Scared to Death: Reflections on Panic and Anxiety in the Field

This paper examines reflections about researcher emotions and the experience of having panic attacks and panic disorder as a result of fieldwork. Anxiety and panic are sparsely discussed in methodological appendices and handbooks about qualitative research, and the embodiment of mental health in the field has received even less attention. I have two aims in the paper: to describe the experience of panic attacks and to open a discussion about panic and anxiety attacks in the field. The failure to address mental health problems as a result of fieldwork can negatively impact expert and fledgling ethnographers, and should be remedied.     

Anger as a Frequent Factor in Custody Evaluation Complaints to Boards of Psychology

In order to provide the highest quality services when court-ordered to do child custody evaluations, it is important for mental health professionals, particularly psychologists who do psychological testing, to be clear about the ethical requirements associated with the child custody evaluation process. They should be impartial, thorough, and competent focusing on the best interest of the child. Mental health professionals have been accused of unethical and illegal behavior when doing such evaluations, in part, due to the anger associated with the outcome and/or the process. The ethical issues most associated with licensing board and ethics committee complaints and civil lawsuits focus on bias, informed consent, lack of symmetry, timeliness, finances, confidentiality, negligence, chemical dependency, multiple relationships, and failure to report/omissions.     

Dynamic Choice, Independence and Emotions

From the viewpoint of the independence axiom of expected utility theory, an interesting empirical dynamic choice problem involves the presence of a “global risk,” that is, a chance of losing everything whichever safe or risky option is chosen. In this experimental study, participants have to allocate real money between a safe and a risky project. Treatment variable is the particular decision stage at which a global risk is resolved: (i) before the investment decision; (ii) after the investment decision, but before the resolution of the decision risk; (iii) after the resolution of the decision risk. The baseline treatment is without global risk. Our goal is to investigate the isolation effect and the principle of timing independence under the different timing options of the global risk. In addition, we examine the role played by anticipated and experienced emotions in the choice problem. Main findings are a violation of the isolation effect, and support for the principle of timing independence. Although behavior across the different global risk cases shows similarities, we observe clear differences in people’s affective responses. This may be responsible for the conflicting results observed in earlier experiments. Dependent on the timing of the global risk different combinations of anticipated and experienced emotions influence decision making.      

Cheong: The Socioemotional Grammar of Koreans

Based on the replies of 36 Korean university students, we analyzed the structural properties that underpin the culture-bound concept of Cheong. Cheong embodies the emotional links among individuals connected to each other by feelings of we-ness and exhibiting the humanistic side of their selves. It is concluded that Western models of the nature of persons and of social relationships are insufficient to account for the socioemotional characteristics of Koreans.     

Gender,emotions and fly‐in fly‐out work

This paper explores the emotional life of fly‐in fly‐out (FIFO) workers and their families, through an analysis of more than 500 postings made on an online chat forum for mining families. Building on literature on fly‐in fly‐out workers and understandings of emotions as socially constructed, analysis shows how posters to the forum, typically women whose male partners are FIFO workers, construct gendered emotional identities for their partners (sometimes referred to as ‘Mr Miner’), and for themselves, as ‘mining women’, ‘mining widows’ or the ‘mining missus’. Inherent in the creation of gendered emotional subject positions is the process of women undertaking emotion work on and behalf of themselves, their male partners and their children. The findings demonstrate the overarching normative dimensions of women's emotional self‐transformations in the service of their mining partners' careers and the attendant reproduction of everyday patriarchal relations in the private lives of mining families.     

The impact of a child protection investigation: a personal reflective account

Researchers who undertake parental perception studies agree that the views of the parents can offer valuable insights in relation to child protection work. Respondents to such studies and others who have shared their experiences of child protection investigations are usually mothers. Taken together, this body of work sheds light on some very private, emotive and often painful experiences of child protection intervention and its impact. This article lends my voice to this literature and gives further insight into the ways a mother can experience a child protection investigation. Drawing upon one incident – a swelling on a baby's head – this article draws attention to my feelings and emotions as the baby's mother. Despite a co‐operative social worker–client relationship and case closure, my analysis draws attention to issues concerning power imbalances and the concept of ‘secondary victimization’ to explain the awfulness of my experience and my convoluted emotional disquiet. The article proposes that more attention is directed to the negative feelings and emotions experienced during the investigative process through further research.     

Natural Hazards and Motivation for Mitigation Behavior: People Cannot Predict the Affect Evoked by a Severe Flood

Past research indicates that personal flood experience is an important factor in motivating mitigation behavior. It is not fully clear, however, why such experience is so important. This study tested the hypothesis that people without flooding experience underestimate the negative affect evoked by such an event. People who were affected by a severe recent flood disaster were compared with people who were not affected, but who also lived in flood-prone areas. Face-to-face interviews with open and closed questions were conducted ( n = 201). Results suggest that people without flood experience envisaged the consequences of a flood differently from people who had actually experienced severe losses due to a flood. People who were not affected strongly underestimated the negative affect associated with a flood. Based on the results, it can be concluded that risk communication must not focus solely on technical aspects; in order to trigger motivation for mitigation behavior, successful communication must also help people to envisage the negative emotional consequences of natural disasters.     

Kicking someone in cyberspace when they are down: Testing the role of stressor evoked emotions on exposure to workplace cyberbullying

ABSTRACT

New technologies at work broaden the scope of bullying behaviours to the online context, creating opportunities for a new form of bullying to arise – workplace cyberbullying. So far, knowledge on the factors contributing to workplace cyberbullying has been lacking. Within this emerging research line, the Emotion Reaction model, specifically focused on workplace cyberbullying, was put forward. In this study, we test the model’s main proposition regarding exposure to workplace cyberbullying; namely, that stressors evoked emotions predict exposure to cyberbullying and that this relation is moderated by emotion regulation strategies. The model was tested in two steps. First, the model as a whole was tested cross-sectionally. Next, the direction of causality between fear and sadness and exposure to cyberbullying was tested using a cross-lagged panel design. The results provide support for the central role of fear and sadness in the relationship between work stressors and cyberbullying exposure and the moderating role of reappraisal. No moderating effect of suppression was observed. In addition, support is found for the causal claim that fear and sadness predict cyberbullying exposure. The results and their implications are discussed.     

论《词源》中之骚雅

骚雅是中国词学批评史上的一个重要理论.在张炎的<词源>中,骚雅之义在于作品立意不忘天下之事,但在艺术上要出以比兴寄托,继承<离骚>芳草美人的传统,取曲而不取直,取温柔敦厚而不取强烈激切.<词源>中之骚雅共出现三次,可视为一种论词标准和审美理想.     

Reflective practice and learning from mistakes in social work student placement

ABSTRACT

Student placement is a fundamental component of social work education and an important space where to build critically self-reflective practitioners. Students learn from their reflection on their experience and their mistakes are a powerful opportunity to go behind the surface of events and understand the essence of the profession. This article will present some results from the analysis carried out on the reflective writing of a group of social work students who describe and reflect on the most significant mistakes they made in their field practice using a reflective framework developed for errors and failures. The main results of this experience are illustrated with special focus on the impact and on the emotions, the relationships with service users and the assessment of the cases. Students are often so concentrated on looking at their responsibility that they become almost blind to the systems and interactions that contribute to the negative outcomes of their actions. Social work education programs should emphasize the importance of structured reflective habits and promote the culture of responsibility instead of the ‘blame culture’, that is probably the strongest obstacle to learning from mistakes and preventing their repetition in the future.