairs kin recognition, strongly suggesting that an intact memory is necessary for kin recognition to take place. Although this study does not address the recognition alleles’ hypothesis per se, our results strongly support a self-referent phenotype matching mechanism. On the whole, kin recognition in A. bilineata larvae is effective through short-term memory, because it is affected by amnesic treatments.     

Working for free: A fundamental value of counselling

This paper challenges two myths about voluntary sector counselling, namely (a) that volunteer counsellors and voluntary sector counselling are the same thing, and (b) that standards of practice in the voluntary sector are significantly different from those elsewhere. The paper also argues that voluntary sector counselling nurtures a deeply felt commitment to respond to human need without monetary recompense. Drawing on evidence from a study of voluntary sector counselling in Scotland, we show that a substantial proportion of voluntary sector counselling is undertaken by paid workers, and that many counsellors who volunteer in one setting undertake paid counselling work in another setting. We demonstrate that the majority of voluntary sector counselling agencies in Scotland work within ethical frameworks developed by the professional bodies for counselling, and we argue that these agencies have been at the forefront of efforts to enhance the quality and safety of counselling services available to the public. We identify and illustrate three overlapping reasons why large numbers of highly qualified counsellors give their time and expertise for free: because of their desire to support the work of agencies through which the accessibility of counselling is extended; because volunteer counselling constitutes personally rewarding and meaningful work; and as an expression of their commitment to give freely of themselves. In conclusion we argue that voluntarism is central to counselling, but that parts of the counselling world are at risk of forgetting this core value.     

Facial expressions modulate the gaze orienting effect on sound localization judgement

Recent studies have shown that cueing eye gaze can affect the processing of visual information, and this phenomenon is called the gaze-orienting effect (visual-GOE). Emerging evidence has shown that the cueing eye gaze also affects the processing of auditory information (auditory-GOE). However, it is unclear whether the auditory-GOE is modulated by emotion. We conducted three behavioural experiments to investigate whether cueing eye gaze influenced the orientation judgement to a sound, and whether the effect was modulated by facial expressions. The current study set four facial expressions (angry, fearful, happy, and neutral), manipulated the display type of facial expressions, and changed the sequence of gaze and emotional expressions. Participants were required to judge the sound orientation after facial expressions and gaze cues. The results showed that the orientation judgement of sound was influenced by gaze direction in all three experiments, and the orientation judgement of sound was faster when the face was oriented to the target location (congruent trials) than when the face was oriented away from the target location (incongruent trials). The modulation of emotion on auditory-GOE was observed only when gaze shifted followed by facial expression (Exp3); the auditory-GOE was significantly greater for angry faces than for neutral faces. These findings indicate that auditory-GOE as a social phenomenon exists widely, and the effect was modulated by facial expression. Gaze shift before the presentation of emotion was the key influencing factor for the emotional modulation in an auditory target gaze-orienting task. Our findings suggest that the integration of facial expressions and eye gaze was context-dependent.     

Psychological Trait Resilience Within Ecological Systems Theory: The Resilient Systems Scales

This project describes the development of the Resilient Systems Scales, created to address conceptual and methodological ambiguities in assessing the ecological systems model of resilience. Across a number of samples (total N = 986), our findings suggest that the Resilient Systems Scales show equivalence to a previously reported assessment (Maltby, Day, &; Hall, 2015 Maltby, J., Day, L., &; Hall, S. (2015). Refining trait resilience: Identifying engineering, ecological, and adaptive facets from extant measures of resilience. PLoS ONE, 10(7), e0131826. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0131826[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) in demonstrating the same factor structure, adequate intercorrelation between the 2 measures of resilience, and equivalent associations with personality and well-being. The findings also suggest that the Resilient Systems Scales demonstrate adequate test–retest reliability, compare well with other extant measures of resilience in predicting well-being, and map, to varying degrees, onto positive expression of several cognitive, social, and emotional traits. The findings suggest that the new measure can be used alongside existing measures of resilience, or singly, to assess positive life outcomes within psychology research.