Secondary school pupils’ views of their school peer counselling for bullying service

Pupils (n=99) from two secondary schools in the UK were interviewed to investigate their views and experiences of the peer counselling for bullying service set up in their school. They were asked about various things concerning (1) the characteristics of the service and service providers that they valued and (2) their reasons for not using the service. Overall, a majority of participants reported a willingness to use this type of service and they identified numerous characteristics that they valued, including peer counsellors with good listening skills who were trustworthy and maintained confidentiality. A noteworthy proportion of participants also wanted the service to provide advice on solving bullying‐related problems. Some barriers to using the service were also identified, including fear of being stigmatised. Responses offered by girls and boys, and by users and non‐users of the service, were compared and several significant differences emerged. The results are discussed in terms of the implications for adults who run this type of service and the peer counsellors who deliver it.     

Facial dynamics as indicators of trustworthiness and cooperative behavior

Detecting cooperative partners in situations that have financial stakes is crucial to successful social exchange. The authors tested whether humans are sensitive to subtle facial dynamics of counterparts when deciding whether to trust and cooperate. Participants played a 2-person trust game before which the facial dynamics of the other player were manipulated using brief (<6 s) but highly realistic facial animations. Results showed that facial dynamics significantly influenced participants' (a) choice of with whom to play the game and (b) decisions to cooperate. It was also found that inferences about the other player's trustworthiness mediated these effects of facial dynamics on cooperative behavior.     

La socialisation des émotions chez le nourrisson: le rôle des expressions faciales contingentes des mères

Although maternal contingent responses to their infant's facial expressions of emotions is thought to play an important role in the socialization of emotions, available data are still scarce and often inconsistent To further investigate how mothers' contingent facial expressions might influence infant emotional development, we undertook to study mother‐infant dyads in four episodes of face‐to‐face interaction during the first year. Mothers' facial expressions were strongly related to their infant's facial expressions of emotions, most of their contingent responses being produced within one second following infants' facial expressions Specific patterns of responses were also found. The impact of maternal contingent responding on infants' expressive development was also examined.     

Dyads experience over confidence in hand‐eye coordination skills after placebo alcohol

An experiment tested the effects of dyad membership and the prospect of completing a motor‐skills task on alcohol placebo consumption and task confidence. Participants (n = 115) completed a taste preference task while alone or in dyads. Half the individuals and half the dyads expected to subsequently complete a motor‐skills task and rated task confidence pre and post‐consumption. Individuals expecting the task consumed less than those in the non‐task condition and felt less confident in their abilities post‐consumption. Among those expecting the task, dyad members' consumption did not reduce and their post‐consumption confidence was higher than individuals'. Findings suggest dyad membership can lead to overconfidence. Attempts to reduce alcohol related harms must balance the protective properties of dyads with risks of overconfidence.     

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.     

Visual feature binding in younger and older adults: encoding and suffix interference effects

Three experiments investigated younger (18–25 yrs) and older (70–88 yrs) adults’ temporary memory for colour–shape combinations (binding). We focused upon estimating the magnitude of the binding cost for each age group across encoding time (Experiment 1; 900/1500?ms), presentation format (Experiment 2; simultaneous/sequential), and interference (Experiment 3; control/suffix) conditions. In Experiment 1, encoding time did not differentially influence binding in the two age groups. In Experiment 2, younger adults exhibited poorer binding performance with sequential relative to simultaneous presentation, and serial position analyses highlighted a particular age-related difficulty remembering the middle item of a series (for all memory conditions). Experiments 1–3 demonstrated small to medium binding effect sizes in older adults across all encoding conditions, with binding less accurate than shape memory. However, younger adults also displayed negative effects of binding (small to large) in two of the experiments. Even when older adults exhibited a greater suffix interference effect in Experiment 3, this was for all memory types, not just binding. We therefore conclude that there is no consistent evidence for a visual binding deficit in healthy older adults. This relative preservation contrasts with the specific and substantial deficits in visual feature binding found in several recent studies of Alzheimer's disease.     

Training Genetic Counsellors to Deliver an Innovative Therapeutic Intervention: their Views and Experience of Facilitating Multi-Family Discussion Groups

Innovations in clinical genetics have increased diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of inherited genetic conditions (IGCs). This has led to an increased number of families seeking genetic testing and / or genetic counselling and increased the clinical load for genetic counsellors (GCs). Keeping pace with biomedical discoveries, interventions are required to support families to understand, communicate and cope with their Inherited Genetic Condition. The Socio-Psychological Research in Genomics (SPRinG) collaborative have developed a new intervention, based on multi-family discussion groups (MFDGs), to support families affected by IGCs and train GCs in its delivery. A potential challenge to implementing the intervention was whether GCs were willing and able to undergo the training to deliver the MFDG. In analysing three multi-perspective interviews with GCs, this paper evaluates the training received. Findings suggests that MFDGs are a potential valuable resource in supporting families to communicate genetic risk information and can enhance family function and emotional well-being. Furthermore, we demonstrate that it is feasible to train GCs in the delivery of the intervention and that it has the potential to be integrated into clinical practice. Its longer term implementation into routine clinical practice however relies on changes in both organisation of clinical genetics services and genetic counsellors’ professional development.     

Getting down and dirty: An exploration of participation in the field of obstacle challenges

This paper examines the contemporary phenomenon of obstacle challenges and why people participate in events that result in them getting soaking wet, freezing cold, and dirtier than they have ever been while also getting shot with pellets and receiving “electric shocks.” Many participants in these challenges have taken part numerous times and keep coming back for more. Using multiple research methods including questionnaires, participant observation where the author completed one of Ireland's more well‐known and “toughest physical and mental endurance challenges,” and also depth interviews with challenge participants has resulted in a rich and detailed account of the obstacle challenge experience. These events are so much more than a few hours of strenuous and muddy physical exercise. The sense of community and camaraderie that people experience during these challenges could be described as “transformative” with participants in many cases more rewarded and moved by this collaborative aspect than the gruelling physical endeavour that they undertake. The escapism provided by the experience is also one its main rewards, relief from the quotidian and the chance to just “be.” The servicescape proves to be critically important to the experience but in ways that are largely incompatible with research in this area to date in that the comfort and cleanliness expected of more traditional servicescapes are spurned and physical hardship is welcomed. As this is an exploratory and novel research topic, suggestions for further research are plentiful.     

The influence of social identity on value perceptions and intention

Despite much research on consumers' brand identification, researchers remain divided regarding the conceptualization of the dimensions underlying social identity and how these dimensions impact marketing outcome variables. Further, previous studies have failed to examine the underlying psychological process driving this effect. The current research is the first to assess the importance of affective social identity as the mediator through which cognitive social identity impacts consumers' purchase intentions by ways of emotional and social value. Results show that affective social identity mediates the relationship between cognitive social identity and emotional value, where affect is the main driver in the formation of purchase intention. This study highlights the need to model cognitive and affective social identity separately and provides insight into how consumers' social identification influences their perceptions of identity‐linked products. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social network predictors of bullying and victimization

This study examined whether bullies, victims, and aggressive victims (those who are both bullies and victims) differed on classroom social network variables, gender, and ethnicity. Survey data were collected from a primarily Latino and Asian sample of 1,368 Southern California 6th graders (mean age = 11.3 years). Logistic regression analyses were performed to determine whether network characteristics and ethnicity were associated with each of the outcome variables. Consistent with social cognitive theory, friends' participation in aggressive behaviors was positively associated with being a bully or an aggressive victim, and negatively associated with being a victim. Consistent with social dominance theory, the number of friendship nominations received was negatively associated with being a victim. Female bullies received fewer friendship nominations, but had a higher proportion of reciprocated friendships. Victims were disproportionately Asian. The findings suggest that bullying prevention efforts targeting highly aggressive students may also diffuse to their friends, and that assertiveness training in handling aggressive situations may successfully combat bullying and aggression.