Reading minds: Mentalization,irony and literary engagement

The concept of ‘mentalization’ has recently provided a fertile resource for thinking about various issues in psychoanalysis, including attachment, children’s play, personality disorders and the work of interpretation within the analytic setting. Mentalization also provides fruitful ways of thinking about how we read. This paper will suggest that book reading is akin to mind reading: engaging with certain literary texts is akin to understanding the minds of others from the subjective perspective required by mentalization. This way of thinking about literature provides a useful way of understanding its value. The paper will focus specifically on the uses of irony and free indirect speech in Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion. Austen’s use of literary techniques provides a way of understanding the inner lives of her characters via the ironic voice of the implied author, and requires the reader to engage in the kinds of understanding and insight required for mentalization.     

Self-reported mental health problems and performance in mathematics and reading in children across Europe

ABSTRACT

The study examines the associations of specific self-reported internalizing and externalizing problems and performance in mathematics and reading in school-aged children across Europe. Data were drawn from 5,842 children between 6 and 13 years of age participating in the School Children Mental Health in Europe study and a large cross-sectional survey in France. Self-reported child mental health was assessed using the Dominic Interactive, academic performance was reported by teachers. Across Europe, controlling for key sociodemographic factors associated with achievement including maternal education, performance in mathematics was more often associated with the presence of externalizing and internalizing problems as compared to performance in reading. In addition, the findings point to significant sex differences in the associations of internalizing problems and academic achievement. Considering the impact of early academic difficulties in terms of later internalizing and externalizing problems and academic attainment, school-based interventions interrupting the cycle as early as possible are warranted.     

小学低年级儿童汉语语素意识、口语词汇知识对阅读能力的影响:一项追踪研究

以149名小学一年级儿童为被试，进行为期三年的追踪，采用交叉滞后的分析方法考察了儿童汉语语素意识、口语词汇知识与阅读能力的关系。结果发现：（1）儿童汉语语素意识、口语词汇知识、阅读准确性和阅读流畅性在小学1~3年级间有显著增长；（2）控制一般认知能力、语音意识、快速命名后，口语词汇知识在儿童早期的语素意识与后期的阅读能力之间起跨时间点的中介作用。结果表明，儿童早期的语素意识水平能够提高词汇知识获得的效率，进而促进阅读能力的发展。     

Novel poetic protest: What Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist offers geographers writing to evoke rather than convey

This paper is a call to geographers, a call for evocative understandings of complicated places and times, for writing practices that foreground feelings, embrace experiential considerations, and privilege embodied relationships with text during periods of struggle, protest, and resistance. I anchor this call in a formalist reading Sunil Yapa's Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. Drawing from poetic impulses, my formalist reading of the novel includes attention to the novels' grammatical structures and lineated assemblages: I extend my reading of the novel into a call for geographers to experiment and emote in our writing practices, whatever those practices might be. The paper also draws on poet Don Paterson's writing about textual work done by the lyrical and the lyric. Paterson suggests poetry offers opportunities to make writing an ingestible project, one with the potential of being physically manifest in a reader. In this paper, I suggest there is much potential for social change if geographers consider emotionally evocative writing and knowledge as opposed to information being conveyed in expected forms. Ultimately, and circling back to Yapa, I call to geographers to consider our writing as activist work, with the emotional potential of making a new and better world.     

Improving Empathy in Children: Interactive Read-Aloud as a Counseling Intervention

ABSTRACT

The authors describe interactive read-alouds as an effective counseling strategy to improve empathy levels in school aged children. The importance of reading development and empathy development were considered as well. Results of the literature review indicate reading development is an essential building block in school aged children’s future academic development. Furthermore, empathy development in students was deemed important. A lesson plan was created to provide school counselors with a means of implementing the interactive read-aloud as a counseling strategy.     

Engineering a Twenty-First Century Reading Comprehension Assessment System Utilizing Scenario-Based Assessment Techniques

The construct of reading comprehension has changed significantly in the twenty-first century; however, some test designs have not evolved sufficiently to capture these changes. Specifically, the nature of literacy sources and skills required has changed (wrought primarily by widespread use of digital technologies). Modern theories of comprehension and discourse processes have been developed to accommodate these changes, and the learning sciences have followed suit. These influences have significant implications for how we think about the development of comprehension proficiency across grades. In this paper, we describe a theoretically driven, developmentally sensitive assessment system based on a scenario-based assessment paradigm, and present evidence for its feasibility and psychometric soundness.