Yes, it is 2014, and welcome to a new issue of the journal for the year. The journal will soon be available to you online when the APACs new website is up and running. All back issues from volume 1, number 1 in 1987 will also be available. After this time you will be able to choose to use both the online version and the printed one, or decline the printed version. More on this in the APAC newsletter later in the year.
The first three articles in this issue examine aggression in students. Deborah Price and her colleagues from the University of South Australia explore students’ attitudes in those who witness bullying online, called cyber-bystanders. After viewing a digital animation vignette, secondary school students reported that they see cyber-bystanders as having the capacity to morally engage in cyberbullying incidents, but that there are some barriers to their active positive engagement. In the second article, Lynn Priddis and colleagues from Western Australia studied aggression in school-aged children. They found that clinically aggressive children showed many more internalising symptoms, such as anxiety and depression, than the non-aggressive children. Treatment principles for these children are discussed. The third article on aggression is from Ireland, by McGuckin and Minton, who write about two frameworks for school-based psychologists and counsellors — Bronfenbrenner's ecological model and the Bildung-Psychology approach — to assist in organising, synthesising and understanding information about a child in a particular environment. They illustrate these models by applying them to the issues of school bullying and violence.
The next article, by Serap Nazli, looks at career development in primary schools, a much neglected topic. The findings from Turkey indicated that although students were able to associate their own personal characteristics with particular careers, they were less knowledgeable about these career implications.
The next set of three articles deals with university students. Demirli and Demir looked at loneliness among Turkish university students. Furlonger and Gencic's paper examined Australian distance education counselling students and their satisfaction, stress, coping and academic performance compared to students who studied counselling on campus. The last article, by Morton, Mergler and Boman, looked at Australian high school students managing the transition to university. Those students with high levels of optimism and low levels of depression and anxiety seemed to adapt better than those who were pessimistic, anxious and depressed. Implications for psychologists and counsellors working in schools are addressed.
I hope you are thinking of contributing to the next special issue on psycho-educational assessment or a paper for the practitioners’ section.
