Through the Looking Glass: Reflecting on Counsellor Dreams for Enhanced Self-Care and Effective Practice

A wealth of information can be extracted from clients’ dream narratives. Few counsellors, however, recognize the significance of monitoring their own dreams. In this clinically-informed position paper, counsellors are urged to consider their own dream content. Self-awareness is vital to the therapeutic relationship, but also instrumental to the safety and well-being of counsellors themselves. Dreaming about one’s client can reflect troubled therapeutic rapport and highlight emotional or countertransference issues. Dreams can be harbingers of vicarious traumatization. Thus, counsellors are encouraged to reflect on their own dreams as a deliberate self-care initiative in order to promote a safe and effective practice.     

Retrieving randomized controlled trials from medline: a comparison of 38 published search filters

Background: People search medline for trials of healthcare interventions for clinical decisions, or to produce systematic reviews, practice guidelines, or technology assessments. Finding all relevant randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with little extraneous material is challenging. Objective: To provide comparative data on the operating characteristics of search filters designed to retrieve RCTs from medline . Methods: We identified 38 filters. The testing database comprises handsearching data from 161 clinical journals indexed in medline . Sensitivity, specificity and precision were calculated. Results: The number of terms and operating characteristics varied considerably. Comparing the retrieval against the single term ‘randomized controlled trials.pt.’ (sensitivity for retrieving RCTs, 93.7%), 24 of 38 filters had statistically higher sensitivity; 6 had a sensitivity of at least 99.0%. Four other filters had specificities (non retrieval of non‐RCTs) that were statistically not different or better than the single term (97.6%). Precision was poor: only two filters had precision (proportion of retrieved articles that were RCTs) statistically similar to that of the single term (56.4%)—all others were lower. Filters with more search terms often had lower specificity, especially at high sensitivities. Conclusion: Many RCT filters exist (n = 38). These comparative data can direct the choice of an RCT filter.     

The Developing Bilingual Brain: What Parents and Teachers Should Know and Do

The field of neuroscience is now providing research findings about how the bilingual brain functions that can be used to promote richer and more successful dual-language development. This article summarizes recent research, then provides practical applications for parents and teachers of emergent bilinguals. Key understandings about how the brain processes first and subsequent languages are translated into ways to enrich instruction and family-based language and literacy experiences.     

Training effects on Belgian preschool and primary school teachers’ attitudes towards the best practices for gifted children

Lack of knowledge of effective educational interventions for gifted children is a pressing problem in Belgian schools. Most preschool and primary school teachers enter the profession without any training in the best practices for gifted children. This results in many misconceptions about giftedness and gifted education and a diversity of well-intentioned but ineffective interventions in the classroom. In response to the request for help from many schools, the Belgian expertise center “Exentra” designed a professional training program for in-service teachers with the aim to increase teachers’ understanding of the characteristics and needs of gifted pupils, and help teachers develop the necessary confidence and skills to effectively teach the gifted in regular, mixed-ability classes. This study shows that the Exentra training is effective in changing teachers’ beliefs about gifted education and enhancing teachers’ knowledge, abilities, and self-esteem to effectively modify the curriculum for the more capable pupils in the classroom.     

Audience support and choking under pressure: a home disadvantage?

This paper highlights the not-so-obvious but compelling reasons why the same supportive audiences that can help performers attain their highest potential also may increase performers' risk of choking under pressure. Drawing primarily from social psychology research and theory, we conclude that audience support magnifies performance pressure and induces performers to avoid failure rather than seek success during the most critical moments of performance contests. Although supportive audiences can inspire performers to excel when motivation would otherwise be lacking, audiences may also lead performers towards maladaptive self-monitoring and overcautiousness when the stakes are highest. The increased self-focus that supportive audiences induce can disrupt the automatic execution of the skills performers possess. Dispositional and situational moderators of the relationship between audience support and performance are reviewed.     

Untangling the Links among Athletic Involvement, Gender, Race, and Adolescent Academic Outcomes

Although previous research has established that high school sports participation may be associated with positive academic outcomes, the parameters of the relationship remain unclear. Using a longitudinal sample of nearly 600 Western New York adolescents, this study examined gender- and race-specific differences in the impact of two dimensions of adolescent athletic involvement ("jock" identity and athlete status) on changes in school grades and school misconduct over a two-year interval. Female and black adolescents who identified themselves as "jocks" reported lower grades than those who did not, whereas female athletes reported higher grades than female nonathletes. Jocks also reported significantly more misconduct (including skipping school, cutting classes, having someone from home called to the school for disciplinary purposes, and being sent to the principal's office) than nonjocks. Gender moderated the relationship between athlete status and school misconduct; athletic participation had a less salutary effect on misconduct for girls than for boys.     

A secure base in adolescence: markers of attachment security in the mother-adolescent relationship

This study sought to identify ways in which adolescent attachment security, as assessed via the Adult Attachment Interview, is manifest in qualities of the secure base provided by the mother-adolescent relationship. Assessments included data coded from mother-adolescent interactions, test-based data, and adolescent self-reports obtained from an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse sample of moderately at-risk 9th and 10th graders. This study found several robust markers of adolescent attachment security in the mother-adolescent relationship. Each of these markers was found to contribute unique variance to explaining adolescent security, and in combination, they accounted for as much as 40% of the raw variance in adolescent security. These findings suggest that security is closely connected to the workings of the mother-adolescent relationship via a secure-base phenomenon, in which the teen can explore independence in thought and speech from the secure base of a maternal relationship characterized by maternal attunement to the adolescent and maternal supportiveness.     

Using Stated-Preference Questions to Investigate Variations in Willingness to Pay for Preserving Marble Monuments: Classic Heterogeneity, Random Parameters, and Mixture Models

This paper investigates heterogeneity in the preferences/WTP (willingness to pay) to preserve marble monuments in Washington, D.C. This is done in the context of three different discrete-choice random-utility models. The main focus is to estimate a mixture model of choices over preservation programs. This model captures the best features of random-parameters models and models that assume preference parameters are deterministic functions of observable characteristics of the individual. The mixture model, and it alone, predicts that increased preservation is a bad for a significant proportion of young, non-Caucasians. That some proportion of the population might consider preservation a bad is a contingency that should be planned for in efforts to value cultural resources. Data and computer code are available athttp://www.colorado.edu/economics/morey/dataset.html.