Children in ethnically diverse classrooms and those with cross-ethnic friendships excel at understanding others' minds

This study examined the link between classroom ethnic diversity, cross‐ethnic friendships, and children's theory of mind. In total, 730 children in the United Kingdom (54.7% girls, 51.5% White) aged 8 to 13 years completed measures of theory of mind in 2019/2020. Controlling for verbal ability, executive function, peer social preference, and teacher‐reported demographic characteristics, greater classroom ethnic diversity provided opportunities for cross‐ethnic friendships, and children with cross‐ethnic friendships performed better than peers without cross‐ethnic friendships on theory of mind. These results extend accounts of intergroup contact by using direct assessments of children's theory of mind and advance social accounts of theory of mind by demonstrating how experiences outside the family are linked with theory of mind

Why do police officers (not) seek help? Correlates and predictors of attitudes towards psychological help-seeking in the police

Through both literature review and empirical research, this thesis explores factors which may explain why police officers do not always seek psychological support when they need it. By consolidating and expanding current knowledge, it is hoped that the thesis may help to inform future efforts to ensure that all officers can access support as required. Paper 1 is a scoping literature review of quantitative studies which have examined the relationship between attitudes towards psychological help-seeking and other variables. The review identified 102 potential correlates/predictors of help-seeking attitudes across 21 studies. Past help-seeking, perceived service availability, and having a mental health diagnosis were the most consistent facilitators of positive help-seeking attitudes. Current PTSD symptoms were the most consistent barrier. However, most variables had a weak evidence base, having been studied only once or having had contradictory findings across studies. The studies also differed substantially in their operationalisation of help-seeking attitudes. The review concluded that further high-quality research is necessary. Paper 2 presents a cross-sectional, quantitative research study investigating the ability of five variables—current psychological distress, mental health literacy, distress disclosure, organisational stigma, and length of service—to predict psychological help-seeking in a UK police force. An online survey was completed by 97 officers. Multiple regression analyses showed that mental health literacy and distress disclosure predicted more positive help-seeking attitudes, while distress and organisational stigma predicted more negative attitudes. Length of service was not significant. Clinical implications of the findings are considered, alongside limitations and recommendations for future research. Paper 3 is an executive summary of the empirical research, written for the research participants, police forces, and related organisations. The paper gives an overview of the study’s background, method, findings, limitations, and recommendations. A police officer, an ex-officer, and police researchers were consulted to maximise this paper’s usefulness

"What is on your mind?" Automated Scoring of Mindreading in Childhood and Early Adolescence

In this paper we present the first work on the automated scoring of mindreading ability in middle childhood and early adolescence. We create MIND-CA, a new corpus of 11,311 question-answer pairs in English from 1,066 children aged 7 to 14. We perform machine learning experiments and carry out extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation. We obtain promising results, demonstrating the applicability of state-of-the-art NLP solutions to a new domain and task.Comment: Accepted in COLING 202

To Establish And Maintain Special Activity Fund Accounting In The Ocheyedan Community School District, 1958-59

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