Teachers’ reactions to experiences of violence: an attributional analysis

Violence perpetrated against teachers is prevalent and has the potential to adversely affect teachers’ well-being, efficacy, and longevity in the profession. In this study, we examined teachers’ reactions after having experienced violence, specifically examining the roles of attributional processes. In collaboration with the American Psychological Association, National Education Association, and American Federation of Teachers, data were collected via a survey instrument from teachers across the United States. We examined responses from 2505 participants who described the most upsetting incident of violence that had been perpetrated against them in their roles as teachers. We examined predictors of (1) communicating with others after the incident and (2) implementing intervention strategies with the perpetrators of violence. Emotions were tested as mediators of the relations between attributions and outcomes. Results indicated that characterological and behavioral self-blame were predictive of negative affect, which in turn predicted the majority of outcomes. Study limitations and implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Mourning’s dissonance; who am I who mourns and whom do I mourn?

In this article I explore how a relational psychoanalytic and phenomenological perspective can open out new possibilities for interpretations of experiences of bereavement. I critically discuss Freud’s acclaimed paper, ‘Mourning and melancholia’ in the light of work by philosophers Merleau-Ponty (a phenomenologist) and Judith Butler (a contemporary post-modern feminist philosopher). I reflect on how questions of identity, language, and embodiment, crucial themes in Merleau-Ponty’s and Butler’s theorising of human subjectivities, emerge in two literary/autobiographical accounts of mourning: Nora Webster, by the contemporary Irish writer, Colm Tóibín, and Mourning Diary by the French philosopher, Roland Barthes. Through my discussion of these philosophical and literary texts I argue for a psychoanalytic perspective which is attuned to the conscious and unconscious subtleties and complexities of mourning and engages with the ways in which the identities of the mourner and the mourned and the relations between them are, for the mourner, constantly in flux. I emphasize the importance of attending in the psychoanalytic relationship to the specificity and uniqueness of individuals’ languages of mourning and to the effects on experiences of bereavement of gender, race, class, sexuality, age, and physical ability within particular socio-historical and cultural contexts.     

Sound to meaning correspondences facilitate word learning

A fundamental assumption regarding spoken language is that the relationship between sound and meaning is essentially arbitrary. The present investigation questioned this arbitrariness assumption by examining the influence of potential non-arbitrary mappings between sound and meaning on word learning in adults. Native English-speaking monolinguals learned meanings for Japanese words in a vocabulary-learning task. Spoken Japanese words were paired with English meanings that: (1) matched the actual meaning of the Japanese word (e.g., “hayai” paired with fast); (2) were antonyms for the actual meaning (e.g., “hayai” paired with slow); or (3) were randomly selected from the set of antonyms (e.g., “hayai” paired with blunt). The results showed that participants learned the actual English equivalents and antonyms for Japanese words more accurately and responded faster than when learning randomly paired meanings. These findings suggest that natural languages contain non-arbitrary links between sound structure and meaning and further, that learners are sensitive to these non-arbitrary relationships within spoken language.     

A comparison of behavioral and emotional functioning in children and adolescents with Autistic Disorder and PDD-NOS.

Behavioral symptomatology was compared in 26 children and adolescents with Autistic Disorder ("autism") and 25 children and adolescents with Pervasive Developmental Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified ("PDD-NOS"). Relative to individuals with PDD-NOS, those with autism had more symptoms of depression, social withdrawal, atypical behavior, and immature social skills--and fewer family problems. These differences remained even when group differences in intellectual ability were statistically controlled. No group differences emerged in somatization, anxiety, or hyperactivity. Findings suggest that although both groups demonstrate considerable evidence of behavioral and emotional problems, those with autism are at particularly high risk for comorbid behavioral and emotional disabilities.     

Knowing and not knowing: the analyst's pregnancy

The author examines some of the dynamics associated with the shifting experience of knowing and not knowing as it arises in response to the pregnancy of the analyst. This experience, as well as the thinking process behind it, is ubiquitous in psychoanalytic work, but is particularly apparent in the work demanded by the analyst's pregnancy. An indepth case history is presented to illustrate the ways in which pregnancy in the analyst may powerfully revive important dimensions of the patient's past.     

The list strength effect: A contextual competition account

Research on the list strength effect (LSE) has shown that learning some words on a list more strongly than others impairs memory for the weakly learned words when tested with a recall task. Norman (2002) demonstrated that the LSE also occurs within the recollection process of a recognition test. In this study, a mechanistic dual-process account of the LSE was tested that simultaneously makes predictions concerning additional sources of context in interference effects. In two experiments, we attempted to replicate Norman's (2002) findings and provide the basis for our modeling efforts. We found evidence for a recollection LSE in raw measures of responding, with memory performance also benefiting from reinstatement of perceptual characteristics at test. However, large differences in the hits between the lists were accompanied by small differences in false alarms, such that when d' is calculated, differences between the lists are not significant. We propose an account of the LSE whereby the actual effect of competition between items on the list is small, although present, and difficult to distinguish from large effects of bias due to the strength manipulations. We argue that our findings provide support for a mechanistic explanation of LSE that is based on competition of source activation and changes in the thresholds for responses.     

What do children do in the rime-analogy task? An examination of the skills and strategies used by early readers

Despite the intense debate surrounding the use of orthographic analogy in the clue word paradigm, little is known about the skills and strategies children actually use and how these compare with their everyday reading of single words. This study, with 4- and 5-year-olds (N=125), supports previous work which suggests children rely on phonological, rather than orthographic, priming in the clue word task since children most frequently produced rhyming words in response to the clue word. The extent to which phoneme and rhyme-based skills, along with letter-sound knowledge, predicted children's performance in the analogy task and in a test of single word reading was contrasted and compared. Our findings suggested that the balance of skills which children drew upon was determined by the demands of the task. The implications of these findings for the validity of the 'orthographic'-analogy task and for teaching beginning readers is discussed.