Pastoral counseling among Chinese churches: a Canadian study

This article reports the results of a survey of Canadian Chinese pastors (N 20) regarding their experiences and attitudes related to pastoral counseling. It identifies common concerns encountered during pastoral counseling, as well as key areas of church concerns. Results of the survey indicate that pastoral counseling may be more important than is currently recognized by Chinese pastors, particularly in key areas of marriage, family life, and general relationship issues. The authors discuss possible implications of the survey relative to training and equipping Chinese pastors to engage more in pastoral counseling as an integral part of their parish ministry.     

Meta-analytic structural equation modeling: a two-stage approach

To synthesize studies that use structural equation modeling (SEM), researchers usually use Pearson correlations (univariate r), Fisher z scores (univariate z), or generalized least squares (GLS) to combine the correlation matrices. The pooled correlation matrix is then analyzed by the use of SEM. Questionable inferences may occur for these ad hoc procedures. A 2-stage structural equation modeling (TSSEM) method is proposed to incorporate meta-analytic techniques and SEM into a unified framework. Simulation results reveal that the univariate-r, univariate-z, and TSSEM methods perform well in testing the homogeneity of correlation matrices and estimating the pooled correlation matrix. When fitting SEM, only TSSEM works well. The GLS method performed poorly in small to medium samples.     

Counselling values and their relationships with self-efficacy among Chinese secondary school teachers in Hong Kong

Two-hundred-and-ninety-nine Chinese secondary school teachers in Hong Kong were assessed on their endorsement of counselling values using a 19-item self-report checklist, and on their perceived self-efficacy towards helping using the 10-item Schwarzer-Wegner scale. These teachers were found to share the same counselling values as counselling psychologists. They prized most highly the humanistic counsellor qualities, followed by counselling practice with a preventive, developmental and holistic perspective. Their relative endorsement of scientific values suggested that they were not resistant to the promotion of empirically supported and evidence-based treatment approaches. Teachers’ self-efficacy towards helping was also predictable from endorsing values related to interpersonal relationships and diversity in counselling practice. Implications of the findings for improved counselling training for teachers are discussed.     

The importance of material-processing interactions in inducing false memories

Deep encoding, relative to shallow encoding, has been shown to increase the probability of false memories in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm (Thapar & McDermott, 2001; Toglia, Neuschatz, & Goodwin, 1999). In two experiments, we showed important limitations on the generalizability of this phenomenon; these limitations are clearly predicted by existing theories regarding the mechanisms underlying such false memories (e.g., Roediger, Watson, McDermott, & Gallo, 2001). Specifically, asking subjects to attend to phonological relations among lists of phonologically associated words (e.g., weep, steep, etc.) increased the likelihood of false recall (Experiment 1) and false recognition (Experiment 2) of a related, nonpresented associate (e.g., sleep), relative to a condition in which subjects attended to meaningful relations among the words. These findings occurred along with a replication of prior findings (i.e., a semantic encoding task, relative to a phonological encoding task, enhanced the likelihood of false memory arising from a list of semantically associated words), and they place important constraints on theoretical explanations of false memory.     

Alpha3-integrins are required for hippocampal long-term potentiation and working memory

Integrins comprise a large family of heterodimeric, transmembrane cell adhesion receptors that mediate diverse neuronal functions in the developing and adult CNS. Recent pharmacological and genetic studies have suggested that beta1-integrins are critical in synaptic plasticity and memory formation. To further define the role of integrins in these processes, we generated a postnatal forebrain and excitatory neuron-specific knockout of alpha3-integrin, one of several binding partners for beta1 subunit. At hippocampal Schaffer collateral-CA1 synapses, deletion of alpha3-integrin resulted in impaired long-term potentiation (LTP). Basal synaptic transmission and paired-pulse facilitation were normal in the absence of alpha3-integrin. Behavioral studies demonstrated that the mutant mice were selectively defective in a hippocampus-dependent, nonmatch-to-place working memory task, but were normal in other hippocampus-dependent spatial tasks. The impairment in LTP and working memory is similar to that observed in beta1-integrin conditional knockout mice, suggesting that alpha3-integrin is the functional binding partner for beta1 for these processes in the forebrain.     

Subjective Difficulty of Movements With Ongoing Visual Control

Objective difficulty of a single-component visually controlled movement may be defined by Fitts's (1954) Index of Difficulty, which is a measure of difficulty in the sense that movement time is linearly related to the objective measure. For movements that have multiple components, it becomes difficult to determine an objective measure of task difficulty due to unknown interactions between components of the movement and interactions with other factors. Thus, it may be necessary to use indirect methods for allocating a measure of task difficulty. The purpose of the study was to determine whether participants could validly construct a subjective measure of the movement difficulty and whether this measure was related to the known objective measure of difficulty. Experiments showed that for single-component movements, there was a close relationship between measures of subjective and objective difficulty. With two-component visually controlled movements it was found that subjective difficulty could be related to objective difficulty, but not as simply as for single-component tasks.     

Perceived emotional intelligence and self-efficacy among Chinese secondary school teachers in Hong Kong

One hundred and fifty-eight secondary school teachers were assessed on their perceived emotional intelligence (Schutte et al., 1998) and general self-efficacy and self-efficacy toward helping others ( Schwarzer, 1993). An item factor analysis yielded four dimensions of perceived emotional intelligence, leading to the construction of four corresponding empirical scales. Teachers scored most highly on positive utilisation and emotional appraisal, followed by empathic sensitivity and positive regulation. Using the four components of perceived emotional intelligence as predictors of self-efficacy beliefs, positive regulation emerged as the significant predictor in predicting general self-efficacy whereas empathic sensitivity emerged as the significant predictor in predicting self-efficacy toward helping others. Implications of the findings for exploring the relationships between various components of perceived emotional intelligence and various specific self-efficacy beliefs for different groups of teachers and the need for further studies using longitudinal data are discussed.     

Body part representations in verbal semantics

Embodied theories of language propose that word meaning is inextricably tied to—grounded in—mental representations of perceptual, motor, and affective experiences of the world. The four experiments described in this article demonstrate that accessing the meanings of action verbs like smile, punch, and kick requires language understanders to activate modality-specific cognitive representations responsible for performing and perceiving those same actions. The main task used is a word-image matching task, where participants see an action verb and an image depicting an action. Their task is to decide as quickly as possible whether the verb and the image depict the same action. Of critical interest is participants’ behavior when the verb and image do not match, in which case the two actions can use the same effector or different effectors. In Experiment 1, we found that participants took significantly longer to reject a verb-image pair when the actions depicted by the image and denoted by the verb used the same effector than when they used different effectors. Experiment 2 yielded the same result when the order of presentation was reversed, replicating the effect in Cantonese. Experiment 3 replicated the effect in English with a verb-verb near-synonym task, and in Experiment 4, we once again replicated the effect with learners of English as a second language. This robust interference effect, whereby a shared effector slows discrimination, shows that language understanders activate effector-specific neurocognitive representations during both picture perception and action word understanding.