Vocal and Facial Emotion Decoding Difficulties Relating to Social and Thought Problems: Highlighting Schizotypal Personality Disorder

Successful social interaction depends on the ability to decode emotion in the nonverbal behaviors of others. Because relationship difficulties are paramount in adolescents with schizotypal personality disorder (SPD), we predicted that adolescents with SPD would (1) make more emotion decoding errors than adolescents with other personality disorders (OPD) or non-psychiatric controls (NPC); and (2) exhibit more social and thought problems than OPD or NPC adolescents. Further, we predicted greater emotion decoding errors for all adolescents would relate to concurrent and future social problems, thought problems, and social reasoning deficits. SPD adolescents made more errors than OPD and NPC adolescents in decoding voices but not faces (except in specific emotion categories). For all adolescents, vocal errors correlated with greater social problems, and facial and vocal errors correlated with greater thought difficulties concurrently and a year later.     

‘So I Feel Like I'm Getting It and Then Sometimes I Think OK,No I'm Not’: Couple and Family Therapists Learning an Evidence‐Based Practice

This research concerns itself with the experiences of couple and family therapists (CFTs) learning about and using an evidence‐based practice (EBP). The engagement with EBP is growing across many aspects of the mental health and health care systems. The EBP model is now being applied in a broad range of health and human service systems, including mental and behavioural health care, social work, education, and criminal justice (Hunsley, 2007). The dialogue about the role of evidence‐based approaches in the practice of CFT and research literature is also evolving (Sexton et al., 2011; Sprenkle 2012 ). Interestingly, while the research delves into what are the best approaches with different populations and presenting issues, little research has explored the experience of CFTs themselves, particularly while learning an EBP. Using a phenomenological approach called interpretive phenomenological analysis (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009), this research explores the experiences of CFTs learning and using an EBP. The paper reports on key issues, challenges, and areas for CFTs, educators, and supervisors. As researchers, educators, administrators, policy makers, and CFTs struggle with what works best with which populations and how best to allocate resources, this research contributes to dialogues about how best to educate and support CFTs, and the complexity of doing research in real‐life settings.     

Parental voices on Individualized Education Programs: ‘Oh,IEP meeting tomorrow? Rum tonight!’

The Individualized Education Program (IEP) was developed as a part of US Public Law 94-142 related to educating students with disabilities. The aim of the IEP process was to ensure that educators and parents are involved in collaboratively creating a formalized plan for instruction that will address unique students’ needs. However, the IEP process has created unintended consequences such as depersonalized meetings, and a focus on paperwork and compliance rather than collaboration with parents. The parents interviewed in this study offered a number of recommendations on how to make both the process and the product of IEP meetings more meaningful.     

Sticky floors and glass ceilings in Latin America

We employ unconditional quantile-decomposition methods to analyze the gender wage gap (gwg) in the urban region of twelve Latin American countries. Using data from harmonized household surveys we decompose the gwg into an explained component (differences in human capital) and an unexplained component (different rates of return to human capital). We find evidence of sticky floors (larger gwg at the tenth percentile than at the median) and glass ceilings (larger gwg at the ninetieth percentile than at the median). The former are more frequent and their magnitude is generally larger. Working women are more educated than working men all along the wage distribution, which partially hides the ‘unexplained’ pay difference. Finally, we find that poorer countries and countries with more income inequality have higher gwg at the tenth percentile of the wage distribution. Richer countries and countries with lower inequality present larger gwg at the ninetieth percent of the wage distribution.     

The experiences of Burmese healthcare interpreters (Iam) in maternity services in Thailand

Background

Interpreters (lam in Thai) have been employed in maternity services in Thailand due to increasing numbers of Burmese women migrating to Thailand. Access to healthcare interpreters is crucial for health professionals and Burmese migrant women using Thai maternity services but no studies have examined the role of the lam.

Who owns the baby? A video ethnography of skin-to-skin contact after a caesarean section

Problem

Providing skin-to-skin contact in the operating theatre and recovery is challenging.

The social construction of a possible male gender bias is negatively impacting fathers in child welfare services: Hammering a square peg into a round hole

The social construction of gender dictates the masculine and feminine roles deemed appropriate within a society. Society has traditionally socially constructed women to be mothers and the primary parent, leaving fathers much too often on the sidelines of parenthood. For example, if a parent is a man, they have fewer rights than a parent who is a woman. Gender biases in society are insidious problems. Such biases can lead to the development of adverse attitudes, beliefs and unfair treatment of members of these groups by both individuals and social institutions. This paper will demonstrate the need to investigate the possibility of a systemic male gender bias in CWS. The paper will include the statement of the problem, the rationale and the framework of how gender is socially constructed to help in the understanding of how it negatively impacts fathers. Next will be a discussion of avoiding fathers at all six principle phases of CWS, the lack of parent programs specific to fathers, direction for future research and potential research implications for fathers, children and child welfare workers.