Managing patient aggression in healthcare: Initial testing of a communication accommodation theory intervention

Patient-perpetrated workplace violence (WPV) in healthcare is common. Although communication skills trainings are helpful, they may be strengthened by having a theoretical framework to improve replicability across contexts. This study developed and conducted an initial test of a training framed by Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) using longitudinal mixed-methods surveys of healthcare professionals in an American primary care clinic to increase their self-efficacy, patient cooperation, and use of CAT strategies to de-escalate patient aggression. Results of the intervention indicate that the CAT training significantly increased professionals’ efficacy and reported patient cooperation over time. Findings showed that those who reported using more of the five CAT strategies also reported situations that they were able to de-escalate effectively. This initial test of a CAT training to prevent WPV demonstrates promise for the applicability of CAT strategies to de-escalate patient aggression, and the need to scale and test these trainings in settings that experience high WPV levels.

Stepping up to Global Challenges (SGC): Empowering Students across the World

Stepping up to Global Challenges (SGC) aimed to provide students with opportunities for language practice through task-based learning activities and the use of digital platforms for interaction. Marketing students at the Polytechnic of Viseu, Portugal, collaborated with peers from Poland and Turkey, choosing an image on entrepreneurship and posting it on the SGC Facebook page to solicit comments from their own and other groups. This was one of the tasks assigned during the 2nd semester of 2019/20, under the constraints of COVID-19. We analyzed the students’ choices, main difficulties, and motivation to persist in learning and improving their skills to share knowledge with (inter)national peers.

Animals, foods, and household items—oh my! Evidence of 24-30-month-old children’s increasing flexibility in word learning from naturalistic data

At 18 months of age, children frequently generalize (and overgeneralize) novel objects’ labels by shape (Landau et al., 1988). However, data from laboratory studies using ostensive word-learning paradigms indicate that, by three years of age, children generalize the labels of novel objects depending on the objects’ perceptual characteristics and taxonomy (Lavin & Hall, 2001; Jones et al., 1991). The current study sought to document this shift in children’s word-learning strategies using naturalistic data. We tracked children’s vocabularies over a six-month period of time (between 24-30 months of age) and classified their known words according to perceptual organization of the object categories to which they refer (e.g., shape-based, material-based). Children’s vocabulary sizes and rates of growth varied in meaningful ways between types of object categories and between the superordinate categories (e.g., animals, toys) to which the object categories belong. Findings carry implications for two popular accounts of vocabulary acquisition.

Developing tolerance to eye contact in autism: A feasibility study with adults using behavioral, interview, and psychophysiological data

Many individuals with autism report that eye contact makes them stressed or uncomfortable. Besides expressing their right to respect for neurodiverse ways of nonverbal communication, some autistic individuals also express the wish to improve their capacity to tolerate eye contact. In the current study, five autistic adults completed a 21- to 28-day computerized program that combines psychoeducation with graduated exposure to eye contact through photos. Interview data, questionnaires, gaze patterns, and psychophysiological measures indexing stress and arousal (pupillary and galvanic skin response levels) were collected to monitor and evaluate outcomes. At intake, discomfort resulting from eye contact in everyday life was described as overwhelming and multifaceted. Post-training data showed that observed increases in eye contact were not happening at the expense of heightened arousal. These results provide information about the (complex) nature of eye gaze discomfort in autism while pointing toward promising techniques to increase discomfort tolerance.

Commitment to the truth or defensive stance? Political strategies in the Brexit contest

This paper analyses politicians’ selection of adverbs of certainty and extreme case formulations (ECFs) in both the 1975 Referendum and the Brexit (2016). This analysis helped discover if politicians in the 1975 Referendum and the Brexit: (a) framed a similar or different reality through their discourse choices and (b) used the same types of adverbs of certainty and ECFs and with the same frequency. For this purpose, we contrasted both the time (the 1975 Referendum vs. the Brexit) and the position (Anti-Europe vs. Pro-Europe). The corpus was made up of eight different recordings. Four of them were about the Brexit and four about the 1975 Referendum. In the case of the Brexit corpus, two recordings were Pro-Europe, two were Anti-Europe, and the same was in the case of the 1975 Referendum corpus.

Processing of party symbols and names predicts the results of 2019 Indian parliamentary election: Analysing psycholinguistic behavioural incongruency effects

The response time and accuracy of processing verbal and nonverbal stimuli may predict the desired outcome of an event. Few studies have examined the psycholinguistic evidence of the speed-accuracy trade-off in the processing of political information to predict the outcome of an election. Therefore, we analysed the perceptual time and accuracy of two major political party names: the Indian National Congress (INC) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and their respective symbols before the Indian election 2019. Our results demonstrated that the pre-election perceptual accuracy to party symbol and name was positively linear to the index of high proportional vote share of the winning party, BJP. The high response accuracy and time for the BJP name correlated with voters’ familiarity of it, thereby establishing a link between response results and parties’ vote shares.

The role of vocabulary knowledge on inference generation: A meta-analysis

Successful text comprehension results in a coherent mental model of the situation being described. To achieve this, the reader has to infer certain information by connecting parts of the text to their prior knowledge. An important construct involved in this process is vocabulary knowledge, usually divided into breadth and depth. We conducted a meta-analysis on 23 studies, and explored the fit of five different models to establish an effect size of both dimensions of vocabulary on inference making, as well as its developmental trajectory in children aged 3-12. We found a significant and moderate effect of vocabulary knowledge of both modalities. Vocabulary type was not a significant moderator, but age was, meaning that there was a similar effect for both breadth and depth and that the strength of the correlations decreased with age. Heterogeneity was high overall, meaning that more moderators should be assessed in future studies.

Who is kissing whom? Two-year-olds’ comprehension of pronouns, case and word order

Two-year olds’ comprehension of pronouns in transitive sentences was examined. Previously, children at this age have been shown to comprehend transitive sentences containing full nouns and pronouns in subject position (Gertner et. al. 2006; Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff 1996;), but little is known about when children begin to comprehend the nominative and accusative case in pronouns. Using a preferential looking task, we found that 27-month-old children were able to comprehend transitive, grammatical sentences that had subject-verb-object (SVO) word order and nominative pronouns in subject position or accusative pronouns in object position, but 19-month-old children did not demonstrate this comprehension. Furthermore, neither group showed a consistent interpretation for ungrammatical sentences containing pronouns, in contrast to adult participants. Our results suggest that the ability to use pronouns as an aid to understanding transitive sentences develops by 27 months, before children are capable of producing these pronouns in their own speech.

Lexical and morphological development: A case study of Malay English bilingual first language acquisition

Many first language acquisition (FLA) studies have found a strong correlation between lexical and grammatical development in early language acquisition. For bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA), the development of grammar is also found to be correlated with the size of the lexicon in each language. This case study investigates how a Malay-English bilingual child developed the lexicon and grammar in each of her languages and considers possible evidence of interaction between the languages during acquisition. The study also aims to show that the predominant linguistic environment to which the child was alternatively exposed might have played an important role in her lexical and grammatical development. Thus, the study presents two sets of data: (a) a 12-month longitudinal investigation when the child was 2;10 up till 3;10 in Australia and (b) a one-off elicitation session at age 4;8 when the family was in Malaysia. The findings show that not only the emergence of grammar is linked to the lexical size of the developing languages, but that other variables, mainly the linguistic environment and the bilingual language mode, also influenced the child’s language productions.