Looking on the bright side: children's knowledge about the benefits of positive versus negative thinking

Five- to 10-year-olds (N = 90) listened to 6 illustrated scenarios featuring 2 characters that jointly experience the same positive event (and feel good), negative event (and feel bad), or ambiguous event (and feel okay). Afterward, one character thinks a positive thought and the other thinks a negative thought. Children predicted and explained each character's emotions. Results showed significant development between 5 and 10 years in children's understanding that thinking positively improves emotions and thinking negatively makes one feel worse, with earliest knowledge demonstrated when reasoning about ambiguous and positive events. Individual differences in child and parental optimism and hope predicted children's knowledge about thought-emotion connections on some measures, including their beliefs about the emotional benefits of thinking positively in negative situations.     

What is the Problem of Ad Hoc Hypotheses?

The received view of an ad hochypothesis is that it accounts for only the observation(s) it was designed to account for, and so non-ad hocness is generally held to be necessary or important for an introduced hypothesis or modification to a theory. Attempts by Popper and several others to convincingly explicate this view, however, prove to be unsuccessful or of doubtful value, and familiar and firmer criteria for evaluating the hypotheses or modified theories so classified are characteristically available. These points are obscured largely because the received view fails to adequately separate psychology from methodology or to recognise ambiguities in the use of 'ad hoc_'.     

A Social Capital Approach to the Analysis of Continuing Education: Evidence from the UK Learning Society research programme

The paper reports from one of the projects of the Economic and Social Research Council's Learning Society Research programme. The project compared initial and continuing education in Scotland and Northern Ireland, in both cases relating these to performance in England. This paper presents results from the fieldwork in Scotland, involving focus groups and individual interviews in a number of economic sectors. It discusses the use of social capital as a central concept in the research, which led to a focus on the nature of relationships between stakeholders: providers of education and training, employers, the state, the community and professional bodies.     

Parents' Evaluation of an Educational Psychology Service

An evaluation of parents' views of an Educational Psychology Service was carried out using a questionnaire survey and follow-up telephone interviews. The most satisfaction was expressed for the pre-school, early years services and child guidance support where a statement was not involved. Parents found it helpful to learn alternative ways to interpret behaviour from understanding professionals. They were less satisfied with statutory assessments of their older children already attending school. The main sources of dissatisfaction were the lack of communication with and involvement of parents in the course of the assessments, the length of time it took to decide on an assessment and the time taken to collect the relevant reports to draw up a statement. Implications for practice are discussed.     

Optimism and Wishful Thinking: Consistency Across Populations in Children’s Expectations for the Future

Two studies investigated 5- to 10-year-olds’ (N = 194) positivity bias when forecasting the future. Children from two geographic locations (mostly Caucasian, higher income college town; mostly African American, lower income urban community) completed a future expectations task (FET). For multiple scenarios, children predicted whether a positive versus negative (optimism items) or a positive versus extraordinary positive (wishful thinking items) outcome would occur, including its likelihood. In both samples, optimism and wishful thinking decreased with age, optimism was higher than wishful thinking, children did not show a comparative self-optimism bias, and individual differences in the FET optimism score correlated with self-reported dispositional optimism and hope. Exploratory comparisons revealed between-sample equivalence in responses to all measures, except for less tempered wishful thinking in the urban community.     

Occupational health nurses' perceptions of their education and training needs to meet the new public health agenda using the nominal group technique

This was a study to collect the views of Occupational Health Nurses (OHNs) working in the NHS in the West Midlands Region of the UK. It was a project to collect OHNs' perceptions about their education and training needs to meet the new public health agenda, using a focus group technique, Nominal Group Technique (NGT). There has been a series of public policy developments recently that have focused on the work/health dimension as an element of public health (Health and Safety Executive (HSE) 1998, Department of Health (DOH), 1998, National Health Service Executive (NHSE) 1998). These initiatives require the expertise and skill of occupational health professionals in the workplace to deliver care. In many organizations occupational health is not seen as a central or integral part of the organizational structure, rather a service to be used when things go dreadfully wrong. There is a clear need for management skills in this group, together with a much stronger grounding in law and the legislative framework. There is a need to take an evidence-based approach to occupational health, and to start sharing expert knowledge that can be applied to daily working in the NHS. It was identified that clarity around funding arrangements is necessary for this group of practitioners, which will be in line with all other NHS employees. Many of the participants wanted education and training opportunities, which were offered on an incremental basis, not all at specialist practitioner level.