Prayer spaces in schools: a subversion of policy implementation?

Based on a major evaluation project, this article presents an emerging theme from research on the activities supported by Prayer Spaces in Schools, an organisation supporting ‘pop-up’ prayer spaces in schools across the UK and internationally. Evaluating the activities primarily in terms of their possible contribution to spiritual development, a number of important issues arose relating to policy on education and religion. This article focuses on how some engage with these prayer spaces as a way of reimagining and renegotiating educational policy. Based on data gathered from interviews with staff and students (aged 7–16) across seven schools in England, questionnaire responses from 555 students across 15 schools and feedback from two prayer spaces conferences, a hermeneutic approach is used to compare the interpretations of staff with those of students and the implicit positions of policy documents. This article explores various forms of policy implementation and how staff engagement with prayer spaces can be seen as a form of subversion, with staff tactically subverting policy implementation sometimes in order to promote the very intention of those policies – a form of what we refer to as subversive obedience.     

From Soma to Symbol: Psychosomatic Conditions and Transformative Experience,edited by Phyllis L. Sloate,Routledge, Abingdon and New York, (2018), 288 pp.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Words and wordlessness in the psychoanalytic situation

The difference between words and wordlessness in the psychoanalytic situation is examined in the context of a detailed clinical example. Various pairs of terms that have been used to account for this difference are mapped onto it: word and act, thought and feeling, public and private experience. Each of these sets of differences suggests certain relations between consciousness and the unconscious, and each implies a position about the nature of language. All three prove to be incomplete or inadequate ways of accounting for the difference between words and wordlessness in the clinical setting. The divergence, though, is well described by the difference between self-reflection and unformulated experience. Reflection is then presented as situated in the unformulated background meanings that contextualize it. It is because of this contextual embeddedness that self-reflection can have the kind of depth, resonance, power, and nuance more commonly associated with the nonverbal. In the creation of an explicit meaning, we simultaneously reconfigure the wordless background, thereby creating new possibilities for other meanings.     

Beyond surprise: the puzzle of infants' expressive reactions to expectancy violation

The reactions of 58 infants to expectancy violation by digitally filtering the experimenter's voice were studied in a cross-sectional design for ages 5, 7, 9, 11-12, and 14 months. The results show that behavioral freezing and changes in gaze direction, but not facial or vocal expression, are reliable responses to expectancy violation. The pattern suggests that a transition in the infant's capacity for cognitive evaluation of novel and discrepant events may occur around age 9 months. These findings confirm the consistent failure to find prototypical facial surprise reactions in research on novel or impossible situations. Componential theories of emotion, which predict adaptive behavior patterns from appraisal processes, may provide clues for underlying mechanisms and generate hypotheses on age-related changes in emotional expression.     

Assessing resource demands during sentence processing in Parkinson's disease

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have sentence comprehension difficulty, but it is unclear whether this is due to a deficit in grammatical processing or to an executive resource limitation. To assess grammatical processing in PD while minimizing task-related demands, PD patients and healthy control subjects performed a word detection procedure that assesses sensitivity to grammatical agreements in sentences in an "on-line" fashion. With this technique, we found that control subjects and PD patients are equally sensitive to grammatical agreement violations in sentences. A traditional, resource-demanding measure of sentence comprehension was also administered to the same PD patients. In comparison to healthy controls, PD patients were significantly impaired in their relative comprehension of sentences containing object-gap subordinate clauses compared to subject-gap subordinate clauses. Performance on several executive resource measures was also impaired in PD, and this correlated with their comprehension performance. Sensitivity to grammatical agreements with the word detection procedure, in the context of sentence comprehension difficulty on a traditional measure, suggests that PD patients' executive resource limitations contribute to their sentence comprehension difficulty.     

Neurocognitive Manifestations of Human Immunodeficiency Virus

Is human immunodeficiency virus still a terminal condition? Recent advances in treatment have significantly reduced both mortality and morbidity associated with HIV, but these treatments have not been successful in eradicating the virus itself. As such, HIV has evolved into a chronic condition that is complicated by neurocognitive factors. Cognitive difficulties associated with HIV are characterized by a subcortical pattern with primary deficits in information processing speed and psychomotor speed. These deficits interfere with the ability of patients to complete important instrumental activities of daily living even in the absence of dementia. Treatment of HIV improves neurocognitive functioning, but the regimens are complex and patient adherence is critical. Cognitive factors can negatively impact treatment adherence, which in turn results in poorer immunological, cognitive, and psychiatric outcome. This cycle emphasizes the important interrelationships between symptom expression and treatment outcome in patients with HIV. The nature of these relationships will change with further developments in treatment regimens such as once-daily dosing. Less complex treatment approaches should improve health outcome as well as provide additional opportunities to further understand the impact of HIV on brain function.     

Inventory of Interpersonal Problems Personality Disorder scales: operating characteristics and confirmatory factor analysis in nonclinical samples

Research involving clinical samples has demonstrated the utility of a 28-item personality disorder (PD) screening measure (Inventory of Interpersonal Problems--Personality Disorder scale [IIP-PD]) culled from the IIP in the prediction of the presence or absence of a PD (Pilkonis, Kim, Proietti, & Barkham, 1996). This article extends these diagnostic efficiency findings to nonclinical samples and presents additional data regarding the factor structure of the 28 IIP-PD items. Diagnostic efficiency statistics for the IIP-PD scale, calculated using both interview and self-report methods, support the utility of the IIP-PD scale as a screening tool for the presence or absence of a PD. High specificity estimates indicate that individuals who do not exceed Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) symptom thresholds rarely exceed the IIP-PD cutoff. Furthermore, a high negative predictive power (NPP) estimate derived using an interview-based diagnostic standard suggests that the IIP-PD scale accurately screens out individuals who do not have a PD. Finally, cross-validated confirmatory factor-analytic results involving items composing the 5 IIP PD subscales identified in previous research (Kim, Pilkonis, & Barkham, 1997) suggest that a measurement model with a single second-order factor (general PD) and 5 first-order factors (one representing each PD subscale) provided the best fit to the observed data compared to 2 other competing models.     

The relative effects of the frostig program, corrective reading instruction, and attention upon the reading skills of corrective readers with visual perceptual deficiencies

How effective are the Frostig training program and corrective reading instruction for improving the reading and visual-motor skills of pupils who possess deficiencies in both areas? Each of the three teachers worked each school day for sixteen weeks with the subjects of the two treatment groups plus a play placebo group. On the basis of the results of this study there is little, if any, support for the use of the Frostig program or corrective reading as treatments to improve the reading skills of children considered to possess a visual-motor problem. Due to the performances of the attention-placebo group, it is logical to hypothesize that improvements of the remedial groups are more a function of personal attention than the unique remedial powers of the two treatments. Consideration should be given to the optimal number of Frostig sessions as well as to the possibility of a ceiling effect of the Frostig program. Eight weeks of training would appear to be the maximum time before regression or improvement takes place.     

A comparison of administration procedures for the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure: flowcharts versus pen switching

The Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure (ROCF) is commonly used to assess visuospatial skills, visuoconstruction, visual memory, and executive functioning. Two different methods are traditionally used to record the order in which the figure is drawn: the flowchart method and the pen-switching method. Although it has been suggested that pen switching may interfere with performance, to date no research has been conducted to assess whether ROCF performance significantly differs due to administration method. As part of routine neuropsychological evaluation, 100 inpatients and outpatients were randomly assigned to either method. Using the Boston Qualitative Scoring System and the traditional 36-point scoring method, the authors unexpectedly found that the pen-switching group generally performed better than the flowchart group, and productions drawn with pen switching were also significantly faster to score.