Fostering connections between graduate students and strengthening professional identity through co-mentoring

For counsellors and counsellor educators, developing a sound sense of professional identity is a necessity in preserving and advancing the counselling field. In an effort to promote professional identity development in a group of counsellors in training, a co-mentoring programme was developed that paired master's level and doctoral level counsellors. The participants used letter writing and email to support the development of these mentoring relationships over the course of a semester. This study attempted to measure the effectiveness of the co-mentoring programme using interview data and written artefacts. An open, axial and selective coding process was employed. The participants of the study identified themes of enhanced professional identity development and collegial professional relationships as a result of participating in the co-mentoring relationship. Further research is needed to determine how best to support professional identity development for emerging professionals and the effectiveness of mentoring relationships and letter writing in this developmental process. A co-mentoring programme may offer training settings an opportunity for student self-awareness and growth in an experiential and meaningful manner, as well as providing additional opportunities for students to develop their professional identity. Implications for the use of co-mentoring and mentoring programmes to aid in the identity development of counsellors or other professionals are addressed.     

Gender Differences in Academic Achievement: Is Writing an Exception to the Gender Similarities Hypothesis?

The gender similarities hypothesis by J. S. Hyde (2005 Hyde, J.S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60, 581–592.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), based on large-scale reviews of studies, concludes that boys and girls are more alike than different on most psychological variables, including academic skills such as reading and math (J. S. Hyde, 2005 Hyde, J.S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60, 581–592.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Writing is an academic skill that may be an exception. The authors investigated gender differences in academic achievement using a large, nationally stratified sample of children and adolescents ranging from ages 7–19 years (N = 2,027). Achievement data were from the conormed sample for the Kaufman intelligence and achievement tests. Multiple-indicator, multiple-cause, and multigroup mean and covariance structure models were used to test for mean differences. Girls had higher latent reading ability and higher scores on a test of math computation, but the effect sizes were consistent with the gender similarities hypothesis. Conversely, girls scored higher on spelling and written expression, with effect sizes inconsistent with the gender similarities hypothesis. The findings remained the same after controlling for cognitive ability. Girls outperform boys on tasks of writing.     

Personality Psychology in the First Decade of the New Millennium: A Bibliometric Portrait

Nine principal personality psychology journals—Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), Journal of Personality (JP), Journal of Research in Personality (JRP), European Journal of Personality (EJP), Personality and Individual Differences (PAID), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), Personality and Social Psychology Review (PSPR), Journal of Personality Assessment (JPA), and Journal of Personality Disorders (JPD)—have published 8510 research papers from 2001 to 2010. These papers have been cited 149 108 times (September 2011) by papers published in journals indexed in the Web of Science. Although personality psychologists from the US published the largest number of papers (4924, 57.9%) and had the largest number of citations (101 875, 68.3%), their relative contribution to personality literature has slightly diminished during the first decade of the new millennium. Unlike other countries, personality psychologists residing in the US demonstrated a strong country self‐citation bias: They were about 14% more likely to cite papers which were written by their compatriots rather than non‐US authors in three leading journals JPSP, PSPB, and PSPR. The intensity and pattern of citations indicate that personality psychology indeed occupies one of the core positions at the heart of psychological knowledge. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Parental reflective functioning is associated with tolerance of infant distress but not general distress: Evidence for a specific relationship using a simulated baby paradigm

Parental reflective functioning represents the capacity of a parent to think about their own and their child's mental states and how these mental states may influence behavior. Here we examined whether this capacity as measured by the Parental Reflective Functioning Questionnaire relates to tolerance of infant distress by asking mothers (N = 21) to soothe a life-like baby simulator (BSIM) that was inconsolable, crying for a fixed time period unless the mother chose to stop the interaction. Increasing maternal interest and curiosity in their child's mental states, a key feature of parental reflective functioning, was associated with longer persistence times with the BSIM. Importantly, on a non-parent distress tolerance task, parental reflective functioning was not related to persistence times. These findings suggest that parental reflective functioning may be related to tolerance of infant distress, but not distress tolerance more generally, and thus may reflect specificity to persistence behaviors in parenting contexts.     

THE GENETIC RECOMBINATION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

The estrangement between genetic scientists and theologians originating in the 1960s is reflected in novel combinations of human thought (subject) and genes (investigational object), paralleling each other through the universal process known in chaos theory as self‐similarity. The clash and recombination of genes and knowledge captures what Philip Hefner refers to as irony, one of four voices he suggests transmit the knowledge and arguments of the religion‐and‐science debate. When viewed along a tangent connecting irony to leadership, journal dissemination, and the activities of the “public intellectual” and the public at large, the sequence of voices is shown to resemble the passage of genetic information from DNA to mRNA, tRNA, and protein, and from cell nucleus to surrounding environment. In this light, Hefner's inquiry into the voices of Zygon is bound up with the very subject matter Zygon covers.     

Writing Desire,or Being Seduced by Karmen MacKendrick

Abstract

This essay explores the intimate relation between writing and desire in Karmen MacKendrick’s work. It uses this relation to connect MacKendrick’s work to work from Georges Bataille and Leo Bersani.     

发展性阅读障碍书写加工缺陷及其神经机制

发展性阅读障碍是学习障碍的主要类型之一, 严重影响个体认知、情感与社会适应性的发展。书写与阅读关系密切, 阅读障碍者常常表现出书写加工缺陷。在行为层面, 阅读障碍者书写缺陷表现在书写质量差、速度慢和停顿多等多个方面。在脑机制层面, 脑成像研究发现, 阅读障碍者书写加工缺陷与字形加工脑区活动, 以及字形与运动区脑功能与结构连接异常有关。总体而言, 阅读障碍者书写过程中的字形通达缺陷的证据比较充分, 但字形与运动编码的衔接以及运动执行是否存在困难, 尚缺乏研究证据。相对于字母语言, 书写与阅读的关系在汉语中更为紧密, 汉语阅读障碍的书写研究将为开发汉语特色的诊治方案提供重要指导。