Reseña de libros

Abstract

This article examines the paradoxical place occupied by Kurt Lewin in the history of social psychology. By analysing an exhaustive corpus of all French-language social psychology textbooks published between 1946 and 2000, we attempt to bring to light both the frequency of references to the author and the rhetoric employed to present his scientific contribution. Our results reveal a paradox underlying the way in which this eminent social psychologist is referred to. While the importance of his role in the formation of this discipline is emphatically reinforced, the full extent of his relevance is not accounted for. This paradox thus takes the form of a marginalisation, which is manifested in a tendency to concentrate on only a portion of his publications, in the stereotyped presentation of his experiments, and in the insufficient context provided for his studies.     

Rethink "Affirmative Agreement," but Abandon "Assent"

Training in ethics and professionalism is a fundamental component of residency education, yet there is little empirical information to guide curricula. The objective of this study is to describe empirically derived ethics objectives for ethics and professionalism training for multiple specialties. Study design is a thematic analysis of documents, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups conducted in a setting of an academic medical center, Veterans Administration, and community hospital training more than 1000 residents. Participants were 84 informants in 13 specialties including residents, program directors, faculty, practicing physicians, and ethics committees. Thematic analysis identified commonalities across informants and specialties. Resident and nonresident informants identified consent, interprofessional relationships, family interactions, communication skills, and end-of-life care as essential components of training. Nonresidents also emphasized formal ethics instruction, resource allocation, and self-monitoring, whereas residents emphasized the learning environment and resident-attending interactions. Conclusions are that empirically derived learning needs for ethics and professionalism included many topics, such as informed consent and resource allocation, relevant for most specialties, providing opportunities for shared curricula and resources.     

Size as Diversity Absent from Multicultural Textbooks

Abstract

The current clinical approach adopted by many mental health clinicians is the medical model, which, in the case of size diversity, has been connected with weight stigma. Mental health practitioners need to be exposed to the critique of the medicalized view that fat is a disease that can be cured through dieting. Weight stigma and fat-shaming may be reduced through adoption of a social justice perspective on sizeism as a form of oppression. An analysis of textbooks designed for use in graduate multicultural courses indicates that size is not currently addressed as a diversity or social justice issue within psychology. It is recommended that fat be conceptualized as a social identity that intersects with other diversity dimensions within coursework for mental health trainees as opposed to a sizeist paradigm where fat is depicted as pathological.     

Lesbian Mothers-The Invisible Minority:

No abstract available for this article.     

The Road to Becoming a Psychologist: Indicators of Success and Hardship during the University Years

Abstract

In order to become a full-fledged psychologist, one must undertake a long, demanding, and quite difficult journey in academia. The academic journey holds a promise of delivering knowledge, interesting theories, and strategies on helping those who need psychological assessment and/or treatment. However, the constant expectation of keeping up with the material, of succeeding in tests and exams, and of preparing to proceed to the next educational level can be daunting and exhausting. In line with the topic of this special issue, this paper addresses factors contributing to academic success at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate levels of psychology. Utilizing the available literature on the Big Five personality classification scheme, high conscientiousness was found to be the most consistent predictor of success, although curiously, this relationship was only found to be reliable at the undergraduate level. Less robust findings included high agreeableness and low neuroticism as predictors of general academic success in all tertiary levels of education. The importance of mentorship figures in psychology, and a highlight of its lack of widespread implementation at the undergraduate level, are also addressed. Additionally, we discuss the negative implications of the impostor phenomenon and of loneliness, which students at all levels may experience as common barriers to scholastic success in psychology. Following a discussion of each factor as outlined above, there is a brief literature review regarding ways that its constraining effects may be limited or its positive effects possibly enhanced.     

Highlights as an Early Predictor of Student Comprehension and Interests

When engaging with a textbook, students are inclined to highlight key content. Although students believe that highlighting and subsequent review of the highlights will further their educational goals, the psychological literature provides little evidence of benefits. Nonetheless, a student’s choice of text for highlighting may serve as a window into her mental state—her level of comprehension, grasp of the key ideas, reading goals, and so on. We explore this hypothesis via an experiment in which 400 participants read three sections from a college-level biology text, briefly reviewed the text, and then took a quiz on the material. During initial reading, participants were able to highlight words, phrases, and sentences, and these highlights were displayed along with the complete text during the subsequent review. Consistent with past research, the amount of highlighted material is unrelated to quiz performance. Nonetheless, highlighting patterns may allow us to infer reader comprehension and interests. Using multiple representations of the highlighting patterns, we built probabilistic models to predict quiz performance and matrix factorization models to predict what content would be highlighted in one passage from highlights in other passages. We find that quiz score prediction accuracy reliably improves with the inclusion of highlighting data (by about 1%–2%), both for held-out students and for held-out student questions (i.e., questions selected randomly for each student), but not for held-out questions. Furthermore, an individual’s highlighting pattern is informative of what she highlights elsewhere. Our long-term goal is to design digital textbooks that serve not only as conduits of information into the reader’s mind but also allow us to draw inferences about the reader at a point where interventions may increase the effectiveness of the material.