Psychometric Aspects of Verbal Pragmatic Ratings

This study examined the psychometric aspects of a verbal pragmatic rating scale. The scale contained six pragmatic features (i.e., Conciseness, Lexical Selection, Quantity, Relevancy, Specificity, and Topic Maintenance) based on Grice's cooperative principles. Fifteen right brain-damaged (RBD), 15 left brain-damaged (LBD), and 16 healthy normal control (NC) right-handed adult participants produced narratives while recollecting emotional and nonemotional experiences. Naive raters evaluated each pragmatic feature for appropriateness on a 5-point Likert scale. When reliability was examined, the overall internal consistency of the pragmatic scale was extremely high (alpha =.96). Factor analysis was conducted to examine the theoretical relations among the six pragmatic features. Three meaningful factors involving discourse content, conceptual unity, and parsimony were identified. Findings are discussed in light of Grice's model and the construct validity of the scale.     

How attention enhances spatial resolution: evidence from selective adaptation to spatial frequency

In this study, we investigated how spatial resolution and covert attention affect performance in a texture segmentation task in which performance peaks at midperiphery and drops at peripheral and central retinal locations. The central impairment is called the central performance drop (CPD; Kehrer, 1989). It has been established that attending to the target location improves performance in the periphery where resolution is too low for the task, but impairs it at central locations where resolution is too high. This is called the central attention impairment (CAI; Yeshurun & Carrasco, 1998, 2000). We employed a cuing procedure in conjunction with selective adaptation to explore (1) whether the CPD is due to the inhibition of low spatial frequency responses by high spatial frequency responses in central locations, and (2) whether the CAI is due to attention's shifting sensitivity to higher spatial frequencies. We found that adaptation to low spatial frequencies does not change performance in this texture segmentation task. However, adaptation to high spatial frequencies diminishes the CPD and eliminates the CAI. These results indicate that the CPD is primarily due to the dominance of high spatial frequency responses and that covert attention enhances spatial resolution by shifting sensitivity to higher spatial frequencies.     

Teachers’ sense of responsibility for educational outcomes and its associations with teachers’ instructional approaches and professional wellbeing

Teachers’ formal accountability and duties have been the focus of high-stakes educational reforms, for instance in the context of national accountability systems. Yet, teachers’ sense of personal (rather than formal) responsibility and willingness to assume responsibility for their teaching and students remains an understudied area. The main purpose of this study was to investigate contextual and person-specific predictors of teachers’ sense of personal responsibility, as well as the potential implications of teachers’ personal responsibility for their instructional approaches and wellbeing. A path analysis indicated that high school teachers (n = 287) who felt responsible for their teaching and students reported higher levels of work engagement and job satisfaction than less responsible teachers, and were more likely to endorse mastery-oriented instructional practices that emphasized student effort, task mastery, and individual growth. Teachers’ perceptions of their school’s social climate (teachers’ evaluations of their relationships with students), their sense of teaching self-efficacy, and incremental beliefs of intelligence emerged as positive predictors of teacher responsibility. Teacher responsibility partially mediated the positive effects of these predictors on teachers’ wellbeing and mastery-oriented instructional practices. The results suggest that both contextual (e.g., school climate) and person-specific (e.g., self-efficacy) factors can contribute to teachers’ sense of personal responsibility, and that responsibility, in turn, can have positive implications for teachers’ wellbeing and instructional practices. Directions for future research and practical implications are considered.     

Confrontation Process of Students with Hijab

Hijab as an Islamic value and divine duty is emphasized, and it is necessary in university settings. The misveiling is a social phenomenon, and its social, political and cultural aspects must be studied for understanding its factors and causes. The aim of this study was to understand how the process of confronting students with hijab. A grounded theory design was used. The data were collected by semi-structured interviews from sixteen students who left their veiling, eleven students with veiling, three advisors, two Vice in Student and Cultural Affairs and three family members of students who left their veiling. The participants were selected through conventional and theoretical sampling method, and the data were analyzed simultaneously by continuous comparisons based on Strauss and Corbin (Basics of qualitative research: procedures and techniques for developing grounded theory, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1998) method. Sociocultural paradox of hijab was appeared as the main (core) variable affecting the process of confronting students with hijab. The main variable in this study includes six axial codes: sociocultural paradox, transformation of values, values selection, adherence to spiritual, doubt in beliefs and normative conflict. The process of acceptance/rejection of the hijab occurs because of sociocultural paradox after the transformation of values. In the meantime, person thinks about strategy. The person’s strategy to accept/leave the hijab is based on her beliefs. By adherence to spiritual, veiling can be strengthened and weakened by doubts in beliefs. In order to promote hijab, it is necessary to pay attention to its underlying conditions and causes. Individual beliefs and values must be strengthened for promoting hijab.

     

Recognizing people from their movement

Human observers demonstrate impressive visual sensitivity to human movement. What defines this sensitivity? If motor experience influences the visual analysis of action, then observers should be most sensitive to their own movements. If view-dependent visual experience determines visual sensitivity to human movement, then observers should be most sensitive to the movements of their friends. To test these predictions, participants viewed sagittal displays of point-light depictions of themselves, their friends, and strangers performing various actions. In actor identification and discrimination tasks, sensitivity to one's own motion was highest. Visual sensitivity to friends', but not strangers', actions was above chance. Performance was action dependent. Control studies yielded chance performance with inverted and static displays, suggesting that form and low-motion cues did not define performance. These results suggest that both motor and visual experience define visual sensitivity to human action.     

Metatherapeutic communication: an exploratory analysis of therapist-reported moments of dialogue regarding the nature of the therapeutic work

The purpose of the study was to investigate the nature of metatherapeutic communication (MTC), defined as dialogue between therapists and clients on the nature of the therapeutic work and the means by which it can be of greatest help to clients. Twelve counselling psychologists, working pluralistically with 35 clients experiencing depression, described on post-session forms moments of negotiation and collaboration around the therapeutic work. Two main dimensions of MTC were identified: the subject matter of the MTC and the temporal focus of the MTC. In addition, MTC varied by the time at which it took place. These findings provide a framework for understanding the nature of MTC in counselling and psychotherapy, and the opportunities for implementing it in practice.     

Automated gaze-contingent objects elicit orientation following in 8-month-old infants

The current study tested whether the purely amodal cue of contingency elicits orientation following behavior in 8-month-old infants. We presented 8-month-old infants with automated objects without human features that did or did not react contingently to the infants' fixations recorded by an eye tracker. We found that an object's occasional orientation toward peripheral targets was reciprocated by a congruent visual orientation following response by infants only when it had displayed gaze-contingent interactivity. Our finding demonstrates that infants' gaze-following behavior does not depend on the presence of a human being. The results are consistent with the idea that, in 8-month-old infants, the detection of contingent reactivity, like other communicative signals, can itself elicit the illusion of being addressed.