How to Foster Toddlers' Mental‐State Talk,Emotion Understanding,and Prosocial Behavior: A Conversation‐Based Intervention at Nursery School

Recent years have seen the development and implementation of a range of training programs aimed at improving children's socio‐emotional skills. Nevertheless, few studies have been conducted with toddlers attending nursery school. In this study, we adopted observational and experimental paradigms to examine the efficacy of an intervention based on conversing about emotions with small groups of 2‐ to 3‐year‐old children. The intervention was designed to promote toddlers' mental‐state talk, emotion understanding (EU), and prosocial behavior. The training group significantly outperformed the control group in the use of mental‐state language, especially emotional‐state lexicon, EU, and prosocial behavior toward peers. There was also a significant Group × Age interaction, with the older training group participants displaying greater gains in EU than the younger ones. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.     

Analysing International Student Mobility Flows in Higher Education: A Comparative Study on European Countries

The analysis of the factors pulling and pushing students in a foreign country to complete their higher education is key for the implementation of university policies aimed at increasing the number of credits gained by students abroad and hence the degree of internationalisation of institutions. Consistent with previous studies, the present contribution examines the roles played by countries in the Erasmus student mobility flows by considering a joint strategy of analysis based on social network analysis and exploratory data analysis. First, data on Erasmus student exchanges among countries are gathered at macro-level from the European Union Open Data Portal and network data structures are analysed. Second, educational indicators from the Eurostat website are collected to describe the investments in higher education. The main findings suggest the presence of a core-periphery configuration in the student mobility network with few central countries in which the economic benefits and the investments in education seem to act as key elements for university attractiveness.

     

The Never‐ending Shift: A feminist reflection on living and organizing academic lives during the coronavirus pandemic

This article offers a feminist reflection written as a nocturnal stream of consciousness exposing the embodied, emotional and professional experience of living and working during a pandemic outbreak. Framed within a feminist approach, this personal narrative provides an example of the effects of such unexpected and unprecedented circumstances on personal and professional academic lives. Developed during the first stage of the (inter)national coronavirus pandemic, my reflections address issues of privilege; emotional labour; the virtual invasion of the home space within the current increasingly ambiguous space of ‘the workplace'; workload; and wellbeing. Further, I consider how the newly enforced flexible work measures based on online tools have turned current work–life dynamics into a ‘Never‐ending Shift'.     

Breadth of Vocational Interests: The Role of Career Adaptability and Future Orientation

The authors examined the relationship between career adaptability, future orientation, and vocational interests. Specifically, they tested the role of career adaptability and future orientation in promoting a broader range of vocational interests, based on the principle that experiencing more interests can be useful in giving one's best in multiple occupations and in planning a broad range of career goals. A total of 762 Italian adolescents (383 males, 379 females) participated in the study. Results highlight the mediating role of future orientation in the relationship between 4 career adaptability resources and breadth of vocational interests. These results underscore that specific interventions in career adaptability and future orientation may foster a broader range of vocational interests, providing more opportunity for adolescents to respond to the demands of the current job market.     

Rural tourism and livelihood strategies in Romania

Substantial changes in the Romanian countryside accompanied by the need for more robust economic activities have caused some families to turn to tourism as an economic diversification strategy. A qualitative study of selected rural tourism entrepreneurs indicates positive experiences, both economically and in other aspects of their lives. However, the development of rural tourism is highly uneven spatially and the Romanian Government should act more incisively to support families establishing guesthouses.     

“The More You Gesture,the Less I Gesture”: Co-Speech Gestures as a Measure of Mental Model Quality

Studies in the literature have revealed that a speaker’s co-speech gestures favor the construction of a complete and articulated mental model of the discourse by the listener; moreover, from the literature on co-speech gestures we know that they help the speaker to organize the stream of thought. Given these data, we hypothesized that a person who listens to a discourse accompanied by gestures would produce fewer co-speech gestures in recollecting the discourse compared to a person who listens to a discourse not accompanied by gestures. The analysis of the co-speech gestures produced by the participants in two experiments while recollecting the content of a discourse confirmed our predictions.     

Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Input Demand Models with Fixed Costs of Adjustment

Traditional models of input demand rely upon convex and symmetric adjustment costs. However, the fortune of this highly restrictive approach is due more to analytical convenience than to empirical relevance. In this note we examine the model under more realistic hypothesis of fixed costs, show that it can be cast in the form of a Double Censored Random Effect Tobit Model, derive its likelihood function, and finally evaluate the performance of the ML estimators through a Monte Carlo experiment. The performances, although strongly dependent on the degree of censoring, appear to be promising.     

Monte Carlo co-ordinate ascent variational inference

Statistics and Computing - In variational inference (VI), coordinate-ascent and gradient-based approaches are two major types of algorithms for approximating difficult-to-compute probability...     

Socio-educational work in at-risk contexts and professional reflexivity: the multi-vision group of “Maestri di Strada”

ABSTRACT

The Association ‘Maestri di Strada’ (MdS) undertakes socio-educational interventions to promote the well-being of young people in the ‘high-risk’ suburbs of Naples. The socio-educational work is not a mere ‘technical-rational’ activity and it relies on the use of ‘self’, which is not an unlimited resource. MdS places great emphasis upon reflexivity after the action and adopts the ‘Multi-Vision Group’ (MVG), which is a modified Balint group, as a support mechanism for its staff. Before trainees begin working, they attend the MVGs, observe them, and provide narrative accounts of the process. In this study, 61 reports prepared by the trainees during an academic year underwent a textual analysis. The aim was to evaluate the reflexive function of the group and the results indicate that, within the MVG, the practitioners express emotions, doubts, and difficulties linked to the job and its high-risk contexts. They show both self-awareness and awareness of the importance of the team, thinking as a community in a cooperative way. These are features related to reflexivity, which is recognised as being crucial for practice; the process of observation and recording also has a high educational importance for the trainees and social work students.