“Immunity‐to‐Change Language Technology”: An Educational Tool for Pastoral Leadership Education

Abstract. One of the primary aims of pastoral leadership education is to offer reflective processes that enable learners to surface, critique, and construct different epistemological conceptions of reality leading to more effective pastoral practice. In many pastoral leadership education programs, this type of intentional reflection usually takes place in a mentoring or supervisory relationship as well as in a reflective seminar. In this essay, I describe how I have used the “immunity‐to‐change language technology” as one type of reflective process for intentional reflection and transformational learning in pastoral leadership education. The results of my research and ongoing use of this educational tool indicate that it can be valuable for enabling change by helping learners expand their pastoral leadership capacities and become more effective in their practice. Given my findings, I conclude that this educational tool could be of interest to other educators who are seeking to broaden their own repertoire of approaches to transformational learning. A version of this research appears in a forthcoming book by the same author, published by Novalis, in Fall 2008.     

Possessions and Self in the Identity Work of Survivors of Domestic Violence

Domestic violence has serious consequences for survivors, including severe effects on psychological well‐being and identity. This article reveals the previously hidden possession experiences and identity work of domestic violence survivors. Using a novel visual research method that features material objects as visual stimuli to elicit data, we found possessions were critical in the complex identity work undertaken by survivors. Emergent themes detailing the role of possessions in coping with ongoing self‐threats by an intimate partner provide empirical support for the conceptualization of diametrically opposed selves, the Prescribed Self and Agentic Self. These opposite and compartmentalized selves enabled survivors to cope with extreme disintegration and destabilization of self by the abuser. As well as the conceptual and methodological contributions we make to the possessions‐self literature in consumer research and psychology, this research is valuable for designing social service programs to help survivors cope with the effects of domestic violence on identity.     

“I think you did it!”: Examining the effect of presuming guilt on the verbal output of innocent suspects during brief interviews

Innocent suspects interviewed by a guilt‐presumptive versus innocence‐presumptive or neutral interviewer may tend more to display non‐verbal behaviours which neutral judges consider indicative of guilt. We examined the effects of interviewer's presumption of guilt on innocent mock suspects' alibis. Participants (N = 90) provided an alibi to convince an interviewer of their innocence of a theft after she implied that she believed that they were guilty or innocent or that she had no belief about their veracity. On the basis of existing conflicting findings for suspects' verbal behaviour during accusatory interviews, we predicted that alibis in the guilt‐belief condition would contain the highest or lowest number of correct details with overall higher or poorer accuracy rates, respectively. Although participants perceived the interviewer's presumptive approach, the number of correct details provided and accuracy rates of alibis did not differ significantly between conditions. We propose explanations to these findings and future research paths.     

Development and validation of the Eyewitness Metamemory Scale

Metamemory can be defined as the knowledge about one's memory capabilities and about strategies that can aid memory. In this paper, we describe the development and validation of the Eyewitness Metamemory Scale (EMS), tailored specifically for use in face memory and eyewitness identification settings. Participants (N = 800) completed the EMS and other measures on general metamemory. Results from exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis revealed good factorial validity, internal consistency, and content validity. The EMS items emerged into three distinct factors: memory contentment, memory discontentment, and memory strategies. The EMS is a brief and easily administrable questionnaire that might be used to assess self‐ratings of face recognition capacity and use of strategies to encode faces.     

Ethics and endings in group psychotherapy: saying good-bye and saying it well

Endings in group psychotherapy are suffused with complexity and potential conflict, some of which entail ethical quandaries. Ethical issues attending endings in group therapy are explored through a discussion of informed consent, time and role boundaries, privacy and confidentiality, unplanned endings, therapist-initiated termination, and competence. Findings from an exploratory survey of members of the American Group Psychotherapy Association and clinical-ethical vignettes are presented to highlight these issues. Clinicians need to develop and maintain ethical fitness and awareness, including attunement to personal responses, to endings and loss.     

Editorial on Supervision

This Editorial provides background information to inform the report from the United Kingdom (UK) and Eire Association of Genetic Nurses and Counsellors (AGNC) Supervision Working Group on Genetic Counselling Supervision. We begin by introducing the context of practice as a genetic counselor in the UK and then follow with an overview of events that have happened in our profession that led to the need and creation of the report. Genetic counseling supervision has become instrumental to our practice, training and registration as genetic counselors in the UK.     

Family income and its relation to preschool children's adjustment for families in the NICHD Study of Early Child Care

The current study examines relations of mean-level estimates, linear changes, and instability in income and family processes to child outcomes and addresses whether income, through its impact on family functioning, matters more for children living in poverty. Temporal changes and instability in family processes, but not income, predicted children's adjustment. Cross-sectional mediational analyses indicated that for families living at the poverty threshold, family processes fully mediated the effect of average income over the study period on social behavior but only partially mediated its effect on cognitive-linguistic development. The strength of these associations diminished as average income exceeded the poverty threshold. That is, income had a greater impact on the family functioning and development of poor children than of nonpoor children.     

Infants’ perception of rhythm and tempo in unimodal and multimodal stimulation: A developmental test of the intersensory redundancy hypothesis

Research has demonstrated that young infants can detect a change in the tempo and the rhythm of an event when they experience the event bimodally (audiovisually), but not when they experience it unimodally (acoustically or visually). According to Bahrick and Lickliter (2000, 2002), intersensory redundancy available in bimodal, but not in unimodal, stimulation directs attention to the amodal properties of events in early development. Later in development, as infants become more experienced perceivers, attention becomes more flexible and can be directed toward amodal properties in unimodal and bimodal stimulation. The present study tested this developmental hypothesis by assessing the ability of older, more perceptually experienced infants to discriminate the tempo or rhythm of an event, using procedures identical to those in prior studies. The results indicated that older infants can detect a change in the rhythm and the tempo of an event following both bimodal (audiovisual) and unimodal (visual) stimulation. These results provide further support for the intersensory redundancy hypothesis and are consistent with a pattern of increasing specificity in perceptual development.     

Intersensory redundancy educates selective attention in bobwhite quail embryos

We assessed whether exposure to amodal properties in bimodal stimulation (e.g. rhythm, rate, duration) could educate attention to amodal properties in subsequent unimodal stimulation during prenatal development. Bobwhite quail embryos were exposed to an individual bobwhite maternal call under several experimental and control conditions during the day prior to hatching. Experimental groups received redundant auditory and visual exposure to the temporal features of an individual maternal call followed by unimodal auditory exposure to the same call immediately or after a 2-hr or 4-hr delay. Control groups received (1) the same exposure but in the reverse sequence (unimodal --> redundant bimodal), (2) asynchronous bimodal --> unimodal, (3) only unimodal exposure, or (4) only bimodal exposure. All experimental groups showed a significant preference for the familiar maternal call over a novel maternal call when tested 2 days after hatching, whereas none of the control groups showed a significant preference for the familiar call. These results indicate that intersensory redundancy can direct attention to amodal properties in bimodal stimulation and educate attention to the same amodal properties in subsequent unimodal stimulation where no intersensory redundancy is available.     

Eyewitness recognition errors: the effects of mugshot viewing and choosing in young and old adults

Eyewitness memory is vulnerable to information encountered prior to a lineup. Young (18-30 years) and older (60-80 years) witnesses viewed a crime video. Some witnesses were then exposed to mugshots of innocent suspects that included a critical foil. After a 48-h delay, all the witnesses took part in a target-absent lineup that included the critical foil and five new foils. Witnesses who picked one of the mugshots as the likely perpetrator showed inflated rates of choosing the critical foil from the lineup. Context reinstatement instructions did not reduce choices of innocent foils following mugshot exposure. Despite age-related increases in false choosing, age did not qualify other effects. The results are discussed in terms of commitment, source memory, and gist-based processing.