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Romantic legacies, Browning and Orientalism, Browning's language and poetic practice, gender, and materialist approaches to Browning's poetry are some of the themes that emerge in publications on Browning this year. [...]

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic revealed systemic weaknesses in health-care systems worldwide. The breadth of challenges left health workers overwhelmed and overstretched, reducing their professional efficacy and causing long-term [...]

Philip Kelly, Edward Hagan, and Linda M. Lewis's new volume 28 of The Brownings' Correspondence has been several years in the making and offers one of the more intriguing glimpses [...]

Many of the publications on Browning this year have the distinction of appearing during a pandemic, while this review has been prepared during a second year marked by challenges to [...]

This year brings the good news of a major National Endowment for the Humanities grant, awarded to Philip Kelley and Edward Hagan for their vital scholarly work in assembling and [...]

This year brings a new volume of The Brownings' Correspondence, taking both Brownings from Rome to Florence and Siena and through the vicissitudes of the Second Italian War of Independence. [...]

If there is a theme that predominates in publications this year, it is the philosophical content and contexts for Robert Browning's poetry, as well as the complexity of his language [...]

The overarching themes in this year's work on Browning are the transatlantic influences that 'network' Browning within an international culture of creative work and exchange. Various critics consider Browning's reception [...]

The pronounced rise in the number of publications on Browning's work coinciding with the bicentenary year 2012 is followed in 2013 by a strong series of sophisticated book chapters and [...]

The year 2011 brings an exciting range of high-quality work on Browning, including an accomplished literary study by Britta Martens covering Browning's full career, an important book chapter by Charles [...]

This year's entry rounds out the year 2010 which, as Britta Martens noted last fall, began as a productive period in Browning scholarship, including the publication of the Selected Poems [...]

Alan Richardson, The Neural Sublime: Cognitive Theories and Romantic Texts. Johns Hopkins up, 2010. 194 pp. Rather than resisting the research and social power of the sciences, the field of [...]

Background: Text-delivered prevention programs provide unique opportunities to deliver substance use prevention interventions to at-risk populations. Methods: A pilot randomized controlled trial was conducted to test the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of a 4-week, automated personalized text-messaging prevention program, designed to reduce risk factors and increase protective factors associated with adolescent substance use and misuse. Sixty-nine adolescents were recruited from a Federally Qualified Health Care clinic and randomized to a text-delivered intervention, or a wait-list control condition. Simultaneously, fifty-two parents of adolescent participants were enrolled into a parenting skills text-delivered intervention. Participants completed a baseline assessment and three follow-up surveys over three-months. Adolescent saliva specimens for drug testing were collected. Results: All intervention-allocated adolescents implemented at least one of the text-based counseling recommendations and 79% indicated that they found the texts helpful. Significant intervention effects were found on risk and protective factors for substance misuse. Adolescents in the intervention group reported reduced depression symptoms (d = −.63) and anxiety symptoms (d = −.57). Relative to controls, adolescents in the intervention group maintained a higher quality of parental relationship (d =.41) and parenting skills (d =.51), suggesting a prophylactic effect. Marginal decrease in the odds of positive drug tests were found for youth in intervention group (77.1% decrease, p = 0.07) but not with controls (54.3% decrease, p = 0.42,). Conclusions: Results provide preliminary evidence in the feasibility, acceptability, and efficacy of targeting risk and protective factors that are implicated in substance use via text-delivered interventions for high-risk populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to assess the validity of a 14-item mental health self-efficacy scale developed to assess the effectiveness of the Road to Mental Readiness (R2MR) – a program aimed at improving the well-being and mental health of Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel. The validity of the scale was assessed through an analysis of data collected as part of a pilot study and a larger group randomized control trial (GRCT) on the effectiveness of R2MR administered to CAF noncommissioned member recruits during basic training. Using data collected for the pilot study (N = 276), an initial review of items indicated a need to eliminate two redundant items and two items that were weakly correlated with other scale items. A parallel analysis and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) conducted on the resulting 10-item scale pointed to a one-factor model with all items loading satisfactorily. Using data from the GRCT (N = 1962), a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted to further assess the revised scale. This CFA suggested good model fit (Root Mean Square Error of Approximation of.07 and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual of.06). The revised scale had an alpha of.88, was very strongly correlated with the full scale (r =.97, p <.001), and significantly predicted perceived control and self-efficacy regarding accessing mental health care and intention to access care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Police agencies increasingly implement training programs to protect mental health. The Road to Mental Readiness (R2MR) program was designed by the Canadian military to increase mental health resilience. A version of R2MR was adapted for municipal police by the Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC). The current research was designed to assess the R2MR program, as adapted and delivered by the MHCC, in a municipal police sample. Participants were 147 Canadian police agency employees (57% women) who received a single R2MR training session. Participants completed pre- and post-training self-report questionnaires, and follow-ups at 6 and 12 months. The questionnaires assessed mental health symptoms, work engagement, resiliency, mental health knowledge, and stigma. Multilevel modeling analyses assessed for within-participant changes over time. The results were consistent with other single session interventions; specifically, there were no significant changes in mental health symptoms, resilience, or work engagement (p >.05). There were small, but significant (p <.05), reductions in stigma at post-training that may facilitate help-seeking among police; relatedly, in open-ended response fields, participants commonly described the training as helpful for changing attitudes and improving communication. More engagement with the material may produce larger, sustained gains, but more published research is critically needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideological work of "The Prophet's Camel Bell" as it is directed to Western readers highlights ethics as a concern and maps elements of an ethically informed response to questions of cultural difference. The memoir suggests that encounters with the foreign can become part of a reorientation toward other environments, which include people as well as natural and human-made affordances. This essay considers the foreign not as a static object or concept but as an embodied field in "The Prophet's Camel Bell," drawing on Tim Ingold's environmentalist anthropology. Conceptualized in this way, "Somalia" consists in a series of shifting environments rather than a singular, describable entity, paralleling Laurence's own emergence within these spaces. At the same time, the text contains historically specific aesthetic strands that create political inconsistencies in the text that have puzzled Laurence's critics. The essay argues for renewed critical attention to epistemological and ethical issues in a major work in the genre of Canadian travel writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay complicates standard readings of Francis Galton's composites by examining his objectives for photography in relation to his work in heredity and to his interest in mapping the body in terms of novel codes and patterns. As new additions to the visual rhetoric of photography, Galton's composite photographs reformulate, stretch, and decenter the human subject. Galton's family composites, for instance, show singular bodies retaining the traces of other bodies that share a similar heredity. These images thus represent in visual terms the individual human as the sum of past evolution and of the action of nature, which works to pressure and shape human and animal development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from primary to secondary school represents a significant rite of passage for many young people in the UK every year. However, this transition has been linked to negative educational, social and emotional outcomes for some pupils. This longitudinal study aimed to better understand the characteristics of pupils who are most vulnerable to negative outcomes at this time. A multi-variate approach was adopted to investigate the risk and resilience factors most predictive of adjustment to secondary school. The study also explored the combined impact of pre-transfer risk and resilience factors upon post-transfer school adjustment by examining possible moderator relationships. A longitudinal non-experimental relational design was adopted. Over 130 pupils completed resilience and school adjustment questionnaires both preand post-transfer. Teachers also reported on pupils' school adjustment and risk/resilience at these times. The factors consistently found to be most predictive of Teacher-Rated School Adjustment were mainly risk factors (Behaviour and Maths Attainment), whilst the variables identified as most predictive of the Pupil-Rated School Adjustment outcomes were predominantly resilience factors (Support, Self-Efficacy, Emotional Sensitivity and Emotional Impairment). Findings also suggest that high levels of specific resilience factors in primary school alone may leave pupils with Special Educational Needs less prepared for the significant changes they face in their new schools. Findings both extend and challenge previous research and emphasise the importance of considering both teacher and pupil perspectives when assessing the effects of transitions on school adjustment outcomes. The implications of findings for education professionals are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mental illness results in loss of productivity, loss of life, and emotional grief and loss. Lack of insight into illness is common among psychiatric disorders. Knowledge and application of ethical principles and legal issues are significant in the treatment of mental illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a higher criticisms on the poems of Robert Browning. Evidence of Browning's interest in the higher criticism of the Bible and of Homer; Attacks on higher criticism; Discussion of Browning's response to the interpretive doublebinds of higher criticism.