Counselling foreign students: A review of strategies

This article focuses on the unique counselling needs of foreign students as reflected from a review of the literature. As more and more students from developing countries opt to further their education in the West, knowledge about counselling foreign students is of increasing interest. Distinctive aspects of foreign student clients and the typical problems faced by them are described. The issues which need to be addressed and the competencies which need to be developed in order to effectively counsel foreign students are discussed. Finally, specific strategies for counselling foreign students are suggested in the context of general guidelines for cross-cultural counselling.     

Transfer-appropriate processing (TAP)

Transfer-appropriate processing (TAP), as applied to implicit memory, has tended to emphasize general forms of processing (e.g., perceptual or conceptual processing). In the present studies, the TAP principle was employed in a more specific manner in order to more precisely assess the relations between the processing engaged during first exposure and that engaged during second exposure to items. Thirteen experiments used a two-phase, cross-task design in which participants engaged in different combinations of seven specific intentional tasks between Phase 1 and Phase 2. Maximum repetition priming was found when tasks were the same in Phases 1 and 2. When Phase 1 and Phase 2 tasks differed, there were lesser, or no, repetition priming effects, depending on the particular combination of tasks. The results demonstrate the importance of the specific intentional processes engaged during repetition priming and the potential heuristic value of TAP, as a principle and methodology, for exploring the organization of memory and related process models.     

Influence of brain-derived neurotrophic factor and catechol O-methyl transferase polymorphisms on effects of meditation on plasma catecholamines and stress

Meditation may show differential effects on stress and plasma catecholamines based on genetic polymorphisms in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and catechol O-methyl transferase (COMT). Eighty adults (40 men, 40 women; mean age 26 years) who practiced meditation regularly and 57 healthy control adults (35 men, 22 women; mean age 26 years) participated. Plasma catecholamines (norepinephrine (NE), epinephrine (E), and dopamine (DA)) concentrations were measured, and a modified form of the Stress Response Inventory was administered. The results were analyzed using two-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) with control and meditation subjects, gene polymorphism as factors, and meditation duration as the covariate. Two-way ANCOVA showed a significant interaction between control and meditation subjects, and BDNF Val66Met polymorphism on DA/NE+DA/E (p = 0.042) and NE/E+NE/DA (p = 0.046) ratios. A significant interaction was found for control and meditation subjects with COMT Val158Met polymorphism and plasma NE concentrations (p = 0.009). Post hoc ANCOVA in the meditation group, adjusted for meditation duration, showed significantly higher plasma NE concentrations for COMT Met carriers than COMT Val/Val subjects (p = 0.025). Significant differences of stress levels were found between the control and meditation subjects in BDNF Val/Met (p < 0.001) and BDNF Met/Met (p = 0.003), whereas stress levels in the BDNF Val/Val genotype did not differ between the control and meditation groups. This is the first evidence that meditation produces different effects on plasma catecholamines according to BDNF or COMT polymorphisms.     

Auditory‐motor adaptation is reduced in adults who stutter but not in children who stutter

Previous studies have shown that adults who stutter produce smaller corrective motor responses to compensate for unexpected auditory perturbations in comparison to adults who do not stutter, suggesting that stuttering may be associated with deficits in integration of auditory feedback for online speech monitoring. In this study, we examined whether stuttering is also associated with deficiencies in integrating and using discrepancies between expected and received auditory feedback to adaptively update motor programs for accurate speech production. Using a sensorimotor adaptation paradigm, we measured adaptive speech responses to auditory formant frequency perturbations in adults and children who stutter and their matched nonstuttering controls. We found that the magnitude of the speech adaptive response for children who stutter did not differ from that of fluent children. However, the adaptation magnitude of adults who stutter in response to auditory perturbation was significantly smaller than the adaptation magnitude of adults who do not stutter. Together these results indicate that stuttering is associated with deficits in integrating discrepancies between predicted and received auditory feedback to calibrate the speech production system in adults but not children. This auditory‐motor integration deficit thus appears to be a compensatory effect that develops over years of stuttering.     

Adult age differences in the effects of goals on self-regulated sentence processing

The authors examined age differences in adults' allocation of effort when reading text for either high levels of recall accuracy or high levels of efficiency. Participants read a series of sentences, making judgments of learning before recall. Older adults showed less sensitivity than the young to the accuracy goal in both reading time allocation and memory performance. Memory accuracy and differential allocation of effort to unlearned items were age equivalent, so age differences in goal adherence were not attributable to metacognitive factors. However, comparison with data from a control reading task without monitoring showed that learning gains among older adults across trial were reduced relative to those of the young by memory monitoring, suggesting that monitoring may be resource consuming for older learners. Age differences in the responsiveness to (information-acquisition) goals could be accounted for, in part, by independent contributions from working memory and memory self-efficacy. Our data suggest that both processing capacity ("what you have") and beliefs ("knowing you can do it") can contribute to individual differences in engaging resources ("what you do") to effectively learn novel content from text.     

Neutron and X-ray diffraction studies and cohesive interface model of the fatigue crack deformation behavior

The crack-tip deformation behavior during a single overload, fatigue test of ferritic stainless steel, and Ni-based HAYNES 230 superalloy is studied at different structural levels using (1) neutron-diffraction, from which both the elastic-lattice strain and volume-averaged total dislocation densities are obtained, (2) polychromatic X-ray microdiffraction to probe the geometrically necessary dislocations and boundaries distribution, and (3) an irreversible and hysteretic cohesive interface model which has been implemented into a finite element framework to simulate the stress/strain evolution near the fatigue crack tip. Neutron strain measurements and finite element simulations are in qualitative agreement on the macroscopic length scale. Large plastic deformation induced by the overload and the resulting compressive residual strains are observed in front of the crack tip after the overload, and are the principal reason for the fatigue-crack-growth retardation. Strong strain gradients surrounding the crack propagation result in the formation of a high density of geometrically necessary dislocations near the fractured surface and cause local lattice rotations on the submicron level.     

A cross-cultural study of hindsight bias and conditional probabilistic reasoning

Hindsight bias is a mistaken belief that one could have predicted a given outcome once the outcome is known. Choi and Nisbett (2000 Choi, I. and Nisbett, R. E. 2000. Cultural psychology of surprise: Holistic theories and recognition of contradiction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79: 890–905. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) reported that Koreans showed stronger hindsight bias than Americans, and explained the results using the distinction between analytic cognition (Westerners) and holistic cognition (Easterners). The purpose of the present study was to see whether hindsight bias is stronger among Easterners than among Westerners using a probability judgement task, and to test an “explicit–implicit” hypothesis and a “rule-dialectics” hypothesis. We predicted that the implicit process is more active among Easterners to generate hindsight bias, and that Easterners are more dialectical thinkers, whereas Westerners are more rule-based thinkers. French, British, Japanese, and Korean participants were asked to make probabilistic judgements in a Good Samaritan scenario (Experiment 1) and in a scenario including conditional probabilistic judgement (Experiment 2). In both Experiments, we presume that the implicit revision of causal models is made just by being given unexpected outcome information, and that explicit revision is made by being asked to point out possible factors for an unexpected outcome. In the results Easterners showed greater hindsight bias generally and it was greater in the Good Samaritan scenario. We conclude that the reason why hindsight bias was lower among Westerners is primarily that they tried to follow a rule to suppress the bias.