Size doesn't matter: emotional content does not determine the size of objects in children's drawings

Abstract

In Experiment 1 we examined whether children spontaneously alter the size of objects in their drawings of emotionally-laden events. To do this, we evaluated children's drawings of their own personal, past experiences. Children were asked to draw a picture of an event that had made them happy and an event that had made them sad. We found no differences in the size of object that children drew in their positive and negative emotional events. In Experiment 2, we asked adults with and without clinical training to discriminate children's drawings of happy events from their drawings of sad events. There was no difference in the accuracy of raters as a function of clinical expertise. Moreover, performance for both groups was at chance when we removed drawings with specific emotional indicators from the set (e.g. smiles or tears). We conclude that the emotional interpretation of drawings on the basis of the size of objects in that drawing is fraught with difficulty. We question the projective use of drawings in forensic and clinical practice.     

Quality of low secure services in the UK: development and use of the Quality of Environment In Low Secure Services (QELS) checklist

Low secure services provide care for psychiatric patients whose risk cannot be safely managed in other settings. The physical environment in these units plays an important role in supporting recovery and risk management. We developed the Quality of Environment in Low secure Services (QELS) checklist to assess the quality of the physical environment of these services. Using recommendations from previously published standards we piloted a draft checklist with a weighted scoring system reflecting the views of patients and providers. The checklist showed good criterion validity and inter-rater reliability. Data collected from 33 low secure services showed considerable variation in the quality of the physical environment. The QELS checklist provides an accessible and reliable means for managers and clinicians to assess whether the quality of the physical environment of low secure units meets recommended standards and can be used to support efforts to improve the quality of care delivered by these services.     

Integrating ‘new polities’ into ‘old polities’: The Swiss party elite

This article offers a new approach to the important question of ‘New Polities’. After discussing various interpretations of the phenomenon, it proposes a conceptualisation on the basis of empirical data drawn from a study of the Swiss party élite. These data show that a New Politics dimension can effectively be measured, and that the ‘left‐right’ axis can be considered to represent an almost perfect synthesis between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ politics.     

Captain Deleuze and the white whale: Melville,moby‐dick,and the cartographic inclination

“Captain Deleuze and the White Whale: Melville, Moby‐Dick, and the Cartographic Inclination”; Herman Melville is usually viewed as one of the United States's darker, more brooding authors, but Deleuze, in his many scattered comments on him, finds a strikingly different figure. Clearly Deleuze feels a strong kinship with this 19th‐century writer, and he seems to find in Melville a perspective that is at some distance from the Melville currently configured by the American academy. This essay reads parts of The Fold and A Thousand Plateaus through a lens provided by Melville, specifically the Melville of Moby‐Dick, arguing that a complex notion of the fold provides a central feature of both authors, concept of human agency.     

Unsettling the metaphysics of neo-classical micro-economic and management thinking

Neo-classical economics and management theory is driven by a conception of self and self-interest that is formally expressed as utility maximization. Such theory is increasingly under attack, but not in ways that recognize its Cartesian metaphysical ground as the problem. An exposition of the role of Descartes' dualistic ontology in underwriting the “self” of self-interest suggests new avenues of escape both from the inconsistencies often pointed out between the behavior dictated by utility maximization and that observed in actual experience, and from the problem entailed by trying to analyze business and economic phenomena in ethically neutral ways.