Digital��nye dereven??iki/digital villagers: Russian online projects from the countryside

The rapid growth of the Russian Internet offers great advantages, especially for geographical and cultural peripheries. Nevertheless, the locational inequality in Internet usage within the country has not yet been bridged. Meanwhile, some Russian villagers living in the countryside have started to ??blog back?? to the metropolitan centres. How is the Russian village represented in these accounts by digital??nye dereven??iki? What power relations are characteristic of villagers and townspeople, as they meet in online forums and blogs? The case studies presented in this essay show that, although the traditional dichotomist opposition between centre and periphery has undergone substantial redefinition, the significance of these concepts as value-loaded, culturally coded discursive entities still prevails. The manifestation of hybrid identities, explored in recent research on transnational diasporic communities, has not yet affected the rather static conceptions of core and periphery at work within Russian borders and on the Russian Internet.     

Content Analysis of 32 Years of American Counseling Association Convention Programs

A content analysis of American Counseling Association convention sessions offered from 1977 to 2008 was conducted. The intent was to identify changes and trends in the counseling profession. Content of more than 15,000 sessions, including educational programs, keynote presentations, and training sessions, was assigned to 1 of 86 categories. A shift from a career and school focus to clinical and mental health, as well as an increasing emphasis on multicultural; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender; and spirituality issues, was noted.     

Appraisals,emotions and emotion regulation: An integrative approach

The present work aims to investigate the relation between appraisals, emotions, and emotion regulation strategies by creating a structural equation model which integrates these three aspects of the emotion process. To reach this aim, Italian students (N = 610) confronted with their high school diploma examination completed a questionnaire 3 weeks before the beginning of the exam. Results showed that they experienced primarily three types of emotions—anxiety/fear, frustration/powerlessness, positive emotions—which were related to specific appraisal profiles. Importantly, these appraisal profiles and emotions were associated with the use of different strategies for regulating emotions: anxiety/fear was associated with focusing on the exam, drug use, and an inability to distance oneself from the exam; frustration/powerlessness, with use of suppression, distancing, and drugs; positive emotion, with reappraisal and problem focused strategies. The effectiveness of these different strategies will be discussed.     

Response priming driven by local contrast, not subjective brightness

We demonstrate qualitative dissociations of brightness processing in visuomotor priming and conscious vision. Speeded keypress responses to the brighter of two luminance targets were performed in the presence of preceding dark and bright primes (clearly visible and flanking the targets) whose apparent brightness values were enhanced or attenuated by a visual illusion. Response times to the targets were greatly affected by consistent versus inconsistent arrangements of the primes, relative to the targets (response priming). Priming effects could systematically contradict subjective brightness matches, such that one prime could appear brighter than the other but could prime as if it were darker. Systematic variation of the illusion showed that response-priming effects depended only on local flanker-background contrast, not on the subjective appearance of the flankers. Our findings suggest that speeded motor responses, as opposed to conscious perceptual judgments, access an early phase of lightness and brightness processing prior to full lightness constancy.     

The “dual usage problem” in the explanations of “joint attention” and children’s socioemotional development: A reconceptualization

The term “joint attention”, which first gained currency in the early 1960s in studies of the development of language and symbolic thought, remains significant in the developmental literature. However, its meaning is unclear. A definitional problem exists similar to what Patterson [Patterson, M. L. (1982). A sequential functional model of nonverbal exchange. Psychological Review, 89, 231–249] described as the “dual usage” problem in the study of behaviour. The dual usage problem manifests when the behaviours of interest are used interchangeably with the function served by those behaviours. Similarly, the behaviours or skills that are taken to show joint attention are used interchangeably with the functions served by these behaviours. Scant attention is given to how the behaviours are generated and regulated and how they contribute to development. The purpose of the present position paper was: (1) to identify and illustrate the ways in which the behaviours and functions of joint attention have been confounded in the literature; (2) to provide a revised operationalization of joint attention incorporating the idea of Consummative Joint Attention, which is defined as a process variable that integrates these two theoretically different and complementary aspects of “joint attention;” and (3) to test this revised definition with evidence from a sample of hearing mothers and their 18- to 36-month-old hearing or deaf toddlers. We suggest that a reconceptualization and revised definition of joint attention as a process served by a particular sequence of complementary and well-timed events in the behaviour of mother–child interaction are particularly well-suited to testing joint attention as an early prelingual mechanism and to detecting early problems with psychosocial and adaptive development created by ineffective patterns of social interaction.     

Deliberate practice predicts performance over time in adolescent chess players and drop‐outs: A linear mixed models analysis

In this study, the longitudinal relation between deliberate practice and performance in chess was examined using a linear mixed models analysis. The practice activities and performance ratings of young elite chess players, who were either in, or had dropped out of the Dutch national chess training, were analysed since they had started playing chess seriously. The results revealed that deliberate practice (i.e. serious chess study alone and serious chess play) strongly contributed to chess performance. The influence of deliberate practice was not only observable in current performance, but also over chess players' careers. Moreover, although the drop‐outs' chess ratings developed more slowly over time, both the persistent and drop‐out chess players benefited to the same extent from investments in deliberate practice. Finally, the effect of gender on chess performance proved to be much smaller than the effect of deliberate practice. This study provides longitudinal support for the monotonic benefits assumption of deliberate practice, by showing that over chess players' careers, deliberate practice has a significant effect on performance, and to the same extent for chess players of different ultimate performance levels. The results of this study are not in line with critique raised against the deliberate practice theory that the factors deliberate practice and talent could be confounded.     

Dreaming of white bears: the return of the suppressed at sleep onset

The present study examined the effects of thought suppression on sleep-onset mentation. It was hypothesized that the decrease of attentional control in the transition to sleep would lead to a rebound of a suppressed thought in hypnagogic mentation. Twenty-four young adults spent two consecutive nights in a sleep laboratory. Half of the participants were instructed to suppress a target thought, whereas the other half freely thought of anything at all. To assess target thought frequency, three different measures were used in the wake state and mentation reports were repeatedly prompted by a computer at sleep onset. In support of the hypothesis, results revealed a reversal of target thought frequency at sleep onset: Participants instructed to suppress reported fewer target thoughts than did controls before falling asleep, but more target thoughts afterwards.     

A comparative study of adolescent risk assessment instruments: predictive and incremental validity

Promising new adolescent risk assessment tools are being incorporated into clinical practice but currently possess limited evidence of predictive validity regarding their individual and/or combined use in risk assessments. The current study compares three structured adolescent risk instruments, Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory (YLS/CMI), Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY), and Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV), for both predictive and incremental validity with respect to general and violent recidivism. Receiver operating characteristic and hierarchical logistic regression analyses revealed that the risk tools predicted general and violent recidivism to varying degrees of accuracy, but the SAVRY offered the most in incremental validity. Clinical implications and future directions for youth risk assessment are discussed.