Counseling psychologists and correctional settings: Opportunities between profession and setting

Counseling psychologists are working in correctional settings; yet, research on how the profession and setting interact to achieve successful solutions for corrections is lacking. This paper provides a conceptual starting point for such research by describing three core themes of counseling psychology: strengths-based approaches, person and environment interaction, and developmental approach across the lifespan. Each core theme is applied to various correctional setting needs (e.g. multiculturalism, violence prevention and rehabilitative treatments, developmentally appropriate vocational services across the lifespan) illustrate the unique fit and ability of counseling psychology to produce successful solutions within this non-traditional counseling setting. Describing the solutions generated by the profession of counseling psychology in the correctional setting may encourage more counseling psychologists to consider applying their knowledge skills and abilities to this important and diverse area of public service and professional work.     

Moved to messiness: Physical activity,feelings, and transdisciplinarity

This paper is based on conversations that took place during a scholarly reading group on the sociology of emotions. The members of the group shared an interest in the body, movement, and culture, but our academic and ‘athletic’ backgrounds were quite varied. Our diverse socio-cultural understandings of emotions were complicated by our own (emotional) experiences of physical (in)activity, thus conversations cut a wide and varied path. One idea, however, continued to resonate throughout our discussions; we found the experiential, theoretical, and methodological notion of messiness to hold great possibility as it allowed us to avoid the urge to reduce diverse experiences to a singular voice (Christians, 2011, Cornforth et al., 2012, Ellingson, 2009, Noble, 2009). Consequently, our project here is twofold. First, we experiment with communal writing as a method for undertaking a study of physical activity. Second, rather than any one perspective taking precedence we use this practice as a way to demonstrate the potential of embracing messiness as a collaborative ethical and theoretical method for understanding the complexities of emotions in relation to (in)active bodies. Specifically, using a variety of disciplinary and theoretical lenses we explore physical (in)activity in relation to pain/pleasure, and the gaze and performance. The result is a conversation made up of traditional and non-traditional approaches to academic writing that work to reconfigure and to challenge traditional dichotomies and hierarchical understandings of the active body, understandings that potentially over-simplify and close-down our emotional experiences of physical (in)activity.     

Motor timing and the preparation for sequential actions

Motor timing is essential for performing self-initiated movement sequences. Here, we investigated how sequence rhythm, or the timing for co-ordinating movements within a sequence, contributes to action preparation, compared with other processes occurring during sequence planning. First, we recorded the readiness potential (RP) in a condition of complex sequence rhythm and in condition of high demand on the timing for sequence initiation. We found that sequence rhythm and sequence initiation are independent processes, with sequence initiation contributing to early RP. Second, we compared the RP recorded in a condition of complex sequence rhythm and in a condition of complex sequence order, in which a complex combination of finger sub-movements had to be correctly ordered within a sequence. We found that sequence rhythm and sequence order share common processes occurring late RP. We suggest that the preparation for movement involves independent processes devoted to different aspects of motor timing and sequencing.     

Prisoners on the Fireline: The Application of Ethical Principles and Guidelines to Prison Fire Camps

Our society gives certain rights and protections to those who are punished and incarcerated, deeming them a vulnerable group in need of additional protections because they are under state control. Despite these protections, prisoners are still susceptible to mistreatment and abuse. This paper delves into one area in which prisoners are particularly vulnerable—the use of prison labor to fight wildfires in the western United States. In this paper, I first broadly discuss prison labor, before going into the current ethical principles and guidelines in the field of corrections that address the treatment of prisoners and prison labor. I argue that these principles and guidelines should be augmented to help those in corrections to make decisions about what is ethical; suggesting that how researchers evaluate proposed research projects could serve as a model for decision-making. I then introduce prison fire camps, considering whether they are ethical by research ethics principles, and suggesting how they can be changed to better reflect the values professed by our society.     

Implementing Trauma-Informed Care in Correctional Treatment and Supervision

ABSTRACT

This article provides a rationale for trauma-informed care (TIC) in correctional services, and challenges readers to think about offending behavior through the lens of trauma. Based on interdisciplinary research and cross-theoretical literature, TIC can help in our quest to develop relevant and successful programs, practices, and policies, and the best methods for delivering them. Using Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)’s core principles of TIC, this article will make suggestions for the implementation of trauma-informed service delivery and practices across correctional settings. The authors translate trauma-informed concepts into practice behaviors through the acronym SHARE (safety, hope, autonomy, respect, empathy), which honors the principles of TIC recommended by SAMHSA and the principles of effective correctional rehabilitation. TIC in corrections may help improve the desired outcomes of successful re-entry and reduced recidivism.     

Using movement and intentions to understand simple events

In order to understand ongoing activity, observers segment it into meaningful temporal parts. Segmentation can be based on bottom-up processing of distinctive sensory characteristics, such as movement features. Segmentation may also be affected by top-down effects of knowledge structures, including information about actors’ intentions. Three experiments investigated the role of movement features and intentions in perceptual event segmentation, using simple animations. In all conditions, movement features significantly predicted where participants segmented. This relationship was stronger when participants identified larger units than when they identified smaller units, and stronger when the animations were generated randomly than when they were generated by goal-directed human activity. This pattern suggests that bottom-up processing played an important role in segmentation of these stimuli, but that this was modulated by top-down influence of knowledge structures. To describe accurately how observers perceive ongoing activity, one must account for the effects of distinctive sensory characteristics, the effects of knowledge structures, and their interactions.     

Review Section

No abstract available for this article.     

Internal Reformation Within the Contemporary Coptic Imagined Community: The Sunday School Movement and Mechanisms of Minority Survival

Abstract

With the centennial jubilee of the Sunday School Movement (SSM) occurring in 2018, this article explores two main questions: what are the main features of the Coptic community as imagined by the leaders of the SSM? And what is the nature of the relationship between “Coptic” Christian and “national Egyptian” identities within the dominant discourse of the SSM? The article argues that the contemporary Coptic identity, as reconstituted by the SSM, helps the Coptic community to survive as a vertical ethnie. The new Coptic identity is rooted in and relies upon the exclusive use of demotic symbols and narratives. Thus equipped, modern Copts perceive themselves as part of an imagined spiritual community within the wider Egyptian community. Indeed, this article argues that the SSM’s discourse presents a unique ‘marble cake’ model wherein religious and national identities are both present. By portraying Coptism as the area of interplay between Christianity and Egyptian-ness, the SSM blends “biological” and “cultural-ideological” modes of myth-making. Accordingly, to identify as Copt becomes equivalent to identifying as Egyptian.