Education as hospitality: welcoming foreigners into a common world

ABSTRACT

The present article aims at examining the specific difficulties that the school form – the modern educational institution par excellence – faces in order to attain hospitality as the raison d'être of the educational process. Educational activity is here understood as a form of hospitality which involves caring for the newcomers and for the physical and symbolic place into which they arrive. A cinematographical narrative drawn from Bégaudeau’s Entre les Murs supplements this analysis of some of the challenges we are faced with when dealing with students from different national backgrounds, beliefs and forms of life.     

Validation of the Visual Analogue Scale for Anxiety-Revised and school refusal across anxiety profiles

Background/Objectives

This paper aimed to validate the Spanish version of scores of the Visual Analogue Scale for Anxiety-Revised (VAA-R) in child population, and to verify the existence of anxiety profiles and to relate them to school refusal.

Action‐semantic and syntactic deficits in subjects at risk for Huntington's disease

Frontostriatal networks play critical roles in grounding action semantics and syntactic skills. Indeed, their atrophy distinctively disrupts both domains, as observed in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and Parkinson's disease, even during early disease stages. However, frontostriatal degeneration in these conditions may begin up to 15 years before the onset of clinical symptoms, opening avenues for pre‐clinical detection via sensitive tasks. Such a mission is particularly critical in HD, given that patients’ children have 50% chances of inheriting the disease. Against this background, we assessed whether deficits in the above‐mentioned domains emerge in subjects at risk to develop HD. We administered tasks tapping action semantics, object semantics, and two forms of syntactic processing to 18 patients with HD, 19 asymptomatic first‐degree relatives, and sociodemographically matched controls for each group. The patients evinced significant deficits in all tasks, but only those in the two target domains were independent of overall cognitive state. More crucially, relative to controls, the asymptomatic relatives were selectively impaired in action semantics and in the more complex syntactic task, with both patterns emerging irrespective of the subjects’ overall cognitive state. Our findings highlight the relevance of these dysfunctions as potential prodromal biomarkers of HD. Moreover, they offer theoretical insights into the differential contributions of frontostriatal hubs to both domains while paving the way for innovations in diagnostic procedures.     

Personality Disorders Are Not as We Thought: Hierarchical Factor Structure at the Criterion Level

The use of personality disorder (PD) categories persists, despite the evidence against them. An often overlooked reason for this is the fact that the true structure underlying the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) taxonomy is still unknown: We cannot be certain which disorders are valid, and which ones are arbitrary mixtures of heterogeneous traits. To address this gap, we factor analyzed the Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire (PDQ–4+; Hyler, 1994 Hyler, S. E. (1994). PDQ–4+ Personality Diagnostic Questionnaire–4+. New York, NY: New York State Psychiatric Institute. [Google Scholar]) at the criterion level in a mixed clinical and nonclinical sample of 2,519 individuals. The resulting structure was more similar to current dimensional taxonomies than to the DSM classification at all hierarchical levels. Whereas paranoid and antisocial PDs—and to a lesser extent avoidant, dependent, depressive, and schizoid PDs—were fairly homogeneous, all other disorders turned out to be combinations of 2 or 3 unrelated dimensions. Our results strongly support the structure of empirically based dimensional taxonomies and relocate DSM criteria within this emerging framework, thus contributing to preserving much of the knowledge accumulated to date.     

Self-Criticism,Neediness, and Distress in the Prediction of Suicide Ideation: Results from Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Studies

The aim of the present study was to test whether the maladaptive personality traits of self-criticism and neediness predict suicide ideation when controlling for general distress. Further, potential interactive effects on suicide ideation of the two traits and distress were also evaluated. Two studies with nonclinical samples were conducted. The first investigation was cross-sectional and involved a final sample of 202 community adults while the second study was longitudinal with a final sample of 207 college students. Results of Study 1 demonstrated that self-criticism, but not neediness, associated with suicide ideation and, in doing so, also interacted with distress. Neediness also tended to interact with self-criticism in the prediction of suicide ideation. Results from Study 2 were similar and confirmed the Study 1 results. Changes in self-criticism, but not changes in neediness, predicted changes in suicide ideation after statistically controlling for changes in distress. Changes in the interaction between self-criticism and distress predicted changes in suicide ideation and changes in the interaction between self-criticism and neediness tended to predict changes in suicide ideation. Results are discussed with regard to their implications for psychological intervention.     

Academic goals and learning strategies in secondary education Spanish students with social anxiety / Metas académicas y estrategias de aprendizaje en estudiantes españoles de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria con ansiedad social

The purpose of this study was to analyse the relationship between high social anxiety, academic goals and learning strategies in a sample of 2,022 (51.1% male) Spanish adolescents aged 12–16. The Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI), Achievement Goal Tendencies Questionnaire (AGTQ) and Learning and Studies Skills Strategies Inventory — High School Version (LASSI-HS) were used to assess the variables. The results showed no statistically significant differences in goal orientations between students with and without high social anxiety. However, students with high social anxiety used learning strategies significantly less. In addition, the logistic regression results indicated that high social anxiety acts as a significant predictor for setting social reinforcement goals and learning and study strategies.     

Interwoven stories: our path of creativity and poetry named the ecodialogue center

The history of organizations and collectives is something alive. It is a network of memories, actions, collaborations, dreams, encounters, and disconnections that live within each of its members. The EcoDialogue Center is an academic space of the University of Veracruz for promoting dialogue between disciplines. In this article we are presenting the stories, both personal and collective, and the values and ideals that create our Center. We are using this opportunity to reflect on the cultural, geographical, emotional, intellectual, and societal conditions that have allowed this innovative process within the rules and customs of a university.     

Reading the Lives of Others: Biography as Political Thought in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

In this essay, I focus on two biographical works by Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir that I read as political texts: Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (Arendt 1957 ) and “Must We Burn Sade?” (Beauvoir 2012 ). Reading Arendt's Varnhagen and Beauvoir's “Sade” side by side illuminates their shared preoccupation with lived experience and their common political premises: the antagonism between freedom and sovereignty, and the centrality of action and constructive relations with others. My argument is that these texts constitute an original style of political thinking, which I call politico‐biographical hermeneutics, or reading the life of others as exercises in political theory. Politico‐biographical hermeneutics, as I take it, is not a systematic methodology, but an approach to interpreting sociopolitical forces as they come to bear and are embodied and inscribed in the lived experiences, struggles, and works of representative or exemplary individuals. This approach identifies the political lessons of lived experience and supports one of the central claims of feminist philosophy, namely, that the personal and the political are not antithetical, but relational.     

Team Development: Definition,Measurement and Relationships with Team Effectiveness

This article describes the development and validation of a theory-based measure of team development. Drawing on 3 independent samples, including multisource and 2-wave data, we found support for the scale’s theoretical multidimensionality. Convergent and discriminant validity was established, and criterion-related validity was determined through the scale’s relation with 3 facets of team effectiveness: viability, extrarole performance, and reputation. We conclude that the 29-item measure is valid and reliable for the assessment of team development. Theoretically, we shed light on the dimensionality of team development and extend the available knowledge on its nomological network. Practical implications for enhancing team effectiveness via team development are discussed.