Educators’ Perceptions Of Youth Behavioral Health Training In Schools Across North Dakota

During the 2019 North Dakota legislative session (the 66th Legislative Assembly), Senate Bill 2149 was introduced to amend the North Dakota Century Code (NDCC) at Title 15.1 Elementary and Secondary Education, Chapter 07 School Districts, Section 34, which addresses behavioral health (including mental health) in an educational setting. This bill was enacted.The purpose of this flexible design qualitative study was to investigate experiences teachers, principals, and school counselors have had related to their students’ mental and behavioral health. Furthermore, this study investigated the perceptions North Dakota educators have had related to professional development on student behavioral health. Finally, this study investigated how North Dakota educators have perceived their experiences related to social emotional learning and mental health program implementation in their schools. This study was guided by ecological theory, which provides a framework for examining human behavior and development; ecological theory shows how environmental systems that people interact within can impact behavior and development. The study began with a Qualtrics survey of teachers, principals, and school counselors. Then, individual interviews and a focus group interview with elementary teachers, secondary teachers, elementary principals, secondary principals, and school counselors were (was) conducted. Educator perceptions identified several challenges in implementing Senate Bill 2149 legislation, including lack of personnel to provide mental health support for students, challenges in obtaining and implementing effective mental health curricula, and limited funding available for professional development time to support this legislation

Handbook of Well-Being

It is a pleasure to bring to you the eHandbook of Subjective Well-Being, the science of when and why people experience and evaluate their lives in positive ways, including aspects such as positive feelings, life satisfaction, and optimism. There are chapters in this eHandbook on the philosophy and history of well-being, as well as reviews of empirical research on the ways to assess well-being, the circumstances that predict it, the outcomes that it produces, the societal policies that enhance it, and many other social, biological, and cultural processes that help us understand why some people are happy and satisfied with their lives, while others are not. There are also chapters on theories of well-being, such as the baseline or set-point models. We believe that Open publication is the wave of the future (Jhangiani & Biswas-Diener, 2017). Therefore, we are presenting the handbook in an electronic format so that it is widely available to everyone around the world. The handbook is entirely open and free – anyone can read and use it without cost. This is important to us as we desire to lower knowledge barriers for individuals and communities, especially because it provides access to students, educators, and scholars who do not have substantial financial resources. We are not certain if this is the first free and open handbook in the behavioral sciences, but hopefully it will not be the last. In the past the prohibitive price of many handbooks have made them available only to scholars or institutions in wealthy nations, and this is unfortunate. We believe scientific scholarship should be available to all. The field of subjective well-being has grown at rapid pace over the last several decades, and many discoveries have been made. When Ed Diener began his research within the field in 1981 there were about 130 studies published that year on the topic, as shown using a Google Scholar search on “subjective well-being.” Eighteen years later when Shigehiro Oishi earned his Ph.D. in 2000 there were 1,640 publications that year on the topic, and when Louis Tay was awarded a Ph.D. in 2011 there were 10,400 publications about subjective well-being. Finally, in 2016 there were 18,300 publications – in that single year alone! In other words, during the time that Diener has been studying the topic, scholarship on subjective well-being has grown over 100-fold! It is not merely the number of published studies that has grown, but there have been enormous leaps forward in our understanding. In the 1980s, there were questions about the reliability and validity of subjective well-being assessments, and the components that underlie it. One notable advance is our understanding and measurement of well-being. We now know a great deal about the validity of self-report measures, as well as the core evaluative and affective components that make up subjective well-being. Further, scholars have a much greater understanding of the processes by which people report their subjective well-being, and various biases or artifacts that may influence these reports. In 1982 many studies were focused on demographic factors such as income, sex, and age that were correlated with subjective well-being. By 2016 we understood much more about temperament and other internal factors that influence happiness, as well as some of the outcomes in behavior that subjective well-being helps produce (e.g., income, performance, physical health, longevity). In the 1980s, researchers assumed that people adapt to almost any life event, and that different life events only have a short-term effect on subjective well-being. A number of large-scale longitudinal studies later showed that that is not the case. By now we know what kinds of life events affect our subjective well-being, how much, and for roughly how long. In the 1980s researchers believed that economic growth would not increase the happiness of a given nation. Now we know when economic growth tends to increase the happiness of a given nation. Additionally, we know much more about the biology of subjective well-being, and an enormous amount more about culture and well-being, a field that was almost nonexistent in 1982. With the advent of positive psychology, we are also beginning to examine practices and interventions that can raise subjective well-being. Given the broad interest in subjective well-being in multiple fields like psychology, economics, political science, and sociology, there have been important developments made toward understanding how societies differ in well-being. This understanding led to the development of national accounts of well-being – societies using well-being measures to help inform policy deliberations. This advance changes the focus of governments away from a narrow emphasis on economic development to a broader view which sees government policies as designed to raise human well-being. We were fortunate to have so many leading scholars of subjective well-being and related topics contribute to this volume. We might be slightly biased but most of the chapters in this eHandbook are truly superb. Not only do they provide a broad coverage of a large number of areas, but many of the chapters present new ways of thinking about these areas. Below is a brief overview of each of the sections in this volume: In Section 1 we begin the volume with chapters on philosophical, historical, and religious thinking on well-being through the ages. Next, we cover the methods and measures used in the scientific study of well-being. Section 2 is devoted to theories of well-being such as the top-down theory, activity theory, goal theory, self-determination theory, and evolutionary theory. Section 3 covers the personality, genetics, hormones, and neuroscience of well-being. Then, demographic factors such as age, gender, race, religion, and marital status are discussed. Section 4 is devoted to how domains of life – such as work, finance, close relationships, and leisure – are related to overall subjective well-being. Section 5 covers the various outcomes of subjective well-being, ranging from work outcomes, to cognitive outcomes, to health, and finally relationship outcomes. Section 6 covers interventions to increase subjective well-being. Finally, Section 7 is devoted to cultural, geographical, and historical variations in subjective well-being. This eHandbook presents the most up-to-date and comprehensive understanding of subjective well-being – and it is freely available to all! The editors would like to extend their thanks to several individuals who have been critical to the success of the handbook. First, our gratitude is immense toward Chris Wiese, Keya Biswas-Diener, and Danielle Geerling, who organized and kept the entire venture on track. Their hard work and organizational skills were wonderful, and the book would not have been possible without them. Second, we extend our thanks to the Diener Education Fund, a charitable organization devoted to education that in part made this project possible. In particular we express deep gratitude to Mary Alice and Frank Diener. Not only did their help make this eHandbook possible, but their lives stood as shining examples of the way to pursue well-being!https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/psychfacbooks/1008/thumbnail.jp

The role of autistic traits in the perception of emotion from faces and voices: a behavioural and fMRI investigation

This thesis combined behavioural and fMRI approaches in the study of the role of autistic traits in the perception of emotion from faces and voices, addressing research questions concerning: behavioural recognition of a full range of six basic emotions across multiple domains (face, voice, and face-voice); neural correlates during the processing of a wide range of emotional expressions from the face, the voice and the combination of both; neural circuity in responding to an incongruence effect (incongruence vs. congruence). The behavioural study investigated the effects of autistic traits as quantified by the Autism- Spectrum Quotient (AQ) on emotional processing in forms of unimodal (faces, voices) and crossmodal (emotionally congruent face-voice expressions) presentations. In addition, by taking into account the degree of anxiety, the role of co-morbid anxiety on emotion recognition in autistic traits was also explored. Compared to an age and gender-matched group of individuals with low levels of autistic traits (LAQ), a trend of no general deficit was found in individuals with high levels of autistic traits (HAQ) in recognizing emotions presented in faces and voice, regardless of their co-morbid anxiety. However, co-morbid anxiety did moderate the relationship between autistic traits and the recognition of emotions (e.g., fear, surprise, and anger), and this effect tended to be different for the two groups. Specifically, with greater anxiety, individuals with HAQ were found to show less probility of correct response in recognizing the emotion of fear. In contrast, individuals with LAQ showed greater probability of correct response in recognizing fear expressions. For response time, anxiety symptoms tended to be significantly associated with greater response latency in the HAQ group but less response latency in the LAQ group in the recognition of emotional expressions, negative emotions in particular (e.g., anger, fear, and sadness); and this effect of anxiety was not restricted to specific modalities. Despite the absence of finding a general emotion recognition deficit in individuals with considerable autistic traits compared to those with low levels of autistic traits, it did not necessarily mean that these two groups shared same neural network when processing emotions. Therefore, it was useful to explore the neural correlates engaged in processing of emotional expressions in individuals with high levels of autistic traits. Results of this investigation tended to suggest a hypo activation of brain areas dedicated to multimodal integration, particularly for displays showing happiness and disgust. However, both the HAQ group and LAQ group showed similar patterns of brain response (mainly in temporal regions) in response to face-voice combination. In response to emotional stimuli in single modality, the HAQ group activated a number of frontal and temporal regions (e.g., STG, MFG, IFG); these differences may suggested a more effortful and less automatic processing in individual with HAQ. In everyday life, emotional information is often conveyed by both the face and voice. Consequently, concurrently presented information by one source can alter the way that information from the other source is perceived and leads to emotional incongruence if information from the two sources was incongruent. Using fMRI, the present work also examined the neural circuity involved in responding to an incongruence effect (incongruence vs. congruence) from face-voice pairs in a group of individuals with considerable autistic traits. In addition, the differences in brain responses for emotional incongruity between explicit instructions to attend to facial expression and explicit instructions to attend to tone of voice in autistic traits was also explored. It was found that there was no significant incongruence effect between groups, given that individuals with a high level of autistic traits are able to recruit more normative neural networks for processing incongruence as individuals with a low level of autistic traits, regardless of instructions. Though no between group differences, individuals with HAQ showed negative activation in regions involved in the default- mode network. However, taken into account changes of instructions, a stronger incongruence effect was more likely to be occurred in the voice-attend condition for individuals with HAQ while in the face-attend condition for individuals with LAQ

Making the Most of Mess

In Making the Most of Mess, Emery Roe emphasizes that policy messes cannot be avoided or cleaned up; they need to be managed. He shows how policymakers and other professionals can learn these necessary skills from control operators who manage large critical infrastructures such as water supplies, telecommunications systems, and electricity grids. The ways in which they prevent major accidents and failures offer models for policymakers and other professionals to manage the messes they face. Throughout, Roe focuses on the global financial mess of 2008 and its ongoing aftermath, showing how mismanagement has allowed it to morph into other national and international messes. More effective management is still possible for this and many other policy messes but that requires better recognition of patterns and formulation of scenarios, as well as the ability to translate pattern and scenario into reliability

Chronicle of a dys-appearance: an autoethnography of a teacher in conflict

Includes bibliographical referencesWith the growth in number of international schools from the 50 identified in 1964 to the current 5,000 international schools worldwide with an associated teaching staff of 250,000 predicted to grow to 10,000 and 500,000 respectively by 2020, the international school is an increasingly prominent sector of education. Yet despite this standing what is known about how international schools discipline and silence their dissenting teachers is negligible. Metaphorically speaking, the problem is that the "black box" of teacher control and correction remains firmly closed in the international school domain. The aim of this study is to open up the "black box" as it were, to use my experiences as an educator to shed some light on how organisational structures and the people working within them can disempower, silence and discipline a dissenting teacher. Although I have used autoethnography as methodology the study is not purely autoethnographic but rather a bricolage of methods that through conceptual enquiries of a philosophical nature (on the emotions, ethics etc.) deepen not only my narrative research but also my understanding of the issues. Engaging with these diverse philosophical analyses has taken me from questions of essence that focused on a Cartesian understanding of difference and conflict ( us/them; cause/effect ; guilt/innocence; darkness/light) to a posthumanist stance on both and questions of how conflict can be understood as emergent from intra-actions between apparatuses of material-discursive practices, conditions both social and material. For conflicts are collisions head on, to the accompaniment of squealing brakes and breaking glass. And it is important to understand not why but how such collisions occur if we are to avoid, prevent, or resolve them ethically. As such I hope that this study contributes to studies on conflict by showing how discourses, material conditions, affect, and power can converge to produce situations with serious consequences for those involved

Making the Most of Mess

In Making the Most of Mess, Emery Roe emphasizes that policy messes cannot be avoided or cleaned up; they need to be managed. He shows how policymakers and other professionals can learn these necessary skills from control operators who manage large critical infrastructures such as water supplies, telecommunications systems, and electricity grids. The ways in which they prevent major accidents and failures offer models for policymakers and other professionals to manage the messes they face. Throughout, Roe focuses on the global financial mess of 2008 and its ongoing aftermath, showing how mismanagement has allowed it to morph into other national and international messes. More effective management is still possible for this and many other policy messes but that requires better recognition of patterns and formulation of scenarios, as well as the ability to translate pattern and scenario into reliability

Live Biofeedback in Electronic Markets

Decisions in electronic markets are frequently made under time pressure and in competition to others. Both factors can cause the decision maker to experience high levels of arousal. Without sound emotional processing, arousal can have detrimental effects on decision making. In this thesis the use of live biofeedback to support emotion perception and thus, to facilitate emotion regulation during emotionally charged decision making is evaluated. Based on a systematic literature review existing live biofeedback research is analyzed in Chapter 2. A transmission model for live biofeedback is developed that classifies the main components of live biofeedback applications and the flow of information in form of transmission signals. To address the identified research gaps, three experimental studies (study I-III) are designed that investigate the effects of arousal and the use of live biofeedback in electronic markets. Study I in Chapter 3 examines how arousal affects purchasing decisions with and without social interaction to analyze the context dependence of the effects of arousal on decision making. The results reveal that in auctions, where social interaction is a key characteristic, arousal increases final prices. Purchasing decisions without social interaction, however, are not affected by arousal. As social interaction has been identified as an essential factor for arousal to affect decision making, the subsequent studies II and III investigate the effects of live biofeedback in markets experiments that involve social interaction. Study II in Chapter 4 evaluates the effects of live biofeedback on emotional processing in the context of auction bidding. Without prior biofeedback training this novel user interface element alters decision making processes at a cognitive and affective level. Study participants, who suppress emotional expressions, experience higher levels of physiological arousal. When provided with live biofeedback, this effect is mitigated. Furthermore, participants who receive live biofeedback show increased coherence of physiological and perceived arousal. Study III in Chapter 5 examines the use of biofeedback in a game that has frequently been used to model financial markets, that is, the beauty contest game. In this study, participants complete a training in order to familiarize with the live biofeedback prior to the experiment. The analysis reveals that live biofeedback increases arousal perception and reduces suppression of emotional expressions. Importantly, participants who receive live biofeedback yield higher decision making quality. In summary, this thesis provides further insights into the effects of arousal on behavior and how live biofeedback affects emotional processing and decision making in electronic markets. The results of this thesis suggest that live biofeedback is a promising tool to support emotion perception, regulation, and decision making of market participants

WiFi-Based Human Activity Recognition Using Attention-Based BiLSTM

Recently, significant efforts have been made to explore human activity recognition (HAR) techniques that use information gathered by existing indoor wireless infrastructures through WiFi signals without demanding the monitored subject to carry a dedicated device. The key intuition is that different activities introduce different multi-paths in WiFi signals and generate different patterns in the time series of channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we propose and evaluate a full pipeline for a CSI-based human activity recognition framework for 12 activities in three different spatial environments using two deep learning models: ABiLSTM and CNN-ABiLSTM. Evaluation experiments have demonstrated that the proposed models outperform state-of-the-art models. Also, the experiments show that the proposed models can be applied to other environments with different configurations, albeit with some caveats. The proposed ABiLSTM model achieves an overall accuracy of 94.03%, 91.96%, and 92.59% across the 3 target environments. While the proposed CNN-ABiLSTM model reaches an accuracy of 98.54%, 94.25% and 95.09% across those same environments

Self-Directed Learning

This book on self-directed learning (SDL) is devoted to original academic scholarship within the field of education, and is the 6th volume in the North-West University (NWU) SDL book series. In this book the authors explore how self-directed learning can be considered an imperative for education in a complex modern society. Although each chapter represents independent research in the field of self-directed learning, the chapters form a coherent contribution concerning the scholarship of self-directed learning, and specifically the effect of environmental and praxis contexts on the enhancement of self-directed learning in a complex society. The publication as a whole provides diverse perspectives on the importance of self-directed learning in varied contexts. Scholars working in a wide range of fields are drawn together in this scholarly work to present a comprehensive dialogue regarding self-directed learning and how this concept functions in a complex and dynamic higher education context. This book presents a combination of theory and practice, which reflects selected conceptual dimensions of self-directed learning in society, as well as research-based findings pertaining to current topical issues relating to implementing self-directed learning in the modern world. The varied methodologies provide the reader with different and balanced perspectives, as well as varied and innovative ideas on how to conduct research in the field of self-directed learning

A critical analytic literature review of virtue ethics for social work: beyond codified conduct towards virtuous social work

This submission is based on a critical analytical literature review of the moral paradigm of virtue ethics and a specific application of this to social work value discourse in search of lost identity. It echoes the philosophical academy's paradigmatic wars between 'act' and 'agent' appraisals in moral theory. Act appraisal theories focus on a person's act as the primary source of moral value whereas agent appraisal theories - whether 'agentprior' or stricter 'agent-based’ versions - focus on a person’s disposition to act morally. This generates a philosophical debate about which type of appraisal should take precedence in making an overall evaluation of a person's moral performance. My starting point is that at core social work is an altruistic activity entailing a deep commitment, a 'moral impulse', towards the distressed 'other'. This should privilege dispositional models of value that stress character and good motivation correctly applied - in effect making for an ethical career built upon the requisite moral virtues. However, the neo-liberal and neo-conservative state hegemony has all but vanquished the moral impulse and its correct application. In virtue ethical language, we live in 'vicious' times. I claim that social work’s adherence to act appraisal Kantian and Utilitarian models is implicated in this loss. Kantian 'deontic' theory stresses inviolable moral principle to be obeyed irrespective of outcome: Utilitarian 'consequentualist' theory calculates the best moral outcome measured against principle. The withering of social work as a morally active profession has culminated in the state regulator's Code of Practice. This makes for a conformity of behaviour which I call 'proto-ethical' to distinguish it from 'ethics proper'. The Code demands that de-moralised practitioners dutifully follow policy, rules, procedures and targets - ersatz, piecemeal and simplistic forms of deontic and consequentualist act appraisals. Numerous inquiries into social work failures indict practitioners for such behaviour. I draw upon mainstream virtue ethical theory and the emergent social work counter discourse to get beyond both code and the simplified under-theoretisation of social work value. I defend a thesis regarding an identity-defining cluster of social work specific virtues. I propose two modules: 'righteous indignation’ to capture the heartfelt moral impulse, and 'just generosity' to mindfully delineate the scope and legitimacy of the former. Their operation generates an exchange relationship with the client whereby the social worker builds 'surplus value' to give back more than must be taken in the transaction. I construct a social work specific minimal-maximal 'stability standard' to anchor the morally correct expression of these two modules and the estimation of surplus value. In satisficing terms, the standard describes what is good enough but is also potentially expansive. A derivative social work practice of moral value is embedded in an historic 'care and control' dialectic. The uncomfortable landscape is one of moral ambiguity and paradoxicality, to be navigated well in virtue terms. I argue that it is incongruous to speak of charactereological social worker virtues and vices and then not to employ the same paradigm to the client’s moral world. This invites a functional analysis of virtue. The telos of social work - our moral impulse at work - directs us to scrutiny of the unsafe household. Our mandate is the well-being of the putative client within, discoursed in terms of functional life-stage virtues and vicious circumstance. I employ the allegorical device of a personal ethical journey from interested lay person to committed social worker, tracking the character-building moral peregrinations. I focus on two criticisms of virtue ethics - a philosophical fork. It is said that virtue ethical theory cannot of itself generate any reliable, independently validated action guidance. In so far as it does, the theory will endorse an as-given, even reactionary, criterion of right action, making 'virtue and vice' talk the bastion of the establishment power holders who control knowledge. I seek to repudiate these claims. Given that this demands a new approach to moral pedagogy, the practical implications for the suitability and training of social workers are discussed