Attention to Faces Expressing Negative Emotion at 7 Months Predicts Attachment Security at 14 Months

To investigate potential infant‐related antecedents characterizing later attachment security, this study tested whether attention to facial expressions, assessed with an eye‐tracking paradigm at 7 months of age (N = 73), predicted infant–mother attachment in the Strange Situation Procedure at 14 months. Attention to fearful faces at 7 months predicted attachment security, with a smaller attentional bias to fearful expressions associated with insecure attachment. Attachment disorganization in particular was linked to an absence of the age‐typical attentional bias to fear. These data provide the first evidence linking infants' attentional bias to negative facial expressions with attachment formation and suggest reduced sensitivity to facial expressions of negative emotion as a testable trait that could link attachment disorganization with later behavioral outcomes.     

Profit distribution and compensation structures in publicly and privately funded hybrid venture capital funds

Policy makers have become increasingly concerned at the lack of risk capital available to new and early-stage entrepreneurial ventures. As a public response to a perceived market failure, several governments have set up programs to channel equity finance to capital constrained but high potential, young enterprises. Critically, government support is often directed through the agency of private venture capital funds. We examine the profit distribution and compensation structures used in these hybrid public/private funds. We appraise government policy makers’ ability to use these structures to improve the expected returns in market failure areas in order to attract private sector investors and professional managers to participate in these funds. The results derived from our simulation study suggest that such asymmetric profit sharing models can only resolve relatively modest market failures unless the programs also manage to attract highly competent investors who are able to produce above average gross returns in market failure areas.     

Finnish students’ enjoyment and anxiety levels during fitness testing classes

ABSTRACT

Background: Fitness testing is a commonly applied learning and teaching practice implemented in both secondary and elementary school physical education (PE). Many teachers believe that by using a variety of different tests, they are able to provide students with feedback regarding their fitness status, and furthermore, increase students’ willingness to be physically active later in their lives. However, empirical evidence concerning students’ affective responses during fitness testing classes is limited.

Purpose: The primary aim of the study was to investigate whether students’ perceptions of enjoyment and anxiety differed between two different types of fitness testing classes and PE in general. In addition, the measurement invariances over time and between Grade 5 (aged 11–12) and Grade 8 (aged 14–15) groups were determined.

Method: A total sample of 645 Finnish Grade 5 (N?=?328, 50% boys, mean age?=?11.2, SD?=?0.36) and Grade 8 students (N?=?317, 47% boys, mean age?=?14.2, SD?=?0.35) participated in the study. Series of multi-group confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to test the level of measurement invariance between general PE and fitness testing classes, and between age groups. Strict factorial invariance was supported for both enjoyment and anxiety scales allowing for latent mean comparisons. Latent mean differences were studied using z-tests.

Results: Grade 5 students perceived significantly lower levels of enjoyment and cognitive processes and a higher level of somatic anxiety in fitness testing classes compared to general PE. Additionally, for Grade 8 students, levels of enjoyment and cognitive processes were significantly lower and somatic anxiety and worry higher in fitness testing classes than in general PE. Furthermore, enjoyment was significantly higher, and cognitive processes, somatic anxiety and worry lower among Grade 5 students compared with Grade 8 students in both contextual PE and during fitness testing class.

Conclusion: Results of this study indicate that students’ perceptions of enjoyment were lower in fitness testing classes compared to PE in general. Additionally, students perceived lower levels of cognitive anxiety and higher levels of somatic anxiety in fitness testing classes than in general PE. It is noteworthy that students might not significantly dislike fitness testing per se but instead have significantly more positive affects towards PE in general. Generally, practitioners conducting fitness testing lessons are encouraged to embrace different strategies such as fostering basic psychological needs or promoting mastery climate to facilitate enjoyment and diminish anxiety.     

The Strategic Challenge of Continuous Change in Multi-Platform Media Organizations—A Strategy-as-Practice Perspective

This article focuses on the complexities of managing multi-platform strategies in the complex and highly dynamic environments of contemporary media markets. Based on a comparative case study of two Nordic media organizations, the article identifies and articulates two sets of practices through which strategy is managed in the continuously changing print and online environments. While the practices that guide strategy development of print publishing tend to be content driven, brand constrained, commercially steered, and top-down monitored, strategizing for online platforms tends to be more technology driven, brand inspired, interactive, and entrepreneurial. For multi-platform media organizations this type of situation is challenging because the incremental and radical innovations that they pursue are platform specific, instead of aiming at exploitation and exploration on both platforms. To succeed in the market, the article argues, multi-platform media organizations need to develop strategies and organizational practices that allow them to be truly ambidextrous—to pursue both incremental and radical change—on all platforms.     

General and special education teachers’ knowledge about reading comprehension processes and instructional practices

Reading and Writing - The study investigated teachers’ knowledge of reading comprehension processes and reading comprehension instruction. The study was carried out among teachers...     

Accessing the Audience Community: How Newspapers Connect with Audience Communities in Finland,Japan, and Korea

The article contributes to the research on media management by approaching the audience as consisting of communities, instead of considering it a mass audience. By developing audience community as a concept in media management and audience research and investigating mainstream newspapers’ perceptions and practices of audience community relations, the study aims to provide a future outlook for the changing community nature of audiences. Newspaper organizations are starting to perceive the audience as a more concrete network of people, and journalistic processes can increasingly consist of generating platforms and practices for communication and communal activities with and among the audience. In the article, these processes are studied empirically by means of a qualitative study carried out in Finnish, Japanese, and Korean newspapers. Interestingly, the findings indicate that audience communities do not, after all, play an important role in the daily practices of the newspapers. The engagement with audience communities in social media is only occasional, intermittent, and by no means systematic. By contrast, interaction with offline communities seems to be more familiar and considered more valuable than connecting with audience communities in social media.     

Economic globalization: which side are we on?

Economic globalization is a powerful force which changes the relationship between markets and states, and places the world economy ahead of national economies. In this article, I explore the globalization doctrine and describe the impact of economic globalization on Canada. I suggest a role for university adult educators and call for university extension and continuing education staff to become more vocal in their opposition to inequality.     

Capturing teacher students’ emotional experiences in context: does inquiry-based learning make a difference?

In the present study teacher students?? contextual learning experiences were examined longitudinally in authentic study environments using the contextual activity sampling system, a means of mobile-supported experience sampling. The students?? (n?=?9) experiences were first recorded during a 2?week period in their first year of study. The same measurements were repeated again for a 2?week follow-up in the second year, accompanied by interviews before and after the follow-up. The first year of study consisted mostly of lectures and ordinary small-group work, whereas the second measurement period ran parallel to the completion of an intensive inquiry-based project, which was the focus of the present study. A multivariate analysis of variance revealed that studying during the inquiry-based period produced stronger experiences of being challenged as well as negative affects than the teacher-centered period. The participants?? experiences of competence, commitment and positive affects did not differ during the two periods. However, interview data indicated that the participants enjoyed the inquiry-based period and that the work was intensive. Contextual data and interviews were also used to describe students?? experiences during one particular study session during the inquiry-based project. The results suggest that negative affects may be an essential part of the process of gradually learning to take responsibility for both individual and collaborative learning processes. Possibilities for using experience-sampling methods to analyze collaborative learning are also discussed.     

Northern Youth under the Siege of Educational Policy Change: Comparing youth's educational opinions in Finland,Sweden, Spain,Portugal and Australia

The question posed in this article is how differences between the five countries in the organisation of social policy and education are related to the educational opinions of the youth. In short, what we are dealing with here is how and to what extent social structures, ideologies and norms are transmitted to the level of attitudes. The theoretical framework used in the analysis is the welfare state typology by Esping-Andersen. Practically identical data sets were gathered approximately simultaneously in Australia, Finland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, during January and February 2000. The youths were 15-16 years of age, in the last grade of obligatory education. For the piece of research introduced in this article, five variables and three background variables were chosen. The final pooled data file had 3008 cases (Finland 567, Sweden 413, Spain 788, Portugal 605 and Australia 635). Generally the educational opinions of the youth differed quite clearly along the lines of welfare state regime, although not in every case in the way expected. As the representative of the liberal welfare state mode, Australia clearly differed from the rest of the countries, especially concerning the competitiveness of pupils.     

The (bio)politicization of neuroscience in Australian early years policies: fostering brain-resources as human capital

Abstract

At the present, human capital theory (HCT) and neuroscience reasoning are dominant frameworks in early childhood education and care (ECEC) worldwide. Popular since the 1960s, HCT has provided an economic understanding of human beings and offered strategies to manage the population with the promise of bringing improvements to nations. Neuroscience arguments added new ways to regulate human beings, and thus another ‘hopeful ethos’ and investment into the future. In this paper, we examine different positive, life-improving, and hopeful takes on early childhood as forms of biopolitical government, which are closely related to the enhancement of individual capacities and the shifting problems of the neoliberal state. Curiously, this process, grounded on biological fatalism and naturalizing arguments, has led to new class categorizations and ways of social discrimination. We hence argue that even though a ‘hopeful ethos’ is offered through the (bio)politicization of neurosciences, it has led to eugenic arguments by re-inscribing social and economic differences into differences in brain architecture. Finally, we aim to demonstrate that ECEC policy offers an example of how current policies govern through scientific evidence and softer forms of ‘government by example’, at the same time moving the government of population into the home, and with that privatizing and personalizing self-investment.