John Cabot University ScholarShip

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  • Publication
    Nurturing Compassion in Schools: A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effectiveness of a Compassionate Mind Training Program for Teachers
    (2022) Matos, Marcela; Albuquerque, Isabel; Galhardo, Ana; Cunha, Marina; Pedroso Lima, Margarida; Palmeira, Lara; Petrocchi, Nicola; McEwan, Kirsten; Maratos, Frances A.; Gilbert, Paul
    Objectives Schools are experiencing an unprecedented mental health crisis, with teachers reporting high levels of stress and burnout, which has adverse consequences to their mental and physical health. Addressing mental and physical health problems and promoting wellbeing in educational settings is thus a global priority. This study investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of an 8-week Compassionate Mind Training program for Teachers (CMT-T) on indicators of psychological and physiological wellbeing. Methods A pragmatic randomized controlled study with a stepped-wedge design was conducted in a sample of 155 public school teachers, who were randomized to CMT-T (n = 80) or a waitlist control group (WLC; n = 75). Participants completed self-report measures of psychological distress, burnout, overall and professional wellbeing, compassion and self-criticism at baseline, post-intervention, and 3-months follow-up. In a sub-sample (CMT-T, n = 51; WLC n = 36) resting heart-rate variability (HRV) was measured at baseline and post-intervention. Results CMT-T was feasible and effective. Compared to the WLC, the CMT-T group showed improvements in self-compassion, compassion to others, positive affect, and HRV as well as reductions in fears of compassion, anxiety and depression. WLC participants who received CMT-T revealed additional improvements in compassion for others and from others, and satisfaction with professional life, along with decreases in burnout and stress. Teachers scoring higher in self-criticism at baseline revealed greater improvements post CMT-T. At 3-month follow-up improvements were retained. Conclusions CMT-T shows promise as a compassion-focused intervention for enhancing compassion, wellbeing and reducing psychophysiological distress in teachers, contributing to nurturing compassionate, prosocial and resilient educational environments. Given its favourable and sustainable effects on wellbeing and psychophysiological distress, and low cost to deliver, broader implementation and dissemination of CMT-T is encouraged.
  • Publication
    Physiological Response to Self-Compassion versus Relaxation in a Clinical Population
    (2023) Naismith, Iona; Otto Scheiber, Clara Sophie; Gonzalez Rodriguez, Daniela; Petrocchi, Nicola
    Background Compassion-focused imagery (CFI) can be an effective emotion-regulation technique but can create threat-focused responses in some individuals. However, these findings have been based on tasks involving receiving compassion from others. Aims This study sought to compare responses CFI involving self-compassion to relaxation and a control task, and to see whether any threat-responses to self-compassion and relaxation decrease with practice. Method 25 participants with depression/anxiety symptoms and high self-criticism and/or low self-compassion engaged in three tasks (control task, relaxation imagery, and CFI) at three or four separate testing sessions, every three days. Heart-rate variability (HRV) was used to explore group-level differences between tasks. Additionally, we identified how many individuals showed a clinically significant change in HRV in response to compassion (compared to baseline) and how many showed such a change during relaxation (compared to baseline). Results During session 1, more individuals had a clinically significant increase in HRV in response to CFI (56%) than in response to relaxation (44%), and fewer had a clinically significant decrease in HRV during CFI (16%) than during relaxation (28%). Comparing the group as a whole, no significant differences between tasks were seen. Repeated sessions led to fewer positive responses to CFI, perhaps reflecting habituation/boredom. Conclusions These preliminary findings suggest that in high self-critics (those most likely to find self-compassion difficult), self-compassionate imagery is no more challenging than standard relaxation tasks. For both compassion and relaxation, some individuals respond positively and others negatively. For those who are not benefiting, practice alone is not sufficient to improve response. Effects may differ for other compassion tasks.
  • Publication
    ‘Selfies’ Under Quarantine: Exploring Networked Emotions in the Time of ‘Social Distancing.’
    (2021) Della Ratta, Donatella
    This essay focuses on auto-ethnography and auto-fiction as USEFUL tools to reflect on the ways in which networked identities are reshaped and reconfigured within the context of a global pandemic where social relationships, family life, work routines, and learning processes are increasingly migrating to the online domain. The piece builds upon the experience of an undergraduate class who collectively contributed to the blog series ‘Selfies Under Quarantine’ during the first severe lockdown in March 2020. It discusses the question of methods and suggests looking at the ‘draft’ as both an aesthetics and an ethics to navigate the current context of crisis.
  • Publication
    Peirce and Cybernetics: Retroduction, Error and Auto-poiesis in Future Thinking
    (2018) Antomarini, Brunella
    The aim of this paper is to connect Peirce’s logic of abduction to the cybernetics of living systems. Living beings cannot be understood through a causalistic epistemology, as they behave according to the effects and not according to the causes. Cybernetics has analyzed the way in which non-trivial machines (that is, machines being able to reproduce themselves by correcting themselves) move through retroaction, or feedback loop: at each step the system (effector) corrects the previous step depending on how far the previous step goes with respect to a possible equilibrium. The dynamics implies a possible inhibition of excessive energy followed by a possible enhancement of insufficient energy. Each of these conditions are errors that automatically correct themselves reaching a temporary state of homeostasis. Self-correction means that they must add to the output a “creative” additional impulse, that is unique and unpredictable (or a new algorithm). The logic that is capable to make sense of this dynamics is Peirce’s abduction, also called retroduction, in that the inferential act retroacts on an incomprehensible fact, an epistemological “error”, by inventing its cause. Thinking and the auto-poiesis of living systems proceed on the same path, replacing occasional strategies to atemporal universal causes. Abduction is the evidence that it is possible to reach a condition of “knowledge” without resorting to causality. The possibility that the “laws of nature”, (science itself), may proceed in this way concludes the essay, by adding physicist Lee Smolin’s notion of the “principle of precedence”, as inspired by Peirce’s idea of the evolution of the laws of nature and their temporal, that is, contingent, character.
  • Publication
    The French Revolution and the Craft of the Liminal Void: From the Sanctity of Power to the Political Power of the Limitless Sacred
    (2018) Roman, Camil
    This paper argues for a political anthropological approach to the study of the French revolution. Looking at the revolution as a moment of liminality, it substantiates two interconnected points. The first is that a proper understanding of the revolutionary dynamic and its lasting effects have to engage closely with the transformation of the sacred and its relation to the existential void. Situated in post-Durkheimian sociology and post-Kantian philosophy, this argument advocates the methodological normalization of metaphysics, drawing attention to the fact that faith belongs to the symbolic, existential and representational realities of any political order, and hence also of its underlying knowledge systems. The second point argues that through the sacrifice of Louis XVI, the French revolution consecrated the ritual and existential sacrifice of the Christian Father. This historical experience is conceptualized as the people’s third body, and the new configuration of the sacred to which it gives birth is interpreted in terms of the liminal void. In this way, the French revolution is shown to constitute the transition from a political order of embodiment – participation in the divine, symbolized by the sacred royal body to a political order of bodies; participation in the liminal void, symbolized by the sacred empty place of the power of the modern democratic imagination.

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