Disability Awareness and Etiquette: Transforming Perceptions Through a Series of Experiential Exercises

Individuals with disabilities represent one of the largest and most diverse subgroups within the population. Because of this diversity and the potential for many disabilities to be hidden, however, biases exist regarding what these individuals may look like or how they may act. The majority of these perceptions focus on inabilities as opposed to abilities despite the risk for all individuals to possess or develop a disability. Therefore, there is an increased need to address these issues. As such, this article involves a discussion regarding the integration of several experiential activities to target disability awareness, including information regarding the rationale, assumptions, objectives, and outcomes of these techniques as well as potential adaptations across various groups.     

Searching for certainty in an uncertain world: the difficulty of giving up the experiential for the rational mode of thinking

Our research explores predictions that people make in a simple environment consisting of sequences of a binary signal followed by two possible outcomes. In order to optimize their prediction success, respondents should use a very simple decision rule, called maximization, whereby they consistently predict according to the signal. In line with past research, our findings show that even respondents who realized after the experiment that maximization is optimal failed to use it during the experiment itself. We discuss conditions that weaken or reinforce behaving according to the optimal rule in a repeated choice situation. Experiment 1 shows that individuals who are forced to plan their strategy and justify their actions are more likely to discover and use the optimal rule than those not forced to do so. Thinking about the appropriateness of one's performance can be done in two different orientations: focusing on the past (justifying past actions) or on the future (planning future action). Experiment 2 shows that planning induces rule‐base thinking, while justifying fails to do so. These findings are discussed within a theoretical framework which suggest an interplay between the experiential and the rational modes of processing. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Experience‐What is it?

The author takes a renewed look at the constitutive aspects of experience, looking at it as process rather than contents. Recently more psychoanalytic voices are discernible that argue for the complexity and multi-leveled nature of inner experience. Yet the predominant and preeminent psychoanalytic voice has traditionally emphasized the linearity and single-factored nature of experience and all that is based on it: development, object relations, psychopathology, and treatment. The author offers an understanding of experience as stemming from the operation of two contiguous, ongoing modalities of processing internal and external input, and reflecting two polarities of the subject-object experience: of separateness and instrumentality, and of oneness and ongoing being. Such a conceptual reframing of experience harbors multiple implications for understanding subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, inter-relatedness as well as single-person psychology, and the all-important role of an experiential 'goodness-of-fit' in the analytic situation and elsewhere.     

Preliminary psychometric properties of the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II: a revised measure of psychological inflexibility and experiential avoidance

The present research describes the development and psychometric evaluation of a second version of the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (AAQ-II), which assesses the construct referred to as, variously, acceptance, experiential avoidance, and psychological inflexibility. Results from 2,816 participants across six samples indicate the satisfactory structure, reliability, and validity of this measure. For example, the mean alpha coefficient is .84 (.78–.88), and the 3- and 12-month test–retest reliability is .81 and .79, respectively. Results indicate that AAQ-II scores concurrently, longitudinally, and incrementally predict a range of outcomes, from mental health to work absence rates, that are consistent with its underlying theory. The AAQ-II also demonstrates appropriate discriminant validity. The AAQ-II appears to measure the same concept as the AAQ-I (r = .97) but with better psychometric consistency.     

Social anxiety and emotion regulation flexibility: considering emotion intensity and type as contextual factors

Background and objectives: Individuals with social anxiety disorder have often been considered inflexible in their emotion regulation. The aim of this study was to investigate emotion regulation flexibility in socially anxious individuals in response to two contextual factors, namely different levels of emotion intensity and emotion type.

Methods: A daily diary approach was employed, investigating emotion regulation (i.e., experiential avoidance, expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal) in college students scoring high (N?=?62; HSA) and low (N?=?52; LSA) on social anxiety.

Results: Results revealed that HSAs were found to use more experiential avoidance than LSAs, especially at higher levels of negative intensity. The use of this emotion regulation strategy appeared to be driven by guilt, nervousness, and sadness. There were no between-group differences concerning the other strategies in response to varying levels of emotional intensity.

Conclusions: Together, the results provide evidence for inflexible emotion regulation in HSAs, reflected in an unwillingness to experience negative emotions.     

Can virtue be learned? An exploration of student learning experiences in ethics courses and their implications for influencing moral character

What does it mean to teach virtue, or to learn it? We consider this question through an institutional review board (IRB) supported research study attending to student learning experiences in undergraduate ethics courses at a Catholic university with an explicit commitment to social justice. This essay draws on and interprets qualitative data concerning the outcomes of select pedagogical approaches that involve exposing students to the experiences of others: the use of narratives; participation in structured experiential learning activities; and community engagement through deep listening and facilitated dialogue. We focus our interpretation around the implications of these pedagogies in relation to student understanding of and attitudes regarding three character traits identified as “other‐regarding” virtues in theological and philosophical scholarship – altruism, compassion, and solidarity. This paper considers the implications of these pedagogies and the practical effects of different sorts of teaching strategies on students' self‐understanding as moral agents.     

Teaching Helping Skills Courses: Creative Activities to Reduce Anxiety

Helping skills courses play a vital role in counseling curriculum, but also tend to bring excessive anxiety for students, to the point of impeding their ability to successfully implement skills. This article describes specific creative and experiential activities, aimed at reducing anxiety in a helping skills course for counselors-in-training.     

体验购买、实物购买与幸福感:关系需要满足的中介作用

基于自我决定理论,本研究考察了体验购买与实物购买这两种购买方式与个体享乐幸福感和意义幸福感的关系,并探索了个体的关系需要满足在其中的中介作用。采用回忆范式启动不同购买经历之后,被试依次完成关系需要满足问卷、享乐幸福感与意义幸福感量表。结果显示,体验购买组的享乐幸福感和意义幸福感都显著高于实物购买组;关系需要满足程度在购买类型与享乐幸福感、意义幸福感的关系间分别起到中介作用,这表明购买类型通过满足个体的关系需要进而提升其享乐幸福感和意义幸福感水平。