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To improve health and wellbeing, it is crucial that people regularly interrupt their sitting. In this paper, we propose a framework for examining and changing sitting behavior that addresses two key steps in the process towards developing effective interventions. First, we suggest that research should move away from its current focus on sitting time, which is an outcome of behavior. Rather, researchers should focus on stand-to-sit and sit-to-stand transitions, which are discrete units of behavior. Second, drawing on goal hierarchy models, we suggest that people rarely engage in stand-to-sit and sit-to-stand transitions for the purpose of being in a sitting or standing position; rather, we suggest that these transitions are means to higher-order goals (e.g., to complete work tasks, to watch television, to eat dinner). To improve adherence to and effectiveness of sitting behavior interventions, intervention designers should aim to increase the frequency of sit-to-stand (and stand-to-sit) transitions. To achieve this aim, intervention designers should capitalize on the higher-order goals that are typically served by these transitions. We suggest four concrete intervention strategies to increase sit-to-stand transitions in congruence with people’s everyday goals. We also describe the implications of our framework for theory and methods in sitting behavior research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since immersive virtual reality (IVR) emerged as a research method in the 1980s, the focus has been on the similarities between IVR and actual reality. In this vein, it has been suggested that IVR methodology might fill the gap between laboratory studies and real life. IVR allows for high internal validity (i.e., a high degree of experimental control and experimental replicability), as well as high external validity by letting participants engage with the environment in an almost natural manner. Despite internal validity being crucial to experimental designs, external validity also matters in terms of the generalizability of results. In this paper, we first highlight and summarise the similarities and differences between IVR, desktop situations (both non-immersive VR and computer experiments), and reality. In the second step, we propose that IVR is a promising tool for visual memory research in terms of investigating the representation of visual information embedded in natural behaviour. We encourage researchers to carry out experiments on both two-dimensional computer screens and in immersive virtual environments to investigate visual memory and validate and replicate the findings. IVR is valuable because of its potential to improve theoretical understanding and increase the psychological relevance of the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African social workers and psychologists have called for the utility of ubuntu philosophy in the fields of social work and psychology. Ubuntu is an African philosophy that is based on humanness, kindness, communality, socio-structural issues such as social justice, and human rights. This paper explores the philosophy of ubuntu guided by the seven modalities of the multimodal approach, which are behaviour, effect, sensation, imagery, cognition, interpersonal relationships and drugs/biology. The article suggests that ubuntu as an African philosophy has potential to contribute two modalities in addition to the seven modalities in the multimodal approach by the South African psychologist Arnold Lazarus. It argues that ubuntu contributes two domains in assessments and these are as follows: the person-physical environment relationship and the spiritual relationship. Given the emphasis on eco-spiritually informed social work, this paper calls for the adoption of these two modalities for the assessment and intervention plans in social work practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Risky alcohol use is a major public health problem globally and in Sri Lanka. While a reduction in alcohol consumption can result in physical, mental, and social benefits, behaviour change is difficult to achieve. Effective, context-adapted interventions are required to minimise alcohol-related harm at a community level. THEATRE is a complex, community-based intervention evaluating whether a promising Sri Lankan pilot study that utilised arts-based research to moderate alcohol use can be scaled up. While the scaled-up pilot study protocol is presented elsewhere, the aim of this protocol paper is to describe the intervention programme theory and evaluation design, and modifications made to the study resulting from COVID-19 and the financial crisis. Drawing on the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW) and Theoretical Domains Framework, behaviour change theories are presented with potential pathways to guide implementation and evaluation. Alcohol consumption patterns and context of drinking is detailed. The multifaceted intervention targets individuals and communities using arts-based interventions. Four of nine BCW functions are employed in the design of the intervention: education, persuasion, modelling and enablement, and training. Modifications made to the study due to COVID-19 and the financial crisis are described. Ethical approval was obtained from the Ethics Review Committee, Faculty of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Rajarata University of Sri Lanka (ERC/2018/21—July 2018 and Feb 2022) and the University of Sydney (2019/006). Findings will be disseminated locally to community members and key stakeholders and via international peer-reviewed publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The characteristics of multiple brands involved and users' original content, facilitate a brand-new online platform's emergence, that is, a product-experience-shared community (PESC), being distinguished from the brand community that has been extensively studied. While popular nowadays, PESC still involves limited research. Mainly, why users volunteer to write a flow of content remains unclear. Our purpose is to analyse the effects of different motivational factors on different participation behaviours, which further influence continued generating intention in the PESC context. Employing the theory of Uses and Gratification (U&G) on a sample of 729 users and using Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM), the study deeply identified the participation behaviour into three levels, i.e. content consuming, reacting, and generating, as well as investigated their relations with motives (utilitarian, recreational, cultural and social motives) and continued generating behaviour. The results show that different participation behaviours are relevant to utilitarian, recreational, cultural, and/or social motives. Furthermore, users continued generating intention is affected by their complete satisfaction with their participation experience. This paper also gives theoretical and practical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present the Integrated Training Transfer and Effectiveness Model (ITTEM), a dynamic model integrating dominant training transfer and training effectiveness models that can be used to evaluate whether mental health and wellbeing training interventions are transferred to the workplace and result in changes in emotions, cognitions and behaviours post-training. Through the integration of training transfer and training effectiveness literatures, the ITTEM aims to further our understanding of how we may enhance the effectiveness of training through optimising training transfer. We employ realist evaluation as our theoretical framework and argue that developing our understanding of what works for whom in which circumstances will enable us to improve how we design, implement, and evaluate training. We propose that pre- and post-training contextual factors influence the extent to which training mechanisms are triggered and bring about intended outcomes, in terms of emotions, cognitions, behaviours and improved employee mental health and wellbeing. The ITTEM can be used to develop our understanding of how and when training succeeds or fails. The ITTEM provides valuable insights in to how organisations may design future training to maximise the impact of transfer thus achieving the aims of protecting and promoting mental health and wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gambling behavior is a prevalent problem requiring the development of effective behavioral interventions targeting reductions in the behavior. Many theories of social cognition can be adopted to identify the specific psychological mechanisms interventions should target and how interventions can be designed to manipulate them. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how the Reasoned Action Approach can be used to achieve these aims. The paper outlines the steps involved in identifying relevant psychological determinants for intervention when adopting the theory. Behavior change is then discussed and the importance of translating intentions and maintaining change is emphasized. It is hoped that the paper encourages the development of a greater number of theory-based interventions targeting reductions in gambling behavior. Doing so may lead to a reduction in the number of people participating in the behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The aim of this paper was to critically review the recent literature on psychosocial and behavioral outcome following childhood stroke, to assess whether quality of life is affected and to investigate the factors related to psychosocial outcome.Methods: Literature searches were conducted and identified 36 relevant papers from the period 1908–2016.Results: The systematic review found that many children experience difficulties in a wide range of psychosocial domains. Quality of life can also be significantly reduced. Inconsistent findings regarding the correlates of outcome are likely due to methodological limitations. These issues include small and heterogeneous samples, lack of control groups, and measurement difficulties.Conclusions: This systematic review strongly indicates that childhood stroke can affect a myriad of psychosocial domains and a child’s quality of life. Methodological issues, particularly around heterogeneous samples and measures, limit the conclusions that can be drawn regarding the predictors of outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The argument put forth in this paper is that Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic theories were pseudoscientific and philosophical rather than empirical. Several examples are given to support this conclusion. It is further argued that Freud and his theories should be completely expurgated from the field and not taught in universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses several objections that have been leveled against a behavioral approach to psychological categories. It reconstructs and critically assesses (a) the so-called causal objection; (b) alleged counterexamples whereby one can exhibit the typical behaviors associated with a psychological phenomenon without exhibiting the latter, including Lewis’ “perfect actor” case and Kirk’s “zombie”; (c) alleged counterexamples whereby organisms can exemplify psychological phenomena without exhibiting any behavior associated with them, including Armstrong’s imagined brain in a vat, Putnam’s “super-super-spartans” scenario, and related cases; and (d) the holistic objection. Mistaken assumptions in each of these objections are pinpointed. The paper starts with a brief characterization of behaviorism about psychological categories and a summary of the particular version thereof supported here, which draws upon Ryle and Skinner, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: The literature shows how gender mandates contribute to differences in exposure and vulnerability to certain health risk factors. This paper presents the results of a study developed in the south of Spain, where research aimed at understanding men from a gender perspective is still limited. Objective: The aim of this paper is to explore the lay perceptions and meanings ascribed to the idea of masculinity, identifying ways in which gender displays are related to health. Design: The study is based on a mixed-methods data collection strategy typical of qualitative research. We performed a qualitative content analysis focused on manifest and latent content. Results: Our analysis showed that the relationship between masculinity and health was mainly defined with regard to behavioural explanations with an evident performative meaning. With regard to issues such as driving, the use of recreational drugs, aggressive behaviour, sexuality, and body image, important connections were established between manhood acts and health outcomes. Different ways of understanding and performing the male identity also emerged from the results. The findings revealed the implications of these aspects in the processes of change in the identity codes of men and women. Conclusions: The study provides insights into how the category 'man' is highly dependent on collective practices and performative acts. Consideration of how males perform manhood acts might be required in guidance on the development of programmes and policies aimed at addressing gender inequalities in health in a particular local context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to examine and to operationalise 12 key character virtues identified within C. S. Lewis’ Narnian texts: courage, curiosity, forgiveness, fortitude, gratitude, hard work, humility, integrity, justice, love, self-control, and wisdom. A pilot study among 56 year eight students (12–13 years of age) generated nine five-item instruments displaying adequate internal consistency reliability, and suggested ways in which the other three measures (curiosity, integrity, and love) could be enhanced in future work. Construct validity was explored by examining the correlations between these 12 character virtues and sex, self-concept, and empathy, and by locating these 12 character virtues within the three-dimensional psychological space proposed by Eysenck’s model of personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue for two main hypotheses. First, that (philosophical) self-control is not a natural mental kind and, second, that there is no dedicated mechanism of self-control (indeed, the latter claim forms part of my argument for the former). By the first claim, I simply mean that those behaviors we label as “self-controlled” are a somewhat arbitrarily selected hodgepodge that do not have anything in common that distinguishes them from other behaviors. In other words, self-control is a gerrymandered property that does not correspond to a natural mental or psychological kind. By the second claim, I mean that self-controlled behaviors are not produced by a mechanism (or a set of them) that is not utilized in the production of other (non-self-controlled) behaviors. Not only is there no natural mental property of self-control, there is no mechanism (such as willpower) that is dedicated to producing self-controlled behavior. I further evaluate whether this account of self-control has enough explanatory power to account for a range of phenomena related to self-control (systematic self-control failures, etc.). I argue that my account does a better job of explaining these phenomena than accounts which appeal to a dedicated self-control mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Primary objective: To systematically review the results of investigative research into psychosocial outcomes following paediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) in children of school-age. Methods: Searches were conducted using PsycINFO, MEDLINE and Science Direct. Three hundred and ninety papers were identified, of which 17 met inclusion criteria. Citation searches uncovered 28 further studies. All 44 studies were appraised in terms of their methodological rigour (e.g. sample characteristics, measures utilized, control groups employed). Results: The papers reviewed described outcomes across domains of behavioural, emotional, adaptive and parent/family functioning. Studies describing behavioural functioning post-injury demonstrated least consistent results. Papers examining emotional, adaptive and parent/family outcomes found that those with head injury presented with poorer functioning than other paediatric populations. Injury severity was commonly identified as a significant predictor of outcome, as were several pre-injury psychosocial factors. Conclusions: Inconsistencies in results may have arisen due to the heterogeneous populations studied and methodologies employed. Research which examines the reliability of assessment measures is needed. Given the high prevalence of difficulties, psychosocial assessment is warranted in this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than two million Americans live in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Available research suggests that the majority of older nursing home residents, including those with some degree of cognitive impairment, place significant value upon a variety of sexual activities. With nearly half of all residents suffering from dementia, psychologists and other mental health professionals often face significant challenges in the assessment of their patients’ sexual consent capacity. A primary ethical issue is to balance an individual resident’s rights to autonomy and privacy with a facility’s need to protect residents from harm. Sexual consent capacity functions on a continuum across time and behavior. It also cannot be predetermined by proxy, in which an individual prepares legal documents ahead of time to identify a surrogate decision maker; sexual consent capacity must be determined by information obtained in the present moment. In this paper, an approach to the assessment of residents’ sexual consent capacity, encompassing knowledge, reasoning, and voluntariness, along with a brief overview of sexual activity among long-term care residents, will be presented. A case example is offered to illustrate complex clinical dilemmas involving staff attitudes, residents’ rights, and family dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author comments on papers published in response to her article on emotions and the integrated theory of emotional behavior. She discusses the stimulus-driven approach and a goal-directed approach to emotions and other behavior, ways in which stimulus-driven and goal-directed mechanisms can interface, and the affect program theory and discrete and dimensional appraisal theories.

This paper addresses the experimental trade-off between the exercise of control over the actions of the experimental participants and the potential to provide understanding about human behavior. Control is a requirement of the experimental method to produce pertinent and intelligible results for scientific inquiry. But the more control is exercised the more the experimental results are the outcome of economists' actions. Economic experiments must therefore achieve a difficult balance. They must elicit intelligible behavior while ensuring that the actions of those taking part in the experiment are not determined by the design set-up and the rules of the experiment. The paper puts forward criteria for the analysis of the level of participation of experimental subjects in economics experiments and applies them to several experiments to illustrate the relevance of assessing the agency of experimental participants when deriving inferences about human behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author explores the relationship between masculinity and violence. She begins by pointing out that although all of the recent school shootings in the US have been perpetrated by boys, very few are associating the acts with the gender of the offenders. Perhaps this connection is not made because society is so conditioned to the fact that men and boys have always made up the preponderance of violent offenders in the US. In this paper the attitudes and behaviors associated with the socially constructed culture of masculinity that lend themselves to male violence and aggression are explored. It includes a discussion of a Freirean approach to the problem and concludes with practical suggestions for transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SummaryGary Thomas’ interesting paper (Thomas, 2002) raises issues which are relevant to both the theory and the practice of educational psychology. Whilst the author is sympathetic to his general thesis, there are still issues which are obscure. This paper attempts to offer a reply to some of these and to stimulate further debate amongst both researchers and practitioners.Psychological Explanations: A replyThomas’ central point is a negative one: that appeal to some supposed psychological faculty does nothing to explain behaviour. Opium induces sleep, but to say that it does so because of a virtus dormitiva (something sleep-inducing) tells us nothing; similarly, according to Thomas (p. 164 ff.), children’s inability to read cannot be usefully ascribed to some supposed faculty or construct, ‘phonological awareness’, which somehow underlies their performance and which the children lack. But, like many other writers, he takes this to be an empirical thesis (“findings consistent with the thesis being advanced here have come repeatedly from research over the past two or three decades”, p. 165); as if it were logically possible for it to be false. In this he follows those whom he criticises (Farnham-Diggory, 1992; Goswami & Bryant, 1990): it is as if he disagreed with them about a matter of fact, about what is actually the case although it might have been otherwise.The connection between what is supposed to explain and what is supposed to be explained in such cases is a conceptual and not an empirical one. Just as part of the meaning of virtus dormitiva is “sleep-inducing”, so (a little less obviously) part of the meaning of “being able to read” is “phonological awareness: that is, the ability to pronounce—in effect, to read—words correctly. In the same way, some supposed mathematical faculty—“being good at manipulating numbers”, perhaps could not be used to explain ‘being good at arithmetic’, since the former is conceptually part of the latter.Quite a lot of supposed psychological explanation is of this kind. To use some other examples (for which see Wilson, 1972), “People who like each other tend to get on better” and “Students who are more motivated will, other things being equal, learn more” are, pretty obviously, logical or conceptual truths rather than empirical truths or matters of fact. But often the status of the assertion is unclear. Thus an empirical enquiry into whether popular people were warm, supportive and friendly might be thought unnecessary, on the grounds that there is a conceptual overlap between “popular” and “warm, supportive and friendly”. On the other hand, the researcher might mean by “popular” something like “supported or voted for by a lot of people”: in that sense, Hitler and Margaret Thatcher would count as popular, without any implication that they were warm or supportive or friendly; and then the enquiry could be genuinely empirical. Great care has to be taken to determine what various researchers actually do mean by the terms they use, since the status of their research depends on that.Thomas gives the impression that he is actually against the existence or at least the explanatory power of mental faculties. Even after careful reading, it is unclear whether he believes in mental faculties at all (in his summary he writes of “supposed faculties (such as memory or awareness)”). But nobody with a grasp of the English language could seriously doubt that terms like “intelligence”, “imagination”, “memory”, and others stood for (fairly general) mental powers, capabilities or abilities: one would have to believe that when we said things like “He’s very intelligent”, “She’s a rather unimaginative person”, “His memory is pretty poor”, and so on we were talking about mythical objects like unicorns or phlogiston.Further, we often use faculties to explain performance. Someone is bad at history: this may be because he lacks general intelligence, or because he has a very bad memory for dates and other historical facts, or it might be because he just hates the subject, so that the cause is not a faculty or ability at all but a kind of disposition or motivational state. The question will be open, but the presence or absence or adequacy of a faculty may answer it. But, of course, we must be able to identify the faculty independently of the performance: otherwise we fall into the virtus dormitiva trap, or find ourselves saying that failure to read must be due to “verbal interpretation incompetence” (where this means no more than “being unable to read”); or, to take a topical example, that if some person cannot or will not pay due attention he must be suffering from “Attention Deficit Syndrome” as if that phrase named some disease which caused the overt behaviour. Thomas is right to warn us of this danger; but that is no reason for dispensing with mental faculties altogether.Nor is it a reason for turning our backs on the physiological preconditions, or constituents, or correspondences with mental powers and performances. Again we are uncertain about how far Thomas really wants to do this; but he talks (p. 164) of “an assumption that an ability could be understood physiologically” (his italics), and says “The assumption is dualistic: that ‘abilities’ emerge out of ‘physiological processes’ in the brain”. Now we know very well that mental powers depend on brain-states: that if people suffer from brain damage some of their mental powers lapse: even that certain types of brain-states correlate with certain mental powers. In that sense they are dependent on, or ‘emerge out of’, certain physiological conditions.That, presumably, is not what Thomas wishes to deny. What perhaps he wishes to deny, quite rightly, is the possibility of a description of some mental ability being translated into purely physiological terms: as if the expression “intelligent” meant “such-and-such neurones moving in such-and-such ways”, or as if the chess-move “pawn to king four” could be translated into statements about the movement of a wooden object. In that sense he is right to claim that an ability cannot be “understood physiologically”. But that does not mean that abilities do not have a physiological background and physiological connections or preconditions or perhaps even fairly detailed correspondence. The sentence he is criticising (from Farnham-Diggory, 1992) begins, “Exactly what this ability involves physiologically is not fully understood”; and that is harmless enough, for whilst what we mean by “being able to read” cannot be translated into physiological terms, it certainly involves certain physiological states. And it is obviously important to discover what these states are.There is a general lesson here which it is important for both researchers and practitioners to learn, and which goes far beyond the particular points that I have mentioned above. What these points demonstrate is the absolute necessity of saying clearly what we mean when we use certain words both in theory and in practice. For if we do not do this, we cannot be clear about just what actual phenomena the words are supposed to describe—we cannot even identify the phenomena properly, let alone explain them.Thus both research in reading and special pedagogies designed to improve reading will be geared, consciously or unconsciously, to some conception of what reading is or what the ability to read consists of. But that is already a misleading way of putting it: “what reading is” or “what the ability to read consists of” might be taken as the titles of some empirical enquiry, an enquiry into the constituents of water and find that if was made up of H20. We have, rather, to determine first what “reading” or “able to read” mean; and that is a logical or linguistic rather than a factual or scientific enquiry. In the same way we need to know what we mean by “intelligence” before we can enquire into what intelligence is made up of: otherwise we should not know just what is was that we were enquiring into under the heading of “intelligence” rather than some other heading.There are in fact some (fairly obvious) questions to be asked about both these concepts. The meaning of “intelligent” does not include either the idea of factual knowledge or the idea of being motivated: if a person knows little or nothing about a subject, or the person is not disposed to be interested in it, that is no criticism of their intelligence. But is there any conceptual connection between intelligence and memory? Certainly we can say “It’s not that he’s unintelligent, it’s just that he has a bad memory”; but suppose we ask someone to solve a lengthy problem which involves quite a lot of information, and by the time they come to the end of the problem they have forgotten the information we gave them at the beginning. Is that lack of intelligence? (“A is bigger than B”. “OK, I’ve got that”. “B is bigger than C”. “Fine, B’s bigger than C, I understand”. “So what can you tell us about A and C?” “Sorry, I forgot what you said about a minute ago ...”). Or, again, is being able to solve problems quickly part of what we mean by “intelligent”? Are brilliant chess-moves more brilliant if they take only a short time to think up? Is it fair to time IQ tests?It may be that we are so used to employing these words, and engaging in various practices connected with what they stand for, that we think we already know well enough what we mean. But even the concept marked by “reading” is far from clear. Thus (1) “reading” presumably involves more than just making appropriate pronounciation: it involves some kind of understanding of what is read. But how much understanding, and understanding of what? Of grammar and syntax and sentence-structure only, or of semantics also? Or (2) what kind of content does “the ability to read” involve? What vocabulary is supposed to be used; what subject matter is the person supposed to be familiar with? Nursery rhymes, shopping lists, descriptions of everyday occurrences at school, fairy tales, the lyrics of pop music, or what? Whether a person is “able to read” or not will be largely relative to this content and vocabulary. One might even ask (3) what kind of script or symbols are we talking about? A person can read English (in capital letters or minuscules), Chinese ideograms and Egyptian hieroglyphics, mathematical equations, maps and charts, graphs, musical scores, and many other things: there is no reason to suppose that there is something called “the ability to read” which is totally independent of the symbolic medium.The point here is not that we need, as it were, to be a little more precise about the words we use; as if that were something we could easily do in our spare time, before undertaking the serious empirical enquiry. It is rather that without investigating the meaning of words we literally do not know what we are talking about, so that much of our psychological theory and educational practice is disconnected from the real world. In natural science the danger is less: we do indeed know pretty well what is meant by (for instance) “planet”, “movement”, and perhaps “atom”; we can identify these things because we know what the words mean, and go on to try to explain them. But anyone who thinks that we know, just as clearly and unequivocally, what is meant by “intelligence”, “memory”, “motivation”, “cognition”, “affect” and other terms with which psychology deals needs to think again.Working out what words mean should not be conceived as a kind of (perhaps rather tiresome) preliminary to research and practice, but as part of them. Yet is seems that few empirical researchers even understand the task. For instance, in the same issue of the journal in which Thomas’ article appears there was an interesting paper on “Circle Time” (Lown, 2002), with a section entitled “Definitions of circle time”. Here we are told (p. 94) that White (1989) shares the view with other authors (Lang & Moslay 1993; Margerison 1996) that circle time is in the main a tool for improving self-esteem, but adds that in so doing it also improves learning. White (1989) also sees circle time as a method of cultivating group identity and cohesion. Housego and Burns (1994) agree with the idea that circle time can and should enhance learning ... Another frequently stated view in the literature is that circle time is a method of improving circle skills ...And so on.Now it is abundantly clear that whatever this is, it is not an attempt to say what the phrase “circle time” means. It does not even try to do that. Typically, writers ‘collect definitions’ from other people, without themselves saying what a term means or how it is used: and, worse, what they collect are not really definitions at all, but (as here) a series of remarks connected with some phenomenon (‘circle time’) which are already supposed to be identifiable. Normally we define words, not things: “Define that word ‘dog’” makes sense, but not “Define this dog”.The above points have been belaboured because it is fatally easy to see the task of defining terms—of laying out what is conceptually involved by for example, “intelligence”, or “reading” or “self-esteem” or any other term, and what is not conceptually involved—as in some pejorative sense “academic” (too “abstract”, “philosophical”, or even “nit-picking”). But it is surely obvious, even without the benefit of lengthy argument, that (for instance) what we count as “a disability” or “a learning difficulty”, what we mean by “dyslexic” or “autism”, what we take to be part or not part of the logic of the expression “gifted and talented”, “disruptive”, “hyperactive” and so on will inevitably give a certain direction to our research and hence to our practice. What we do is driven by how we think, and how we think is largely determined by the concepts we use. The author hopes that these remarks, brief and sketchy though they are, will at least show the importance of this enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to do three things: First, to provide a review of John Staddon's book Adaptive dynamics: The theoretical analysis of behavior. Second, to compare Staddon's behaviorist view with current ideas on embodied cognition. Third, to use this comparison to explicate some outlines for a theoretical analysis of behavior that could be useful as a behavioral foundation for cognitive phenomena. Staddon earlier defended a theoretical behaviorism, which allows internal states in its models but keeps these to a minimum while remaining critical of any cognitive interpretation. In his latest book, Adaptive dynamics, he provides an overview and analysis of an extensive number of these current, behaviorist models. Theoretical behaviorism comes close to the view of embodied cognition, which also stresses the importance of behavior in contrast to high-level cognition. A detailed picture of the overlaps and differences between the two approaches will be sketched by comparing the two on four separate issues: the conceptualization of behavior, loopy structures, parsimonious explanations, and cognitive behavior. The paper will stress the need for a structural analysis of behavior to gain a better understanding of both behavior and cognition. However, for this purpose, we will need behavioral science rather than behaviorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a brief overview of attachment theory in order to describe the genesis of attachment disorganization. All infants develop an attachment style as an adaptive response to their caregiver's behaviour, and the overall pattern may be secure or insecure. However, the coherence of any of these infant attachment patterns can break down resulting in attachment disorganization. This paper describes the characteristic behaviour of the disorganized infant and discusses the validity of the concept in terms of the ability of the disorganized classification to predict future infant behaviour. We explain how parental state of mind may lead to infant disorganization and describe the parental behaviours that are thought to be associated with this adverse infant development. Finally, we discuss the observable developmental phenomena of attachment disorganization in terms of psychoanalytic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When educators consider ‘student behaviour’, they usually think about ‘problem behaviour’ such as disruption or defiance. This limited and limiting view of ‘student behaviour’ not only fails to acknowledge children as educational actors in a wider sense, but also narrowly positions educators as either in control or out of control of their classroom. Mainstream educational psychology’s responses to ‘challenging behaviour’ point educators to numerous ways to prevent its occurrence, through, for example, changing their disciplining approaches and techniques. However, much of the advice directed at improving student behaviour fails to interrogate the core notion of ‘student behaviour’ itself, as well as the conceptual baggage that it carries. The focus is squarely on eliminating ‘problem behaviour’ and often resorts to a pathologisation of students. Meanwhile, when considering ‘student behaviour’ through a Foucauldian post-structuralist optic, behaviour emerges as something highly complex – as spatialised, embodied action within/against governing discourses. In this opening up, it becomes both possible and critical to defamiliarise oneself with the categorisation of ‘challenging behaviour’ and to interrogate the discourses and subject positionings at play. In this paper, we pursue this task by asking: what happens with the notion of ‘behaviour’ if we change focus from ‘fixing problems’ to looking at the discursive constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’? What does it become possible to see, think, feel and do? In this exploration, we theorise ‘behaviour’ as learning and illustrate the constitution of ‘learner subjectivities’. Drawing on two case scenarios, we explore how children accomplish themselves as learners and how this accomplishment links the production of subjectivity and embodied action, and illustrate how ‘student/child behaviour’ appears significantly different to what mainstream educational psychology would have us see. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last 15 years we have seen a small but growing interest in Prospect Theory (PT) as an alternative behavioural paradigm within which to represent traveller behaviour. Some elements of PT such as gains and losses have become so popular in travel choice studies that authors increasingly indicate that they are applying PT. In its strictest interpretation, PT has a number of essential elements that must be included if the link with PT can be claimed. This paper reviews recent transportation studies which report an association with PT as a way of gaining a greater appreciation of what is and what is not an application of PT. We set the scene by providing an overview of PT using studies in the fields of psychology and behavioural economics, where PT was originally established and further developed, and then identify travel behaviour studies which satisfy the PT (Original or Cumulative PT) conditions. A number of specific issues are identified to highlight the connection to PT, including empirically estimated prospect theoretic parameters and referencing. Some behavioural limitations of the reviewed transport PT studies are also presented, including the absence of willingness to pay estimates and consideration of unobserved between-individual heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a new practical visual approach, the Rules Grid, to support children who have social communication and interaction needs. The Rules Grid involves a system whereby behaviours of concern can be broken down into smaller behavioural manifestations which in turn lead not only to problem identification and specification, but provide a visible structure to support behaviour change at a reasonably micro level. The paper provides an overview of the theory and research that support visual approaches before outlining some important examples of visual strategies. This is followed by a presentation of a single case study which illustrates how the Rules Grid could be used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a disgust-inducing film, Gross (1998) showed that the instruction to suppress mimic expression (suppression) triggered physiological arousal, while the instruction to think about the film in order to adopt a detached and unemotional attitude (reappraisal) reduced affective strain compared to a condition instructing subjects simply to watch the film (watch). The present paper investigates, if disgust sensitivity has a moderating role in this context. Physiological, subjective, and behavior responses were recorded in 120 males divided according to high/low disgust sensitivity who were exposed to the disgust-inducing film used by Gross. The instruction effects reported by Gross could not be replicated. However, high disgust-sensitive subjects were more physiologically and emotionally aroused than low disgust-sensitive subjects. Interactions between disgust sensitivity and the three film instructions can possibly be traced back to a repressive coping style of subjects with low disgust sensitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable effort has been invested in improving assessment processes for older people, some of the most vulnerable of whom live in care homes. The paper compares two well-known assessment tools used in care homes, the CANE and the Minimum Data Set/Resident Assessment Instrument. There was poor agreement between the tools in terms of domains of need covered. Nineteen pairs of items could be compared, with agreement greater than 60% found on 11 items. Of the 15 items where κ could be computed, seven significant values were found. High levels of agreement existed in relation to behaviour, psychological wellbeing, mood state, psychotic symptoms, incontinence, mobility and inadvertent self-harm (risk). The study suggests that tools commonly used for assessment are not interchangeable and that the selection of assessment tool should be determined by the setting in which it is used, the needs of the population being assessed, the skills and knowledge of those undertaking the assessment and the purpose of the assessment itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the rationality of anger in the light of a standard notion of economic rationality. Whether anger is rational or otherwise cannot be answered in general, but will depend on the economic setting. As long as anger can be explained as a preference in a parsimonious and stable utility function, it does not make sense to talk of anger as rational or irrational. The production of anger is subtly mediated by many cognitive factors. These (and the anger-induced cognitive effects and intertemporal inconsistency of preferences) underlie what are the genuine problems that anger creates for rational choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a commentary on the article "Idiographic Filters for Psychological Constructs," by Nesselroade and others. This paper discusses the assumptions and challenges to the approach to measurement whereby the authors focused on the modeling relationships within persons and factor analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how experienced teachers learn informally, and more specifically, how they learn through the activities they undertake when teaching classes. Regarding these activities we studied four aspects: behaviour, cognition, motivation and emotion. During one year, data were collected through observations of and interviews with four experienced teachers. For the analysis we used Eraut's distinction into three types of learning which differ in the degree of consciousness that is involved. We found several activities that represented each of these types of learning. The findings demonstrate how cognitive, affective, motivational and behavioural aspects are interrelated in classroom teaching and that learning from classroom teaching occurs at several levels of awareness. Hence, we argue that a theory of teacher learning should account for activities involved in the alignment of behaviour to plan and for the role of motivation and emotion. The findings suggest that fruitful development of the quality of teaching requires more attention for the relation between teachers' cognition, emotion, motivation and behaviour, and for promoting teachers' awareness of their implicit beliefs and behavioural tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports five experiments demonstrating that the low spatial frequency components of faces are critical to the production of rapid attentional responses towards fearful facial expressions. In our main experiments, low spatial frequency (LSF) or high spatial frequency (HSF) face pairs, consisting of one fearful and one neutral expression, were presented on a computer screen for a brief period. Participants were required to identify as quickly as possible the orientation of a bar target that immediately replaced one of the faces. Responses were faster when targets replaced the location of LSF fearful faces, compared with LSF neutral faces. By contrast, there were no differences between responses to targets replacing HSF fearful versus HSF neutral faces. This facilitation in spatial orienting occurred specifically with short time intervals between faces and target, and is consistent with a rapid processing of fear cues from LSF inputs that can serve to guide attention towards threat events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of mentalization (Fonagy, Steele, Moran, Steele, & Higgitt, 1991) has been used to describe the way in which the child's ability to understand his own and others' minds crucially depends on the developmental opportunity to recognize himself as represented in the mind of another. Within the context of a case presented for supervision, this paper discusses the importance of mentalization or 'reflective function' in the development of the psychological self, drawing on recent attachment-related research. Peter Webber's film Girl with a Pearl Earring is also presented and discussed as illustration of the psychotherapeutic significance of searching for the individual's inner psychological potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first examines the reasons for the limited success of empirical studies of movement behavior in documenting a consistent relationship between spatial behavior and its psychological antecedents. It then proposes an integrated conceptual framework to incorporate the mediating and determining role of constraints on spatial behavior. It is argued that acceptance of the implicit assumptions of utility maximization and volitional control has encouraged an undue emphasis on the attitudinal determinants of behavior to the detriment of its nonattitudinal components. Thus, model misspecification has compounded the inferential problems stemming from conceptual and operational ambiguities, from spatial aggregation, and from excessive dependence on a narrow range of linear models. By providing a flexible foundation for the reconceptualization of the processes underlying spatial decision making, recent developments in attitude theory are pointing the way toward redressing this imbalance in research efforts. Disaggregate models of travel, mobility, and migration behavior should account for the inconsistencies between thought and action, not ignore them. Models should thus be formulated within conceptual frameworks able to incorporate into existing psychological theories of behavior an operational formulation of the structural, social, and institutional constraints that account for the missing links between spatial behavior and its psychological antecedents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the views of the author on the criticisms over his article "On Interobjectivity," published within the issue. His paper was about his idiosyncratic arguments in social theory. However, he thanked his critics for the feedbacks. He added that some of the critics were too naive to consider his arguments. On the other hand, he objected to the comment on social theory in general by Mike Lynch. He clarified that the reason for his slow movement is that he is trying to avoid the engagement of objects into the practice that is most often employed when too much attention is given to human action.

SUMMARY This paper compares Seligman's recent work on learned helplessness with N. R. F. Maier's work on frustration-instigated behavior published some 30 years ago. Some striking similarities are noted between the two approaches, and it is concluded that some of the differences are more apparent than real and that the learned helplessness model could provide an explanation for the "abnormal fixations" reported by Maier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]