Offender reintegration : an RNR-GLM framework

According to the Good Lives Model, the inability to meet human needs in an adaptive manner - through lack of suitable circumstances, abilities, or opportunity - compels the individual to address this deficiency through other (maladaptive) means available to them. Thus the GLM contends that offending behavior serves a specific function and that different behaviors (crimes) are used to meet different needs. This presentation will discuss how the Good Lives Model can be used, in conjunction with that of the Risk-Needs Model, in a prison service. The combined model develops and implements programming for offenders prior to release into the community by mapping the offender's offence, social and psychological history against the secondary goods described in the Good Lives Model (i.e., the concrete means by which primary goods or human needs can be achieved), with identified deficits in secondary goods being the focus of intervention.

The process of interpersonal perspective taking

Perspective taking, the main cognitive component of empathy, has a particularly important and complex role to play in the clinician-client relationship, particularly in mental health nursing. However, despite extensive investigation into the outcomes of this construct (e.g. sympathy, altruism), the process by which people take another's psychological point of view has received comparatively little attention. The purpose of this study was to investigate what the individual does when attempting to take the perspective of another person. The aims were to identify the specific strategies people used to accomplish this task, to consider how and why these strategies were chosen, and the relationship between the strategies and subsequent outcomes. Participants described an example of their own perspective-taking experience. Adopting an interpretive phenomenological approach, analysis resulted in the generation of several themes of direct relevance to both the perspective taking process and the wider empathic experience. Of particular importance were two superordinate themes, use of other-information and use of self-information. One significant subordinate theme (within use of selfinformation) to emerge was that of past experience, where the participant had experienced either (a) a similar role to that which they occupied in the present situation, or (b) a similar situation to that of the target person. Both of these experiences were determinants of how easy participants perceived the task of apprehending the target’s perspective. Within the wider empathic experience, themes included emotional manifestations (e.g. sympathy), as well as judgements of appropriate behaviours. Implications of findings when working in clinical and mental health settings are discussed.

Popular fiction and the emotional turn : the case of women in late Victorian Britain

Many within the history profession today consider that we are experiencing an ‘emotional turn’, a perception that has been spurred by a recent proliferation of research centres and outpouring of publications exploring the concept of emotion. Interest in this field looks likely to grow, although there are methodological challenges that have yet to be overcome, as, of course, there are with any newly emerging field of study. One main concern is source material. Attempting to access such an elusive and intensely subjective area of historical inquiry as emotions requires seeking out new sources, as well as returning to old ones with a fresh eye, with new questions in mind. In the specific realm of the emotional lives of women living in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, fiction proves a promising source – popular fiction especially. This is due to the fact that this was the era that ushered in the modern bestseller, novels that more often than not explored the everyday and the emotional, novels that were thought to have been ‘devoured’ by women in particular. This essay plots recent developments in the burgeoning area of emotions history, as well as those that have taken place in relation to the use of fiction as evidence in a history of women’s interior lives. It argues that, at this point in the development of emotions history, when questions of methodology, interdisciplinarity and sources are being addressed more widely, consideration should be given to popular fiction as a readily available pathway, if not an uncomplicated one, into the emotions of the past.

Structure and properties of biomedical films prepared from aqueous and acidic silk fibroin solutions

Silk fibroin films are promising materials for a range of biomedical applications. To understand the effects of casting solvents on film properties, we used water (W), formic acid (FA), and trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) as solvents. We characterized molecular weight, secondary structure, mechanical properties, and degradation behavior of cast films. Significant degradation of fibroin was observed for TFA-based film compared to W and TA-based films when analyzed by SDS-PAGE. Fibroin degradation resulted in a significant reduction in tensile strength and modulus of TFA-based films. Compared to water, TFA-based films demonstrated lower water solubility (19.6% vs. 62.5% in 12 h) despite having only a marginal increase in their ß-sheet content (26.9% vs. 23.7%). On the other hand, FA-based films with 34.3% ß-sheet were virtually water insoluble. Following solubility treatment, ß-sheet content in FA-based films increased to 50.9%. On exposure to protease XIV, water-annealed FA-based films lost 74% mass in 22 days compared to only 30% mass loss by ethanol annealed FA films. This study demonstrated that a small variation in the ß-sheet percentage and random coil conformations resulted in a significant change in the rates of enzymatic degradation without alteration to their tensile properties. The film surface roughness changed with the extent of enzymatic hydrolysis.