Protégés’ and mentors’ reactions to participating in formal mentoring programs: A qualitative investigation

Mentors and protégés from two formal mentoring programs were interviewed about the benefits associated with program participation, problems encountered in the program, and recommendations for program improvements. The most commonly reported benefits for protégés included learning, coaching, career planning, and psychosocial support. Mentors most frequently reported learning, developing a personal relationship, personal gratification, and enhanced managerial skills. Both groups identified a range of problems including mentor-protégé mismatches, scheduling difficulties, and geographic distance. Unique problems were also identified, including mentor neglect (by protégés), unmet expectations (by protégés), structural separation from the mentor (by protégés), and feelings of personal inadequacy (by mentors). Finally, suggestions for program improvement were identified such as clearer communication of program objectives, better matching, targeted participation in the program, and better program monitoring. Findings are discussed in terms of what we currently know about informal mentoring and implications for mentoring theory. Suggestions for mentoring practice are also discussed.     

Contextualizing the Psychosocial Well‐being of Military Members and Their Partners: The Importance of Community and Relationship Provisions

Evidence of the impact of communities has been documented for a variety of individual and relational outcomes, including mental and physical health as well as the quality of romantic and parent–child relationships. The military represents a rather unique work context; in that, it is generally considered a lifestyle with a distinct culture and community. Yet, military families are also members of their broader, comprehensive community. Drawing from the social organizational theory of action and change (SOC) (Mancini & Bowen, 2013), and relationship provisions theory (Weiss, 1969) and utilizing a sample of 266 active duty military families, this study examined connectedness with the military community and the broader, comprehensive community. A dyadic model was evaluated whereby each partner's perspective of their comprehensive and military community was hypothesized to influence their own psychosocial well‐being as well as their partner's psychosocial well‐being. The role of relationship provisions (that is, having relationship needs met) as a mechanism linking community connections to psychosocial well‐being was also examined. Overall, the findings supported the hypothesized model, particularly for intra‐individual effects and military members. Findings emphasize the importance of considering what is gained from connections within a community rather than a focus solely on the connections themselves.     

Rival Methodologies in Emergence Theory: A Non-Dual Approach

Jason Roberts proposes that Karl Rahner's theology of nature serves as an appropriate dialogue partner for natural scientists like Terrence Deacon in his naturalistic approach to the emergence of higher-order levels of existence and activity within the natural sciences. Yet Rahner and Deacon employ different understandings of formal causality in their respective approaches to evolutionary theory: for Rahner, causal agency vis-à-vis constituents; for Deacon, objective constraint on the agency of constituents. Yet a compromise position may be available based on a modest revision of the relationship between societies and their constituent actual entities in A.N. Whitehead's cosmology.     

Formal assessment of reliability specifications in embedded cyber-physical systems

Reliability has become an integral component of the design intent of embedded cyber-physical systems. Safety-critical embedded systems are designed with specific reliability targets, and design practices include the appropriate allocation of both spatial and temporal redundancies in the implementation to meet such requirements. With increasing complexity of such systems and considering the large number of components in such systems, redundancy allocation requires a formal scientific basis. In this work, we profess the analysis of the redundancy requirement upfront with the objective of making it an integral part of the specification. The underlying problem is one of synthesizing a formal specification with built-in redundancy artifacts, from the formal properties of the error-free system, the error probabilities of the control components, and the reliability target. We believe that upfront formal analysis of redundancy requirements is important in budgeting the resource requirements from a cost versus reliability perspective. Several case-studies from the automotive domain highlight the efficacy of our proposal.     

Considerations on medical training for gender-affirming care: Motivations and perspectives

Abstract

Background: Many transgender individuals lack access to needed medical care, partially due to a lack of providers with experience in gender-affirming healthcare.

Aims: The purpose of this study was to identify professional motivators for medical providers seeking out training in gender-affirming care and to define which training experiences were most beneficial to their career development. By identifying experienced providers’ recommendations on which training modalities are most relevant to their practice, we aim to suggest future directions for medical education initiatives to effectively expand the transgender care workforce.

Methods: A voluntary cross-sectional electronic survey was distributed through professional listservs and publicly-available referral lists to interdisciplinary providers who self-identified as having experience in providing care to transgender individuals.

Results: One hundred and fifty-three (n?=?153) physicians, physician assistants, or advance-practice nurses responded to the survey. The majority (96.7%) were located in the United States, representing 37 states. The two most common motivators for seeking out training in gender-affirming care were filling a need in the community (73.0%) and/or having met a transgender-identified person in a clinical setting who requested care (63.8%). While many providers gained skills independently (57.3%), the two most commonly-available training opportunities were professional conferences (57.3%) and mentorship (41.3%). Respondents were most likely to recommend that others in their field be trained via structured clinical experience (e.g., a rotation or longitudinal exposure during training), rather than additional didactic training.

Discussion: This study identifies key high-yield training methodologies which could improve access to quality gender-affirming healthcare. Through integration of structured clinical experiences during training, direct clinical mentorship, and professional development at conferences on gender-affirming care, the workforce of welcoming and prepared healthcare providers for transgender patients will increase. This will lead to a tremendous improvement on access to gender-affirming care in our communities.     

Rectifying the Mischaracterization of Logic by Mental Model Theorists

Khemlani et al. (2018) mischaracterize logic in the course of seeking to show that mental model theory (MMT) can accommodate a form of inference (, let us label it) they find in a high percentage of their subjects. We reveal their mischaracterization and, in so doing, lay a landscape for future modeling by cognitive scientists who may wonder whether human reasoning is consistent with, or perhaps even capturable by, reasoning in a logic or family thereof. Along the way, we note that the properties touted by Khemlani et al. as innovative aspects of MMT-based modeling (e.g., nonmonotonicity) have for decades been, in logic, acknowledged and rigorously specified by families of (implemented) logics. Khemlani et al. (2018) further declare that is “invalid in any modal logic.” We demonstrate this to be false by our introduction (Appendix A) of a new propositional modal logic (within a family of such logics) in which is provably valid, and by the implementation of this logic. A second appendix, B, partially answers the two-part question, “What is a formal logic, and what is it for one to capture empirical phenomena?”     

The Road to Becoming a Psychologist: Indicators of Success and Hardship during the University Years

Abstract

In order to become a full-fledged psychologist, one must undertake a long, demanding, and quite difficult journey in academia. The academic journey holds a promise of delivering knowledge, interesting theories, and strategies on helping those who need psychological assessment and/or treatment. However, the constant expectation of keeping up with the material, of succeeding in tests and exams, and of preparing to proceed to the next educational level can be daunting and exhausting. In line with the topic of this special issue, this paper addresses factors contributing to academic success at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate levels of psychology. Utilizing the available literature on the Big Five personality classification scheme, high conscientiousness was found to be the most consistent predictor of success, although curiously, this relationship was only found to be reliable at the undergraduate level. Less robust findings included high agreeableness and low neuroticism as predictors of general academic success in all tertiary levels of education. The importance of mentorship figures in psychology, and a highlight of its lack of widespread implementation at the undergraduate level, are also addressed. Additionally, we discuss the negative implications of the impostor phenomenon and of loneliness, which students at all levels may experience as common barriers to scholastic success in psychology. Following a discussion of each factor as outlined above, there is a brief literature review regarding ways that its constraining effects may be limited or its positive effects possibly enhanced.