Action and language: Contextual action theory in counselling

Contextual action theory is presented as a conceptual framework useful for grounding the recent work in counselling and career development called Life Design. Based on the premise of the goal-directed nature of human action, this approach has links to language in theories of naive action and attribution, and theory of mind. Contextual action theory has an associated research method that has been used to generate a range of research studies that have described actions and projects in the career development and counselling domains. The link that contextual action theory provides between research and practice allows the identification of five tasks for the counselling practitioner informed by this approach.     

The Irony of Social Trust: Individual‐level and Contextual‐level Links with Protest Intention and Radical Right Support in Switzerland

This research examines how social trust translates into dynamics of mobilisation for inclusion or exclusion in Swiss cantons by studying how social trust is linked to equality‐directed protest intention versus radical right support, comparing individual‐level and contextual‐level relationships. The study is based on data from the Swiss Household Panel collected between 2002 and 2008. The impact of individual‐level and contextual‐level social trust is analysed in three‐level regression models of repeated observations, nested in individuals who are nested in cantons. The results indicate complex patterns that depend on the level at which social trust is assessed and confirm the need for a contextualised view of social trust and social capital. For individuals, higher social trust is associated with higher protest intention and lower radical right support. However, in cantons characterised by higher rates of social trust, individuals are less likely to engage in protest actions and more likely to support the radical right. Further analyses show that canton‐level social trust is intertwined with other contextual factors, suggesting that in certain configurations, that is, combined with low levels of cultural and social diversity, climates of social trust may be linked to more restricted forms of solidarity and the persistence of inequality. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Simple actions influence pop-out search

Recent research has revealed that a simple action (pressing a computer key) produced in response to a visual object prioritizes features of that object in subsequent visual search. The effects of simple action, however, have only been studied with search displays that required serial search. Here we explored whether simple actions have an effect when the target in visual search is always a salient singleton. Participants viewed a coloured shape at the beginning of each trial, and sometimes they acted (pressed the space bar) in response to it. In the subsequent search task, after acting (but not after viewing), the previously-seen colour affected search performance even though the target was always a salient singleton and the colour was uninformative. The results reveal that prior action can interact with bottom-up salience during search. Implications for our understanding of both visual search and repetition priming are discussed.     

Hijab in the American workplace: visibility and discrimination

While the initial purpose of this article was to outline online collective action (OCA) towards promoting the rights of hijab-wearing Muslim women in the workplace, it became apparent that there were substantial impediments to this solidarity. Thus, the bulk of it takes up these obstacles, arguing that American hijabis face structural discrimination and Muslims in the United States are subjected to heightened discrimination when they are highly visible to the mainstream culture. This article reviews two cases of workplace discrimination against hijabis and the reactions to these incidents on the Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, and hijab-oriented blogs. Findings indicate that intolerance of Muslims is prevalent across various political affiliations and apprehension associated with hijabi rights could be related to the perceived decline of white privilege. The analysis also demonstrates that there may be impediments to solidarity with hijabi rights within Muslim communities due to disagreements on the Qur’anic mandate of modesty, divergent perspectives on how Muslims can best promote their rights and ensure their safety, and misunderstandings related to the rights guaranteed under reasonable accommodation. Despite the various obstacles to solidarity with hijabis, the article traces various forms of OCA at local, national and international levels that were encountered on social media platforms.     

自闭症碎镜理论之迷思:缘起、问题与前景

自闭症患者在社会沟通和交往障碍上主要涉及社会情感互动缺陷、非语言行为交流缺陷、发展维持和理解人际关系的缺陷。该群体在社会认知过程中潜在自动的直觉成分受损被视为其独特的临床症状。鉴于镜像神经元系统在社会认知的直觉成分上扮演的重要角色,该系统的功能障碍假说(或称"碎镜"理论)被提出并用以解释自闭症的成因及其异常表现。然而,在经历了10年的发展与证据检验后,该理论潜在的问题逐渐暴露。当前的研究显示,迄今为止人类镜像神经元系统的研究存在内在缺陷,镜像神经元系统至多是社会认知的附带原因,该系统功能障碍也并非自闭症患者社会认知障碍的必要条件。碎镜理论面临来自临床行为研究与认知神经科学实验证据的广泛质疑。未来,伴随自闭症研究对象的变化,镜像神经元的社会响应学说的提出,双个体范式、第二人称神经科学范式与计算精神病学的兴起,镜像神经元与自闭症的真正关系将有望得以阐明。     

脑激活定律

用物理学的观点在系统水平上讨论脑内功能子系统的脑区激活及相互作用。引入一些参量描述脑功能特性 ,并且根据现有实验事实提出脑激活的四条定律。     

Appreciating a Scientist-Theologian: Some Remarks on the Work of John Polkinghorne

Perhaps the greatest irony about the contemporary religion-science dialogue is the fact that, despite their own strongly articulated denials, many thinkers implicitly accept the "warfare" thesis of A. D. White—that is, they agree with White that traditional theology has proved unable to engage science in fruitful conversation. More than most others, John Polkinghorne understands just how badly White misread the history of Christianity and science, and how much theology has been impoverished by its failure to challenge this core assumption of modernity.     

Capturing system level activities and impacts of mental health consumer-run organizations

Since the 1970s mental health consumer-run organizations have come to offer not only mutual support, but they have also adopted agendas for broader social change. Despite an awareness of the need for system level efforts that create supportive environments for their members, there has been limited research demonstrating how their system level activities can be documented or their impacts evaluated. The purpose of this paper is to feature a method of evaluating systems change activities and impacts. The paper is based on a longitudinal study evaluating four mental health consumer-run organizations in Ontario, Canada. The study tracked system level activities and impacts using both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The article begins by describing the development and implementation of these methods. Next it offers a critical analysis of the methods used. It concludes by reflecting on three lessons learned about capturing system level activities and impacts of mental health consumer-run organizations.     

Beliefs About Gender Discrimination in the Workplace in the Context of Affirmative Action: Effects of Gender and Ambivalent Attitudes in an Australian Sample

This study investigated beliefs about gender discrimination in opportunities for promotion in organisations and their relation to gender and gender-focused ambivalent beliefs as measured, respectively, by the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI) and the Ambivalence toward Men Inventory (AMI) (Glick and Fiske, Ambivalent sexism. In M.P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, 33: pp. 115-188, San Diego, CA: Academic, 2001a). These two inventories were administered to 225 students at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia along with discrimination items concerning advantage, responsibility, guilt, and resentment about the advancement of men and women in the workplace. Results showed gender differences in discrimination beliefs and in the hostile and benevolent scales from the ASI and AMI. Gender differences and relations between these scales and the discrimination variables were interpreted in terms of system-justification, self and group interests, and the effects of values and beliefs about deservingness and entitlement. This study was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council.     

Genetic and environmental influences on the positive traits of the values in action classification,and biometric covariance with normal personality

Virtually all human individual differences have been shown to be moderately heritable. Much of this research, however, focuses on measures of dysfunctional behavior and relatively fewer studies have focused on positive traits. The values in action (VIA) project is a comprehensive and ambitious classification of 24 positive traits, also known as character strengths (Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association), the majority of which have received no behavior genetic attention. Using a sample of 336 middle-aged twins drawn from the Minnesota Twin Registry who completed the VIA inventory of strengths, we detected significant genetic and non-shared environmental effects for 21 of 24 character strengths with little evidence of shared environmental contributions. Associations with a previously administered measure of normal personality found moderate phenotypic overlap and that genetic influences on personality traits could account for most, but not all, of the heritable variance in character strengths.