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Currently, self-report measures are the primary assessment tool for anxiety disorders. Since they have some limitations, alternative measurements, such as language-based measures, are worth investigating. This paper explores which language markers signal anxiety in fictitious stories written in response to four Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) cards. Participants (n = 492) from a non-probabilistic convenience sample were asked to write a short story next to each TAT card after completing the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7. We used RoLIWC2015 to conduct the text analysis and applied the LASSO method to identify which language markers predict anxiety. The results showed that the respondents scoring high on anxiety also tend to use more words expressing negative emotions, and fewer words expressing positive emotions. Moreover, their language contained a higher frequency of words that implied semantic differentiation (i.e., but, else) and a lower frequency of words indicating leisure. In conclusion, this paper aims to shed new light on the multimethod assessment of anxiety, mainly focused on specific language signatures as reliable predictors of anxiety symptoms. Further research using more extensive text data is recommended to discover more linguistic markers and improve prediction accuracy.

Background: Long-term care of a relative with a disability is associated with negative consequences on the caregiver's mental health. Therefore, investigating how some personality traits, such as resilience, protect caregivers with dysfunctional personality traits from caregiving stress is necessary. This study examines the moderating role of resilience in the relationship between caregiver's personality dysfunction and care stress. Methods: A total of 224 family caregivers of children and adults with developmental disabilities participated in this cross-sectional research. They completed self-report measures of resilience, personality dysfunction, and care stress. Results: The results show that medium and high levels of resilience protect familial caregivers from the adverse effects of personality dysfunction on stress. The relationship is maintained for three of the five dysfunctional personality traits (antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism). Conclusions: From a theoretical point of view, the results show the contribution of the dimensional personality model to the study of caregiving stress. From a practical standpoint, the results can be used to optimise the resilience of familial caregivers, providing them with tools to take better care of their relatives.

The COVID-19 pandemic is the most disturbing event in the lifetime of most of our planet's citizens. The lockdown measures directly impacted many areas of our lives, including the educational sector, because locking down countries meant implicitly locking down the educational system. Moreover, what was first considered a temporary solution for an extraordinary situation began to look more and more like a medium to long-term general rule. Nevertheless, the questions are: are we all ready to move the entire educational process online and fully understand the challenges and implications for all stakeholders involved? This two-part research aims to provide some answers to these questions by identifying and analyzing the perceptions of Romanian engineering students enrolled at "Gheorghe Asachi" Technical University of Iasi (TUIASI) regarding the changes registered in the past year once the emergency e-learning situation started. The first part of the research was conducted between April and May 2020 through an online survey among 134 engineering students. It aimed at identifying the students' perception of the online learning systems provided by their university, considering the significant speed with which changes were imposed. In addition, this research phase focused on students' access to resources and knowledge to use and integrate online learning into their study routine. The second part of the research was carried out after almost a year of e-learning between March and April 2021 and consisted of six online focus groups with 36 students and aimed at identifying the main advantages and challenges students experience throughout the online educational process. The research revealed that although students are digital natives, they still have difficulties harnessing e-learning's advantages and integrating them into their study routine. Another significant aspect refers to the changing role of the professor perceived not only as an instructor but as a mentor during a time of crisis. The study results can offer higher education institutions insight and valuable information that can be used in designing and implementing online and hybrid activities and classes that better fit the students' needs and expectations in terms of e-learning.

Blended Learning (BL) in English language learning programs in Canada is defined as the combination of f2f learning with instructor-facilitated use by students of online activities and resources that complement the in-class teaching (Kennell & Moriarty, 2014). Blended Learning is increasingly in demand by students, teachers, and programs (Garrison & Vaughan, 2008), particularly in the Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program, the English language and settlement program provided by Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) in Canada (Kennell & Moriarty, 2014). This article explains the findings of a demonstration research project regarding the effects of blended learning in LINC for students, instructors, and the program. The blended approach shows promise for enhancing English language learning and access to LINC classes for newcomers to Canada via technologies important in our digital age. The research findings here regarding the effects of BL in LINC are important in light of the need to enhance accessibility to English language learning for newcomers to Canada and the paucity of research related to BL for English language learning and settlement needs (Kennell & Moriarty, 2014; Lawrence, 2014).

Although English language teaching professionals are committed to ongoing continuous professional development, economic and workload factors may impede their ability to attend a traditional 2-day annual conference. Teachers have turned to social media as an alternative approach to self-directed professional development. In particular, Twitter has become the choice of many educators with its potential for networking and collaboration. There are scheduled Twitter chats held regularly on a variety of topics of interest to language teaching professionals, including #CdnELTchat. In addition, connected educators have built a community of practice on the Twitter platform and provide inspiration and support to their colleagues online. In this article, four connected educators who have found their community on Twitter share their stories of how they got started on Twitter, how they connected with each other, and what they value about the open Twitter platform.

The current study's aim was to assess the contribution of empathic perspective-taking to the relationship between attachment security and children's risk of maladjustment. A sample of 212 preschoolers aged 3-5 years old was included in this study. Children completed the Attachment Story Completion Task and a modified version of the Kids' Empathic Development Scale. Teachers and parents rated children's externalizing/internalizing problems by employing the Caregiver-Teacher Report Form, and the Child Behavior Checklist, respectively. Results supported the notion that the indirect path from attachment security to externalizing problems was negatively mediated by empathic perspective-taking related to negative (but not positive) emotions. Similarly, the same component of empathic perspective-taking negatively mediated the relationship between attachment security and internalizing problems. These findings indicate that empathic perspective-taking in relation to negative emotions might serve to promote preschoolers' reduced risk of mental health problems.

For more than two decades, the New York Performance Standards Consortium, a coalition of 38 public high schools, has steered clear of high-stakes testing, which superficially assess student learning. Instead, the consortium's approach relies on performance-based assessments--essays, research papers, science experiments, and high-level mathematical problems--to engage students and measure their knowledge and skills in a deep and meaningful way over time. In this article, the authors present how this form of assessment is working and benefiting the students.

The aim of this meta-analysis was to investigate factors associated with resilience in familial caregivers of children with developmental disabilities. The protocol was registered in the PROSPERO database, with the registration number CRD42018105180. Several electronic databases were searched for studies. A random-effects meta-analysis was performed on 26 selected studies that associated resilience to an array of other variables (i.e., psychological distress, social support, coping, perceived health, life satisfaction). Overall, the significant pooled effect sizes were small to medium, ranging from r = 0.291 for coping to r = 0.442 for social support. Although the literature on the topic has improved, there is a lot of study heterogeneity and the need for focusing on male caregivers becomes evident.

Background: Attachment theory emphasizes that parents' responses to children's emotional distress might shape their ability to empathize with others. Previous research showed that securely attached preschoolers are prone to exhibiting more empathy towards others' distress compared to insecurely attached children, but less is known about the way attachment influences a particular empathy-related skill, namely perspective-taking. Objective: The current study's aim was to evaluate attachment status effects on preschool children's empathic perspective-taking employing a multi-component conceptualization including affective, cognitive and behavioral perspective-taking. Method: The sample included 212 children aged between 3 and 5. The attachment story completion task was employed to assess children's internal working models concerning the quality of the parent-child attachment relationship. Additionally, a modified version of the Kid's Empathic Development Scale was administered to evaluate children's self-reported affective, cognitive and behavioral empathic perspective-taking. Results: The results consistently revealed that the insecure avoidant group, but not the insecure ambivalent group, scored significantly lower on all dimensions of empathic perspective-taking compared to the secure category. Conclusions: These findings suggest that in typically developing preschoolers, insecure avoidant attachment patterns might be associated with overall difficulties in perspective-taking abilities, whereas insecure ambivalent attachment patterns could be responsible for more specific perspective-taking difficulties related to eliciting prosocial behaviors (i.e., behavioral perspective-taking). These findings could have implications for designing interventions aimed at enhancing parents' ability to support the development of their children's empathic perspective-taking skills.

This research tested the relationship between career adaptability and academic performance and the incremental validity of career adaptability in predicting academic performance, as well as the mediation role of career adaptability in the relationship between personality and academic performance. 437 undergraduate students completed measures of the Big Five and HEXACO personality models and career adaptability. Academic performance was measured relying on students' GPA. Results showed that career adaptability was positively related to academic performance. Career adaptability was predicted by Big Five extraversion, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness. Following the traditional approach (hierarchic regression) career adaptability showed incremental validity in predicting academic performance. However, career adaptability did not predict academic performance after the effect of Big Five and HEXACO models of personality was controlled using SEM analysis. Moreover, career adaptability mediated the relationship between Big Five extraversion, conscientiousness, HEXACO openness and academic performance. Implications of the results are discussed.

The aims of the current study were (1) to replicate findings regarding the mediator role of emotion regulation (ER) between attachment and empathy; (2) to extend current knowledge by testing the moderator effect of ER on the relationship between attachment and empathy; and (3) to test an integrative moderated mediation model in which attachment was hypothesized to moderate its indirect effect on empathy. The sample included 212 preschoolers aged three- to five-years old. Attachment, ER, and empathic perspective-taking were assessed by employing child interviews. The results confirmed that more secure attachment patterns foster higher ER awareness, which in turn is associated with higher levels of empathy; the strongest relationship between attachment and empathy occurs at below-average ER awareness; and the strength of the indirect effect of attachment on empathy through ER decreases as attachment security increases. These findings have implications for designing and implementing preventive interventions for preschoolers.

The comprehension of constituent questions is an important topic for language acquisition research and for applications in the diagnosis of language impairment. This article presents the results of a study investigating the comprehension of different types of questions by 5-year-old, typically developing children across 19 European countries, 18 different languages, and 7 language (sub-)families. The study investigated the effects of two factors on question formation: (a) whether the question contains a simple interrogative word like "who" or a complex one like "which princess", and (b) whether the question word was related to the sentential subject or object position of the verb. The findings show that there is considerable variation among languages, but the two factors mentioned consistently affect children's performance. The cross-linguistic variation shows that three linguistic factors facilitate children's understanding of questions: having overt case morphology, having a single lexical item for both "who" and "which", and the use of synthetic verbal forms.

All European states have a primary obligation to establish and maintain governmental schools everywhere, but as the result of political struggle and constitutional guarantees, they have also allowed and often financed non-state schools based on special pedagogical, religious or philosophical ideas. Depending on the level of state grants for non-state schools, states have more or less the right to supervise these non-governmental schools and seek to guarantee that the quality of organisation and teachers are not lower than those in governmental schools. Using comparable cross-national data for all member states of the European Union, we first describe four existing basic arrangements of non-governmental and governmental schools: integrated educational systems of public and non-state schools, denomination supportive educational systems, limited-support non-governmental schools and educational systems with segregated public and non-state schools. Using the same cross-national data for all member states of the European Union, we then explore three other topics: parental background and the choice of non-governmental schools, non-governmental schools and their cognitive outcomes, and non-governmental schools and their non-cognitive outcomes. There are important differences between non-governmental-"in"dependent (without state grants) and non-governmental-"de"pendent schools (with state grants); that school choice of non-governmental-"de"pendent schools is more related to socially mobile parents, whereas schools choice of non-governmental-"in"dependent schools is more related the reproduction of social classes; that in a majority of European countries, non-governmental-"de"pendent schools are more effective cognitively than governmental schools, but that non-governmental-"in"dependent schools are more effective cognitively only in a few countries and more ineffective in a larger number of countries. Also non-governmental-"de"pendent schools are "not" more effective non-cognitively than governmental schools.

This discussion draws attention to the discriminatory efforts of policymakers in Arizona to professionally marginalize public school teachers deemed to have an accent. In addition to debunking the linguistic and pedagogic validity of this policy, we emphasize the role of the media in the (re)construction and justification of language ideologies used to cast immigrants and language-minority groups in a negative light. To accomplish this, we have conducted a Critical Discourse Analysis of online responses to a recent "Wall Street Journal" article describing the Arizona Department of Education's latest attempt to oppress language-minority communities. Tapping into publicly advertised dialogues allows us to expose how media sources like the "Wall Street Journal" both emphasize and reproduce discourses that cement shared beliefs about minority groups. From this stance, we promote the benefits of linguistic diversity and advocate for the cultural and professional rights of teachers who speak English as an additional language. (Contains 1 table and 1 footnote.)

Operatic music involves both singing and acting (as well as rich audiovisual background arising from the orchestra and elaborate scenery and costumes) that multiply the mechanisms by which emotions are induced in listeners. The present study investigated the effects of music, plot, and acting performance on emotions induced by opera. There were three experimental conditions: (1) participants listened to a musically complex and dramatically coherent excerpt from Tosca; (2) they read a summary of the plot and listened to the same musical excerpt again; and (3) they re-listened to music while they watched the subtitled film of this acting performance. In addition, a control condition was included, in which an independent sample of participants succesively listened three times to the same musical excerpt. We measured subjective changes using both dimensional, and specific music-induced emotion questionnaires. Cardiovascular, electrodermal, and respiratory responses were also recorded, and the participants kept track of their musical chills. Music listening alone elicited positive emotion and autonomic arousal, seen in faster heart rate, but slower respiration rate and reduced skin conductance. Knowing the (sad) plot while listening to the music a second time reduced positive emotions (peacefulness, joyful activation), and increased negative ones (sadness), while high autonomic arousal was maintained. Watching the acting performance increased emotional arousal and changed its valence again (from less positive/sad to transcendent), in the context of continued high autonomic arousal. The repeated exposure to music did not by itself induce this pattern of modifications. These results indicate that the multiple musical and dramatic means involved in operatic performance specifically contribute to the genesis of music-induced emotions and their physiological correlates.

Denominational schooling makes up an important part of European educational systems. Given its specificity, denominational schooling can be expected to place a greater weight on values teaching and moral education. It also may be more successful in creating a warm and caring atmosphere, thus helping students to better emotionally connect to the school community. We compare public and publicly supported private (as a proxy to denominational) schools on 2 dimensions, namely the emotional integration with the rest of the school community and the concern and feelings of responsibility towards the environment. Except for Austria, Belgium, and Spain, no evidence could be found that the type of the school has any impact on the reported psychological adaptation to the school. In these 3 countries, publicly supported private schools tend to be more successful in integrating their students. Also, students in public and private dependent schools were equally environment oriented. (Contains 8 tables and 22 notes.)

We apply propensity score matching to the estimation of differential school effectiveness between the publicly funded private sector and the public sector in a sample of 26 countries. This technique allows us to distinguish between school choice and school effectiveness processes and thus to account for selectivity issues involved in the comparison of the 2 sectors. Concerning school choice, we found 2 patterns: a choice of upwardly mobile parents for private schools and a preference for segregation by (lower) middle-class parents. As regards school effectiveness, our results indicate that, after controlling for selectivity, a substantial advantage in reading achievement remains among students in publicly funded private schools in 10 out of the 26 countries. (Contains 1 figure, 4 tables and 15 notes.)

This paper builds on previous research into teachers' conceptions of learning and teaching with an investigation of information technology academics. Using a phenomenographic approach to build a model of IT academics experiences and practice of teaching, we aimed to identify any specific issues that academics in the IT discipline face and to assess the impact of the changing higher education environment on their teaching experiences. While there were few discipline-specific issues we did find that the current higher education environment appears to be negatively affecting the quality of teaching and learning within the IT discipline and indications are that these environmental factors are affecting academics within other disciplines. We concluded that current institutional policies, including teaching and learning quality measures and lack of resources, are compromising the way subjects are delivered. In some cases academics are discouraged from improving their teaching practice. (Contains 2 tables.)

Reviews history of events leading to the Linked Systems Project and describes two major components: communications facility and applications programs. The initial application--sharing of authority data based on the Library of Congress Name Authority Cooperative Project--is discussed, and future applications and their implications are briefly addressed. (8 references) (EJS)

Four intertwined issues in networking--local systems, linking, linking standards, and database ownership--need to be dealt with by bibliographic utilities and librarians, as their members, in the very near future. The resolution of these major issues will significantly affect the future direction of nationwide networking. (Author)

Traces the development of library networking over the last 20 years, and examines the current attitude toward an integrated national network. The political and economic problems of the Linked Systems Project are discussed, as well as issues relating to copyright. (10 references) (Author/CLB)

Describes the National Coordinated Cataloging Program, a formal system in which selected research libraries follow agreed-upon practices for creating national-level bibliographic records. The aims and assumptions of the program, initial considerations for implementation, and the pilot project scheduled to begin in 1988 are discussed. (MES)

Discusses cooperative efforts between research organizations and libraries to create a national information network. Topics discussed include the Linked System Project (LSP); technical processing versus reference and research functions; Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Reference Model; the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET); and bibliographic records and the work of bibliographic utilities. (LRW)

Reviews present and international library networking activities, both in terms of the status quo in 1978 and, in the case of the United States, the efforts underway toward implementing a more coordinated and comprehensive system than presently available. The roles of various organizations/groups are also discussed. (Author/JD)

Reviews bibliographic control before and after the advent of machine-readable cataloging, and holds that new developments toward decentralization seem to counter the existing technological trend toward centralization of automated library services. (FM)

Discusses legal, political, and economic implications of technological advancement that may affect the operations and services of libraries. The emphasis is international; however, many problems have national counterparts. Included is a description of ownership and copyright problems experienced by the international MARC network. (Author/RAA)

Describes a variety of institutions and groups that affect promulgation of library standards, including standards organizations (American National Standards Institute, International Organization for Standardization); library associations (American Library Association); national and international committees, government agencies (National Bureau of Standards); abstracting and indexing services; and funding agencies. Twenty-seven sources are cited. (EJS)