Understanding adolescent type 1 diabetes self-management as an adaptive process: A grounded theory approach

Objective: To develop a conceptual understanding of the process of adapting to the self-management of type 1 diabetes during adolescence.

Design: Participants were recruited from a National Health Service paediatric diabetes service within the south-west of England which runs six countywide diabetes clinics. Thirteen interviews were conducted using a social constructivist grounded theory approach.

Results: The findings illustrate how self-management can be understood in terms of a continuum-based framework, ranging from difficulties with, to successful self-management. Adaptation within the continuum can further be understood by specific transitional phases and process mechanisms, providing further depth to individuals’ experiences of adaptation.

Conclusion: This investigation provides a conceptual understanding of the complex issues adolescents encounter while adapting to and integrating a diabetes self-management regime into their lives. It provides an invaluable framework for exploring psychological mechanisms and contextualising them within a self-management continuum. Implications for healthcare professionals are discussed and further research proposes whether the model could be applicable to other chronic illnesses.     

建构主义教学与元思维的关系:认知压力的解释

本研究采用建构主义教学评估问卷、认知压力问卷、一般元思维量表与情境元思维量表对381名学生进行测量,考察了建构主义教学与元思维之间的关系,以及一级、二级认知压力在其中的中介或解释作用。研究采用结构方程模型分析,结果显示:(1)仅考虑一级认知压力时,建构主义教学能正向预测两种元思维,一级认知压力在建构主义教学与两种元思维间皆起部分中介作用;(2)仅考虑二级认知压力时,其在建构主义教学与两种元思维间皆起完全中介作用;(3)同时加入两种认知压力时,仅二级认知压力的中介作用显著。     

All You Need Is Love: The Importance of Partner and Family Relations to Highly Creative Individuals’ Well-Being and Success

The aim of the article was to investigate how the family life of highly creative individuals—mainly marriages or romantic relationships—is related to their sense of success and well-being. Previous studies have led to conflicting conclusions. The predominant finding has been that marriage and family constitute an obstacle to creative potential development. Other studies have demonstrated that, regardless of gender, creators lead satisfying family lives, which contributes to their well-being. The study presented in this paper is based on the grounded theory methodology and triangulates two sources: interviews with prominent creators from the USA conducted years ago (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, N = 91) and interviews with recognized contemporary Polish artists and scientists (N = 34). Based on interactions between the interviewees’ perception of themselves as creators and their perception of gender and family roles, the authors identify and discuss five types of relationship between creators’ family life and work. They also discuss the factors that hinder or facilitate creators’ satisfactory functioning in both areas in each of the five types of relationship.     

Constructing bridges and systemic connections: In brief dynamic therapy

The author outlines how the conceptual framework which underpins cyclical psychodynamics, a branch of relational psychoanalysis, provides an opportunity for a coherent integration of constructivist CBT principles and techniques and family systems theory within a model of brief dynamic therapy. Drawing upon Wachtel’s articulation of a more flexible notion of the internal world and one in which current interpersonal patterns are seen to shape the psyche and internal conflicts, the author goes on to identify ways in which attending to a client’s behaviour and the ways in which affective experience is expressed interpersonally can open the way to an integration of therapeutic features from constructivist CBT and family systems theory. The contribution that coaching a client in the ways in which they behave interpersonally in the context of both family and workplace relationships can make to therapeutic effectiveness is explored. These themes are illustrated with a case study.     

Living and Learning: Reproducing Beliefs in Selective Experience

People's decisions shape their experience. For example, a recruitment officer decides between job applicants and cannot evaluate the suitability of rejected applicants. The selection decisions thus affect the content of the officer's experience of suitable and unsuitable applicants, and experiential learning is achieved from a selective sample of experiences. It is suggested that people's beliefs are sensitive to the content of the experienced sample, but the mind cannot adjust for the selectivity of the sample even when it results from the individual's own decisions. Two experiments with a recruitment task showed that incorrect prior beliefs survive experiential learning when the beliefs are reproduced and thus appear to be confirmed, in actual experience. When the task was to achieve high performance, incorrect prior beliefs persisted because they were reproduced in a smaller sample of selected job applicants. In contrast, when the task was focused on learning, a greater number of applicants were selected, and a more representative experience therefore revised incorrect beliefs. The actual content of the experienced sample is thus crucial for the persistence, as well as for the revision, of incorrect beliefs. Further, as predicted by the hypothesis of constructivist coding, when feedback was absent for rejected applicants, participants constructed “internal feedback” in line with the expectation that the rejected applicant was unsuitable. Thus, when fewer applicants were hired, participants came to believe that the actual proportion of suitable applicants was low. Finally, the implications for efforts to reduce bias and improve experiential learning are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

民族本质论对民族认同和刻板印象的影响

The simple understanding of ethnicity by lay people is called the lay people’s theory of ethnicity, two theories are used to interpret the ethnicity by lay people in their everyday life. One of the theories contends that ethnicity is determined by nonmalleable, deep-seated essence and the essence would give rise to stable personality traits and abilities across situations, this is called the essentialist theory of ethnicity. The other theory, however, denies the real existence of ethnic essence, ethnicity is a social construction that is arbitrarily created due to social and political reasons in historical contexts, which is termed the social constructivist theory. Some western studies have shown that people have different interpretation about ethnicity cause different group perceptions and group relations. It is necessary to test and extend these results in another social background, like the Chinese one. First, 351 students from different ethnic groups participated in Study 1. They completed a questionnaire aimed at assessing their attitudes towards inter-group perception, ethnic identity, lay people’s theory of ethnicity, and out-group contact attitude. The results showed that: (1) the stronger essentialist belief a participant has, the more sensitive he or she is about group difference; (2) essentialist theory affects people’s inter-group identity, i.e. the deeper one believes in essentialism, the tenser he or she feels about in-group identity and bias, the more passive attitude is hold towards out-group contact. Second, 104 Han students participated in Study 2. An experimental method was used to test stereotyping differences against the minorities in relationship to lay people’s ethnic theories. Participants were randomly assigned to read the article advocating the essentialist view of ethnicity or the article advocating the social constructionist view of ethnicity. The result illustrates that: participants in the essentialist ethnicity condition showed stronger stereotyped impressions, especially negative stereotyping than did those in the social constructionist condition, but participants in the two conditions did not differ significantly on their positive stereotyping. In conclusion, the essentialist theory of ethnicity has a great influence on ethnic identity and ethnic stereotyping. Practical implications of these results imply that lay people’s theory of ethnicity can be used as a vehicle for reducing prejudice. Specifically, we can teach people to hold more social constructivist belief and less essentialist belief.     

两种世界观影响下的生涯咨询评估

自上世纪初逻辑实证主义影响下量的评估就一直在生涯咨询中占主导地位。近年来建构主义对生涯咨询的影响逐渐增加．质的评估越来越突出。文章立足于两种不同的世界观基础,比较了量和质的生涯评估模式及其特征,并探讨如何发展质的生涯评估过程。     

Interaction and bio-cognitive order

The role of interaction in learning is essential and profound: it must provide the means to solve open problems (those only vaguely specified in advance), but cannot be captured using our familiar formal cognitive tools. This presents an impasse to those confined to present formalisms; but interaction is fundamentally dynamical, not formal, and with its importance thus underlined it invites the development of a distinctively interactivist account of life and mind. This account is provided, from its roots in the interactivist biological constitution of life, through the evolution of the dual internal regulatory capacities expressed as intentionality and intelligence, to its expression in self-directed anticipative learning in persons and in science.