Resilience as a chance of developmental success for a child with a chronic illness

Chronic physical illness considered as a negative event, a potential stressor or a life crisis can be the risk factor for difficulties in the development of a child. Negative consequences of transactional influence of the factors associated with illness parameters, a child's personality and his or her environment occur particularly in the emotional and social development. This situation can be also the chance for stimulating a development of a child's personality and his or her growing as a person. The theoretical construct that in right way explains the positive transformation in understanding of the context of chronic illness – is a resilience. The meaning of this construct is discussed from the perspective of model proposed by E. Groetberg and assumptions of positive psychology, while its application value is showed in the light of the empirical data. The conceptualization of a developmental success refers to psychological well-being and being a mature and optimally functioning person. Chronic physical illness considered as a negative event, a potential stressor or a life crisis can be the risk factor for difficulties in the development of a child. Negative consequences of transactional influence of the factors associated with illness parameters, a child's personality and his or her environment occur particularly in the emotional and social development. This situation can be also the chance for stimulating a development of a child's personality and his or her growing as a person. The theoretical construct that in right way explains the positive transformation in understanding of the context of chronic illness – is a resilience. The meaning of this construct is discussed from the perspective of model proposed by E. Groetberg and assumptions of positive psychology, while its application value is showed in the light of the empirical data. The conceptualization of a developmental success refers to psychological well-being and being a mature and optimally functioning person. Key words: child with a chronic illness, resilience, developmental success, psychological well-being, mature and optimally functioning perso

Tentative guidelines on a dictionary of intensifiers

The growing body of literature on intensifiers enables us to circumscribe the scope of the phenomenon more accurately and to identify rigorously its linguistic realizations. Yet, the latter are clearly underrepresented or inconsistently treated both in general dictionaries and in textbooks. That is why the need arises to work up a dictionary devoted to means of intensification so that it can serve as a tool to students of French. Rather than simply listing these means, it should be conceived of as a lexicongrammar enabling users both to vary particular forms and to respect syntactic and combinatory constraints. Additionally, it should account for when registers can be conveniently switched. The present paper aims at giving some hints on how such a disctionary should be prepared.The growing body of literature on intensifiers enables us to circumscribe the scope of the phenomenon more accurately and to identify rigorously its linguistic realizations. Yet, the latter are clearly underrepresented or inconsistently treated both in general dictionaries and in textbooks. That is why the need arises to work up a dictionary devoted to means of intensification so that it can serve as a tool to students of French. Rather than simply listing these means, it should be conceived of as a lexicongrammar enabling users both to vary particular forms and to respect syntactic and combinatory constraints. Additionally, it should account for when registers can be conveniently switched. The present paper aims at giving some hints on how such a disctionary should be prepared

The factorial structure and validity of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) in Polish adolescents

Aim. The present study aimed to explore the factorial structure, validity and stability of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) in chronically ill and healthy Polish adolescents. Methods. 146 chronically ill (girls: 57.6%) and 309 healthy (girls: 45.9%) adolescents aged between 12 and 16 years (M = 14.03; SD = 1.3) filled in an adapted version of HADS (HADS-Teen) in hospital or school settings. The one-week test-retest reliability and construct validity was analyzed in two sub-samples of healthy adolescents. Results. HADS-Teen showed a two-factor structure in the chronically ill sample and a three-factor structure in the healthy sample. The Anxiety scale had high internal reliability and stability and adequate correlation with another measure for generalized anxiety. Still, the Depression scale had good stability, but poor internal reliability in both samples. In the healthy sample, the Depression items split into two factors: depressed mood together with psychomotor retardation/agitation and anhedonia. Conclusions. The issues concerned with the factorial structure of HADS are replicated in Polish adolescents as well. HADS-Teen shows different structures in chronically ill versus healthy adolescents. Results indicate that a special attention must be paid when assessing depression symptoms in healthy adolescents using this instrument

Does asthma disturb executive functions and self-regulation in children?

Due to possible psychosocial and neurocognitive factors, asthma may present a risk to children’s executive functions and self-regulation, especially when it is poorly controlled. One hundred and one 8-11 year-old children (patients with asthma, ADHD and healthy peers) and their parents participated in the study. Four cognitive tasks measuring different executive functions and parent and child versions of behavior regulation inventory were used. Children with asthma had more diffi culties shifting their attention between tasks and exhibited more problems in self-regulation than their healthy peers, but their scores were better than children with ADHD. Patients with more intensive treatment, poor symptom control, a history of acute asthma attacks and non-compliance had slightly more diffi culties in executive functions and self-regulation

Consequences of learned helplessness and recognition of the state of cognitive exhaustion in persons with mild intellectual disability

Persons with intellectual disability are a group at risk of being exposed to overly demanding problem-solving situations, which may produce learned helplessness. The research was based on the informational model of learned helplessness. The consequences of exposure to an unsolvable task and the ability to recognize the symptoms of cognitive exhaustion were tested in 120 students with mild intellectual disability. After the exposure to the unsolvable task, persons in the experimental group obtained lower results than the control group in the escape/avoidance learning task, but a similar result was found in the divergent thinking fluency task. Also, participants in the experimental group had difficulties recognizing the symptoms of the cognitive exhaustion state. After a week’s time, the difference in escape/avoidance learning performance was still observed. The results indicate that exposure to unsolvable tasks may negatively influence the cognitive performance in persons with intellectual disability, although those persons may not identify the cognitive state related to lowered performance

Psychometric properties of Self-Perception Profile for Children in a Polish sample

The Self-Perception Profile for Children (SPPC) is a measure which allows one to assess children’s self-concept. Our article presents this instrument’s psychometric properties within a Polish sample. In our study we tested 432 elementary school students and 14 form teachers. As validity indicators we used the Teacher’s Rating Scale of Child’s Actual Behavior (TRS) and the average school grade for the previous semester. The Polish version of SPPC yielded good psychometric properties. The instrument’s factorial structure paralleled the structure of the original version. Reliability was high both in terms of internal consistency and test-retest results. Scale validity was confirmed in the correlational analysis. Boys scored higher than girls in the Physical Appearance and Global Self-Worth subscales but lower in the Behavioral Conduct subscale. Younger children scored higher than older children in the Scholastic Competence, Physical Appearance, and Global Self-Worth subscales. Judgments on children’s physical appearance were the best predictor of their global self-worth

Geneza formy architektonicznej kościoła Mariackiego w Gdańsku – późnogotyckiej świątyni Rady Głównego Miasta

The Church of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary, the parish church of the Main Town of Gdansk, is one of the most magnificent monuments of brick architecture of the Baltic coast. It is a building both important and symptomatic to the direction of changes occurring in late sacral brick architecture. However, while being mentioned in all significant compendia of the history of art, it remains unrecognized. It does not explicitly fit either into the building tradition of great parish churches of hanseatic cities or the architecture of lower Rhine or Holland. The origin of its architectural form cannot be drawn directly from the evolution of the European model of the cathedral church (in its royal-episcopal or bourgeois-patrician variations in planning and spatial characteristics), or from the solutions inspired by Cistercian churches. No sources have been identified in terms of particular hall church buildings in the Baltic coast. Moreover, it was not directly conditioned by the architectonic heritage of the neighboring region, i.e. the religious State of Teutonic Knights in Prussia. The progenitors and the builders of the church did indeed draw some impulses from all of the above mentioned sources, yet their Gdansk building outgrew the formal and expressive capabilities of its model predecessors. The commissioners of that "town council church" participated in a kind of intellectual discourse on the very form of their parish church as well as its ideological expression. It was a discourse of European range and significance, despite the authorities' decisions being made with no awareness as to their "inscribing into the current of formal transformations" of architecture. The form was undoubtedly meant to adequately reflect the intended content. Through that building - at the same time sacral and municipal - patrician town council manifested their status in the Hanseatic League. Yet, their choice of a reductive, 'anti-gothic' language of architectonic forms remained a singularity. The artistic conception of that late Gothic church was outlined already in the 1380s by the master Henryk Ungeradin. As a result, changes were introduced into the constructive thought which shaped the pre-existent 14th century basilica. Ungeradin worked out the plan, the idea of the building's internal space and the geometric form of its hall choir. Those outlines also dictated the rebuilding of the nave body beginning from the 1480s, which on its completion merged the nave with the choir and the transept. Various building adjustments occurring in the meantime did not influence the original idea of the master. What he had planned was a huge church, with a wide square-ended choir, three-nave transept and a round of chapels enveloping the whole church, built in between the buttressing. The size of the transept, its position halfway down the building's length as well as the rhythm of the nave bays widening towards the center, all contributed to the optical centralization of the whole complex. Thick, rough walls 'categorically' closed the hall area divided by octagonal pillars. These supported the domed calottes of sumptuous crystal and net vaults. An analogous aesthetic effect in the outer view of the geometric form of the building was achieved by juxtaposing plain peripheral walls with the lacelike area of the roof triads above each nave. The article was an attempt to provide a response to the question of where Ungeradin's idea did in fact originate, with special attention to the eastern part - the choir and the transept. Looking at the fundamental guidelines for the analysis in such elements of the building as: 1/. the project of the eastern part based on the so-called cathedral layout (multi-nave, pseudo-ambulatory, square-ended choir, lined with chapels, connected with multi-nave chapel-lined transept, also with straight-ended arms), 2/. accomplishing a hall-like nave layout based on such a plan, made it possible to search for the origin of each characteristic of the estate among adequate architectonic types, as well as their variations and mutations in multiple architectonic environments of the late 13th and all through the 14th century. Those taken into consideration included, among other items, ambit choirs in basilica layout on polygonal plan with a round of chapels, ambit choirs in basilica layout on rectangular plan with a round of chapels, hall three-abside closed choirs tending to 'square' their eastern end, choirless hall churches, a group of Baltic city parish churches with their so-called 'cathedral choirs' with chapels and with elaborate transepts, estates of hall churches built according to those plans, with the embedded process of the reduction of the number of sides of the polygon ending and the introduction of shallow inter-buttress chapels equal in height to the naves. It was revealed that the stages leading to the concept of the master Ungeradin could be traced back above all to the regional, Baltic complexes of churches in Stralsund (St. Nicolas), Rostock (Holy Virgin Mary), Doberan (Cistercian), towards the end of the century leading to completely new creations in Wismar (St. George) or Stralsund (Holy Virgin Mary). It is just in the final two that we can find the same formal values. They may have taken shape in a parallel fashion, regardless of the changes taking place in West European architecture of the second half of the 14th century. The example of Stralsund bears particular resemblance to the Gdansk church. Such similarity could even suggest that master Henryk Ungeradin educated himself on the building grounds of the Marian church of that city. Both churches boast a particular and groundbreaking purity of architecture, bestowing value to a wall through its very massive and real character. The Gdansk church became the same late medieval 'picture of the Church', expressed in the language of forms in a very concrete, rational vision. Methodology-wise, the present feedback is consistent with the traditional - undoubtedly requiring further revision - approach of architecture researchers, whose aim is to include the monument into the typological-formal sequence of architectural model transformation