Mother-infant interactive play: theory and practical application

Mother-infant interactive play during the first 18 months of life is discussed in terms of its genesis, development, character, and function. Interactive play is considered as an “organizer” which reflects four interrelated lines of development. It is further regarded as a prototype for the infant's negotiations with the world at large, a precursor of representational play, and a foundation for developing a sense of mastery and competence as well as ego strength and self-esteem. Specific interactive play patterns (including father-infant play) are described within the context of physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development. The mother's multifaceted role in interactive play is described in accordance with the developmental stages, as the infant moves from a dependent, receptive mode to an active, initiating position. Interactive play is also considered as a window through which one can observe maladaptive as well as adaptive patterns. The conceptual framework for understanding interactive play suggests a number of practical applications.     

Outdoor-based play and reconnection to nature: a neglected pathway to positive youth development

Throughout history, outdoor-based play and the connection to nature have been recognized as important contributors to a happy life and healthy development. At times, however, play and nature have been neglected and viewed as frivolous and wasteful. In the early twentieth century, the first play movement took place to get children out of the factories and back outdoors to play. Now, a century later, factors including twenty-four-hour media,stranger danger, and overscheduling of children's time have resulted in a level of play deprivation that is contributing to a host of social, emotional, and physical problems. This article draws on recent research that shows that as many as 40 percent of America's schools have eliminated or significantly reduced recess. Also, children and adolescents are spending an average of fifty-three hours each week in front of screen media, and only 31 percent of mothers report that their children play outside as frequently as they did as children. The deficits in outdoor-based play that arise from these lifestyles have resulted in significant increases in emotional and psychological disorders, decreased capacity to deal with stressors, and decreased physical fitness. This article describes specific organizations and programs that address the problem of play deprivation and reconnection to the outdoors.     

Playing work,or gamification as stultification

ABSTRACT

The contrast between work and play as activities collapses if play is seen, following anthropologist Thomas Malaby, as a disposition towards the indeterminate. Once play is positioned as a state of mind, activities that constitute work need not be disjunct from playful behavior. Yet for most workers, work is rarely if ever playful, and attempts to import play behavior into the workplace (‘gamification’) do not result in greater playfulness. Part of this problem results from specific aesthetic values for games having dominated both work and play. As Roger Caillois warned half a century ago, sport-like values have increasingly saturated the culture of the overdeveloped world. Meanwhile, gamification processes have only been able to export task-focussed reward structures from the domain of play – practices that descend from Dungeons & Dragons, but that have been denuded of their playful qualities. In parallel to the gamification of work has been the gamification of games, namely an increasing emphasis on tasks to structure video game play (e.g., achievements), and thus make them more compelling yet less playful. In so much as this entails forcing particular patterns of understanding onto both players and workers, this makes gamification a parallel to Jacques Rancière's stultification in education: a binding of wills instead of an emancipation. If we want a world where work could be more playful, we must begin by breaking the cultural dominance of sport-like and task-like aesthetics of play, and endeavour to overcome the underlying fears that prevent work from being played.     

Children's Perceptions of Choice in Relation to their Play at Home,in the School Playground and at The Out‐of‐School Club

Choice is often presented as a defining feature of play and it has been argued that a perception of choice contributes to the developmental potential of play. This paper investigates children's self‐recorded levels of choice during play across three contexts—the home, the school playground and the out‐of‐school club. Children recorded their play activities across contexts using a structured diary technique. Findings based on 401 reported play episodes indicated that choice varied across contexts, according to the number of children involved and whether or not an adult was present. The findings are discussed in relation to theory, policy and professional practice.     

Playful organisations: Undecidability as a scarce resource

This article explores how organisational play becomes a managerial tool to increase and benefit from undecidability. The article draws on Niklas Luhmann's concept of decision and on Gregory Bateson's theory of play to create a conceptual framework for analysing the relation between decision and undecidability. With an empirical point of departure in Danish public school policy and two concrete examples of games utilised in school development, the article analyses how play is a way for organisations to simultaneously decide and also avoid making a decision, thus keeping flexibility and possibilities intact. In its final sections, the article discusses what happens to conditions of decision-making when organisations do not just see undecidability as a given condition, but as a limited resource indispensable for change and renewal. The article advances discussions of organisational play by exploring the consequences play has for the very conditions of organising and for key concepts in organisation theory.     

ASOBI IN ACTION

In the past 30 years, play (asobi) has become the subject of a heated ideological debate in urban Japan, reflecting processes of cultural transformation. During these years, a late consumer culture characterized by an incessant pursuit of playlike hedonistic pleasures has reached its apotheosis within a conservative social context that maintains high levels of conformity and prioritizes production. It is against the background of these sociocultural dynamics that the cultural conceptualization and appreciation of play have been negotiated between play as a subsidiary activity complementary to work life, confined within boundaries, and play as a phenomenon of greatest personal significance, hardly constrained by time or space. These dialectics have influenced collective imaginaries, transforming play into a symbolic activity through which people can experience and reproduce cultural rhetoric about social distinctions, values and priorities.     

No Small Change: Process‐Oriented Play Therapy For Children of Separating Parents

This article looks at a process‐oriented play therapy for children adversely affected by parental separation. Process‐oriented play therapy is a therapeutic method that involves the therapist directly entering the ‘world of play’ with the child, by amplifying various modes of expression and helping underlying meaning to emerge, in order to help children access aspects of their life they feel they have no say in. One particular case has been used as an example, involving ‘Jim’ (pseudonym) and his mother, who attended the play therapy session.     

浅谈企业如何发挥效能监察

针对效能监察工作在现代企业建设步伐中发挥的重要作用,就如何更好地发挥效能监察的作用,提高市场竞争能力,进行了一些探讨。     

Towards Greater Recognition of the Right to Play: An Analysis of Article 31 of the UNCRC

Children’s right to play is formally enshrined in Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). However, few research studies have explored children’s experiences of play from an explicit rights‐based perspective. Using children’s views to illustrate the multi‐dimensional relationship Article 31 holds with other key children’s rights, this article shows how a rights‐based classification of play emphasises issues such as freedom, safety, choice and inclusion. The article highlights the fact that while Article 31 has provided an impetus for play policies throughout the UK, these have not been developed from an explicit rights‐based perspective. The article concludes by suggesting that the Committee on the Rights of the Child could take a greater lead on this issue through more robust monitoring and enforcement of Article 31.     

Using role plays in teaching and assessing family therapy skills

This report describes the adaptation of the microteaching model for the teaching of family therapy skills, and a method of assessing students' skill mastery by viewing videotaped role plays prepared as a formal assignment. Criteria for skills and instructions for making the tape are given. Problems encountered by a class of 14 students as they carried out the novel assignment included high anxiety and lapses into inauthentic behaviour on the part of the role play family members.

Assessments based on the prerecorded role plays were judged reliable, as the staff members' marks agreed highly and the students' ratings of an increase in confidence also correlated significantly with their marks. The relationship between role play scores and marks on a more traditional essay assignment suggested three types of students: those whose pair of grades were equal in being very high or very low, inexperienced students who worked hard to prepare for the taping and gained most from making them, but still scored lower on the role plays than on the essays, and students with prior role playing experience who performed better than they wrote.

Nine of the 14 students regarded the role play assignment as a better learning experience, 1 regarded the essay as more educational, and 4 valued the assignments equally. This, plus the general increase in confidence to use family therapy skills as a result of preparing the role plays, indicated the potential of the videotaped role play as an educational as well as an assessment device.     

Church organists: Analysing their willingness to play

There currently exists a scarcity of church organ players even though they have traditionally been paid. This paper presents an empirical investigation into the factors that affect the church organ player's willingness to play. Results suggest pay does not attract the organ player to the position but being paid in situ increases their willingness to play, as do larger choir sizes and a better instrument quality. We also identify that organ players should be taught when they are young, as the younger the church organ player starts learning the instrument then the greater their willingness to play.     

Task‐to‐Task Vagal Regulation: Relations With Language and Play in 20‐Month‐Old Children

In this article we report patterns of task‐to‐task vagal tone change across multiple language and play tasks as well as associations between these patterns of task‐to‐task vagal tone change and language and play performance in 20‐month‐old girls and boys. Although initially different in vagal tone suppression during solitary play, girls and boys exhibited similar group patterns of vagal reengagement during successive language and play tasks with their mothers and with an experimenter. In terms of individual differences, vagal suppression during solitary play and vagal reengagement during social interactive tasks predicted language and play performance. Gender differences emerged in patterns of predictive relations: Task‐to‐task vagal changes predicted primarily play performance in girls and language performance in boys. These findings expose the effects of social context on directional changes in task‐to‐task vagal tone and speak to the functional role of appropriate vagal regulation in young children's language and play performance.     

Building a Clinically Relevant Picture of Attachment from Case Study Observations in a Parent-Infant Play Group

Differences in security of attachment are manifested in, and observable in, multiple everyday environments. Thus, a parent-infant play group suggests a potential setting for the assessment of attachment security and how it manifests itself in dyadic affective and behavioral interaction. Such assessments would enhance clinical understanding of the functions served by the relationship, as well as provide information relevant for targeted early intervention. This article describes an assessment process based on building a clinical picture from ongoing observation in a parent-infant weekly play group, and illustrates the process via a clinical case study of interactions observed between four mothers and their toddlers, with a particular focus on the affective qualities observed between mother and baby as these toddlers went about their play in a highly supportive, non-stressful environment. Dyads distinguished by differences in attachment security, as measured by the Deane and Waters (1985) attachment security Q-sort, were also distinguishable in patterns of emotional interchange during play. The important role that the attachment relationship has in helping the infant to organize and apply energy and emerging abilities to the world of play are clearly evident in these case studies. Such information should be useful to clinicians and early interventionists as they assess the meaning of attachment relationships within the contexts of the everyday environments of toddlers and their families.     

Animal Abuse as Dirty Play

Animal abuse by children is generally regarded as an impulsive psychological act without instrumental benefit. This research takes a sociological approach to the topic, exploring the deliberate harm of animals as a particular kind of unsavory or dirty play that is part of adolescent socialization. Interviews were conducted with twenty‐five college undergraduate students who admitted to abusing animals earlier in their lives. Respondents considered their prior acts a form of everyday play having serious and thrilling overtones. At a deeper level, their abuse was an extraordinary form of play in that they also were appropriating adult culture. Because their appropriations stemmed from a wider culture racked with inconsistencies about the proper treatment of animals, respondents' presentations of self were split between those who no longer spoke of abuse as fun and admonished themselves for having done this and those who still clung to the idea that harming animals was fun and were seemingly untroubled by their former acts.     

Playing at work: Understanding the Future of Work Practices at the Institute for the Future

This paper analyses the latest management assumptions and theories of playing at work, by examining how management strategies, especially relating to new media, invoke elements of play to create distinct and competing genres of discourse. After a brief overview of the latest management crisis of innovation, we will provide a few definitions of play, followed by a short summary of where play and other competing dialogues converge and overlap at worksites historically. This context will then enable us to present an ethnographic account of play at work at a non-profit forecast research firm known as the Institute for the Future, a site where notions of play are linked to a number of business and cultural discourses about the future of new media and presented in full relief. What we find is that while elements of play exist, the discourses that arise from it do not necessarily belong in the realm of play at all. Instead, notions of play at work are tied to wider historical frameworks acknowledging earlier 1960s American counter-cultural appeals for new values in management and worker self-actualization, and linked to a process for transforming that renewed impulse into the service of a networked economy in the 1990s.     

The Impression Management Techniques of the Burlesque Comedian

This discussion is an in-depth study of burlesque comics. The basic argument is that burlesque comics, like other marginal members of society, manipulate their behaviour so as to present a more favourable self-image than the one in play in negative stereotypes. They have a detailed knowledge of the social sexual norms of the more conventional members of society and use this knowledge alternately to pass as respectable citizens and to play the role of comic in the burlesque performance.     

Gender role orientation and gaming behavior revisited: examining mediated and moderated effects

The article presents results of a study that examined the influence of gender role orientations on gaming motivations, game genre preferences, and different play styles. Applying social role theory, it was hypothesized that femininity and masculinity influence gender-typed motivations (social interaction, competition, and challenge) and preferences (role-playing and action games) as well as gender-typed behavior (cooperative play and competitive play). After collecting empirical data through an online survey, hypotheses were tested by structural equation modeling. Moreover, moderating effects of sociodemographic characteristics (biological gender, age, and educational level) were examined. Findings provide evidence for the existence of gender-typed motives of play, genre preferences, and – mediated by motivations and preferences – gaming behavior. Group analyses support a biosocial model of gender-typed gaming behavior because gender-typing of motives, preferences, and play styles varies in strength and direction by biological gender, age, and educational level.     

On the adjudication of conflicting claims: an experimental study

This paper reports an experimental study on three well-known solutions for problems of adjudicating conflicting claims: the constrained equal awards, the proportional, and the constrained equal losses rules. We first let subjects play three games designed such that the unique equilibrium allocation coincides with the recommendation of one of these three rules. In addition, we let subjects play an additional game that has the property that all (and only) strategy profiles in which players coordinate on the same rule constitute a strict Nash equilibrium. While in the first three games subjects’ play easily converges to the unique equilibrium rule, in the last game the proportional rule overwhelmingly prevails as a coordination device, especially when we frame the game as an hypothetical bankruptcy situation. We also administered a questionnaire to a different group of students, asking them to act as impartial arbitrators to solve (among others) the same problems played in the lab. Also in this case, respondents were sensitive to the framing of the questions, but the proportional rule was selected by the vast majority of respondents.     

Correlates and Predictors of Lottery Play in the United Kingdom

Previous studies of lottery play have tended to adopt one particular approach, concentrating on demographic, personality, cognitive, or social aspects of play. Using the recently introduced United Kingdom National Lottery, this study investigated variables associated with all of these approaches within an overall integrative framework. In a community sample (N = 160), Lottery play was positively correlated with friends' Lottery play, Instants Lottery play, frequency of other gambling, and misunderstanding of Lottery probability, and negatively correlated with level of education. In a regression analysis, friends' Lottery play, Instants Lottery play, and education level were significant unique predictors of Lottery play, and a combination of these and other variables accounted for 38% of the variance in playing behavior. The results are discussed predominantly in terms of the nature of lotteries as a social activity.     

The Play‐Learning Binary: U.S. Parents’ Perceptions on Preschool Play in a Neoliberal Age

Although many studies have examined parental decision‐making patterns in regard to early childhood care and education, few studies have examined how parents’ perceptions on play influence those patterns. This study explores parental perceptions regarding play in early education and the broader socioeconomic context within which these perceptions emerge. Twenty parents of preschool‐aged children completed questionnaires comprised of ratings and open‐ended questions. Findings indicate that the parents in this study defined play and learning in binary terms as opposed to mutually constitutive processes. Subsequently, while parents rated play as important, they also described it as peripheral to, and less important than, the acquisition of literacy and numeracy skills. This study argues that this binary thinking is an outgrowth of neoliberalism and ultimately undermines child well‐being.