Prevention of school bullying: The important role of autonomy‐supportive teaching and internalization of pro‐social values

Background. This study examined students’ perceptions of autonomy‐supportive teaching (AST) and its relations to internalization of pro‐social values and bullying in class. Aims. We hypothesized that: (1) teachers’ AST, which involves provision of rationale and taking the student's perspective, would relate positively to students’ identified internalization of considerateness towards classmates, and would relate negatively to external regulation (considerateness to obtain rewards or avoid punishments); (2) students’ identified regulation would relate negatively to self‐reported bullying in class, whereas external regulation would relate positively to bullying; and (3) the relation between teachers’ AST and student bullying would be mediated by students’ identification with the value of considerateness towards others. Sample. The sample consisted of 725 junior high school students (50% females) in Grades 7 and 8 from 27 classes in four schools serving students from lower‐middle to middle‐class socioeconomic backgrounds. Method. The participants completed questionnaires assessing the variables of interest. Results. Correlational analysis supported the hypotheses. Moreover, mediational analyses using hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) demonstrated that identified regulation mediates the negative relation between AST and self‐reported bullying in class. The mediational hypothesis was supported at the between‐class level and at the within‐class level. Conclusions. The findings suggest that school policy aimed at bullying reduction should go beyond external control that involves external rewards and sanctions and should help teachers acquire autonomy‐supportive practices focusing on students’ meaningful internalization.     

The Use of Islamic Patterned Art Therapy: Healing of Psychological Problems Among University Students

Journal of Religion and Health - This study was designed to adopt art therapy from an Islamic perspective by adding/including shapes and designs of Islamic origin. This was...     

Reconstructing the recent visual past: Hierarchical knowledge-based effects in visual working memory

This paper presents two experiments that examine the influence of multiple levels of knowledge on visual working memory (VWM). Experiment 1 focused on memory for faces. Faces were selected from continua that were constructed by morphing two face photographs in 100 steps; half of the continua morphed a famous face into an unfamiliar one, while the other half used two unfamiliar faces. Participants studied six sequentially presented faces each from a different continuum, and at test they had to locate one of these within its continuum. Experiment 2 examined immediate memory for object sizes. On each trial, six images were shown; these were either all vegetables or all random shapes. Immediately after each list, one item was presented again, in a new random size, and participants reproduced its studied size. Results suggested that two levels of knowledge influenced VWM. First, there was an overall central-tendency bias whereby items were remembered as being closer to the overall average or central tokens (averaged across items and trials) than they actually were. Second, when object knowledge was available for the to-be-remembered items (i.e., famous face or typical size of a vegetable) a further bias was introduced in responses. The results extend the findings of Hemmer and Steyvers (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 80–87, 2009a) from episodic memory to VWM and contribute to the growing literature which illustrates the complexity and flexibility of the representations subtending VWM performance (e.g., Bae, Olkkonen, Allred, & Flombaum, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(4):744–63, 2015).     

Positive mental imagery and mental health amongst university students in Pakistan

Mental health problems amongst university students pose a major public health challenge, and this is particularly the case in Pakistan. Alongside broader societal and cultural pressures, cognitive factors likely also play a role in the development of and resilience to mental health problems and may provide a feasible target for interventions. The current study built on previous research in primarily European samples investigating the relationship between one cognitive factor, positive future-oriented mental imagery, and mental health, extending this to a sample of university students in Pakistan (N = 1838). In a cross-sectional design, higher vividness of positive future-oriented mental imagery was associated with lower levels of depressive symptoms and higher levels of positive mental health amongst participants completing questionnaire measures on paper (N = 1430) or online (N = 408). In the sample completing the measures on paper, these relationships remained statistically significant even when controlling for socio-demographic and mental health-related variables. The results provide a foundation for further investigating positive mental imagery as a potential mechanism of mental health and intervention target amongst university students in Pakistan.     

Stroop effect in words that differ from color words in one letter only

In two experiments, participants named the color of a colored word, which was a Hebrew color word or a word in Hebrew that was different from a color word in one letter only. The magnitude of the Stroop effect increased with the location of the changed letter. It was smallest when the first letter of the color word was replaced, resulting in a noncolor word, and it was largest when the last letter was replaced. These results challenge the assumption that automatic reading, as indicated by the Stroop effect, can be explained exclusively by memory retrieval accounts of automaticity. The results also have implications for the sources of facilitation and inhibition in the Stroop effect.