Mentoring has been regarded as a promising way to reach at-risk youth and to strengthen the protective factors. This article focuses on emotions, reflections, and challenges that adult volunteers face in trying to establish and maintain a friend relationship with young adults in a multicomponent mentor setting in Finland. Based on our…

This study explores the complexity of emotionally engaging schoolwork among students by analysing the interrelation between the affective and the social dimensions of emotional engagement. The data were collected from 78 Finnish sixth-grade (aged 12-13 years) and 89 eighth-grade (aged 14-15 years) students using picture tasks. The results show…

This paper draws on feminist new materialist, poststructuralist and post-human theories to rethink discomforting moments when engaging with sensitive topics in teacher education. It is argued that the common approach to such events--as instances of student resistance or pedagogical failures--is both simplistic and problematic, and that a more…

This study focuses on a particular relationship between teachers and one- to three-year-old children: the child in the teacher's lap. When, in what situations, does this happen? Who are the children in the teacher's lap? Why are they there? How do children express emotional well-being when in the teacher's lap? Relational, sociocultural and…

The aim of this study is to answer the following question: what do children tell about their well-being in Finnish day care centres? The theoretical and methodological framework of this study is based on a narrative approach. The research material was collected by participating in the everyday life of three groups of children and listening to…

We compared the primacy of affective versus semantic categorization by using forced-choice saccadic and manual response tasks. Participants viewed paired emotional and neutral scenes involving humans or animals flashed rapidly in extrafoveal vision. Participants were instructed to categorize the targets by saccading toward the location occupied by…

This study focused on the psychosocial aspects of cleft lip and/or palate on maternal emotional reactions and the family, with emphasis on the effect on the maternal-infant bond. Interviews were conducted with 40 mothers of 1-year-old infants with non-syndromic cleft lip and/or palate. The interviews were analyzed using the phenomenological…

In this paper, experiments on the automatic discrimination of basic emotions from spoken Finnish are described. For the purpose of the study, a large emotional speech corpus of Finnish was collected; 14 professional actors acted as speakers, and simulated four primary emotions when reading out a semantically neutral text. More than 40 prosodic…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…