The Effects of a Reading-Based Intervention on Emotion Processing in Children Who Have Suffered Early Adversity and War Related Trauma

Early adversity and trauma can have profound effects on children's affective development and mental health outcomes. Interventions that improve mental health and socioemotional development are essential to mitigate these effects. We conducted a pilot study examining whether a reading-based program (We Love Reading) improves emotion recognition and mental health through socialization in Syrian refugee (n = 49) and Jordanian non-refugee children (n = 45) aged 7-12 years old (M = 8.9, 57% girls) living in Jordan. To measure emotion recognition, children classified the expression in faces morphed between two emotions (happy-sad and fear-anger), while mental health was assessed using survey measures of optimism, depression, anxiety, distress, and insecurity. Prior to the intervention, both groups of children were significantly biased to interpret ambiguous facial expressions as sad, while there was no clear bias on the fear-anger spectrum. Following the intervention, we found changes in Syrian refugee children's bias in emotion recognition away from sad facial expressions, although this returned to pre-intervention levels 2 months after the end of the program. This shift in the bias away from sad facial expressions was not associated with changes in self-reported mental health symptoms. These results suggest a potential positive role of the reading intervention on affective development, but further research is required to determine the longer-term impacts of the program.

Development and Evaluation of Affective Domain Using Student's Feedback in Entrepreneurial Massive Open Online Courses

Entrepreneurship education is a very important issue in the digital age. It aims to enable learners and society to respond to emergent economic and employment challenges. When entrepreneurs struggle to launch and sustain a new venture, the key question usually is not a lack of relevant knowledge, but the necessary fortitude and attitude to face down difficulties and challenges. Thus, entrepreneurs require development in the affective domain. However, most of courses emphasize the cognition and psychomotor functions, but neglect the affective domain. This study attempts to combine entrepreneurial Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and blended curriculum design for affective learning. A total of 32 students participated in a 9-week social entrepreneurship program. Content analysis was used for comparison of the learning performance. The findings suggest that social entrepreneurship courses can be effectively used to help learners achieve learning objectives of different affective levels, but this is a time-intensive process, particularly for higher levels. The affective development of the final level takes longer to achieve; therefore, course designers should adopt a spiral structure which frequently revisits concepts in the last three levels. Moreover, MOOCs are designed for mass usage, and treat all learners uniformly. MOOCs' course content should be supplemented and adjusted according to specific course goals and student needs.

Psychological aspects in children affected by duchenne de boulogne muscular dystrophy

Impairment of intelligence in Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) patients was described by Duchenne de Boulogne himself in 1868. Further studies report intelligence disorders with mayor impairment of memory. The aim of the present study was to assess the presence of affective and personality disorders in a group of children affected by DMD. Twenty six male DMD patients, mean age eleven and four months years old, were assessed for their affective and personality disorder. Only eight subjects had a total IQ below average with major difficulties in verbal and visual-spatial memory, comprehension, arithmetic and vocabulary. All the subjects presented some disorders: tendency to marginalization and isolation, self-depreciation, sense of insecurity, hypochondriac thoughts and marked state of anxiety. These disorders are often a dynamic prolongation of a psychological process which starts when the diagnosis is made and continues, in a slow and latent fashion, throughout the evolution of the disease.