The Fae: The Fae remain in chaos, their leadership in shambles since the disappearance of the Princess. While the council struggles to lead without her, the day to day lives of their people has remained relatively unchanged.
The Daemon: The long awaited war has finally begun, and the Angels have taken advantage of the Daemon Lord’s absence to start targeting important Daemons. The Angels have attacked single Daemons or in those in small groups and while they haven’t made a dent in the Daemon’s numbers the loses sustained are noteworthy.
The Shapeshifters: The old Alpha Female and the new Alpha Male have finally met, and the future of the Shifter race will be determined by the course of their meeting. Angels and Daemons both have their sights on the Shifters while the Shifters themselves would rather remain in the shadows and not take an official side, focusing instead on just surviving.
The Humans: With the Prince now engaged to a Boil commoner against the King and Queen’s wishes and the Princess remaining mysteriously ill, the human population are becoming polarized about the current rule. Some are satisfied with the gentler ruling and others are becoming dissatisfied, wanting to reengage in the war with the Fae while their Princess remains absent.
The Outcasts: With the Angels now engaged in in a war with the Daemons the other Outcast groups have become fearful of being banished once more. The Shadows have become even more elusive, and most ignore the activities of the world at large while Halflings and Dwarves attempt to grow closer to the Fae and Humans.
Armies
Fae: 1,200
Daemons: 900
Shapeshifters: 1,700
Humans: 18,000
Angels: 300
The Song of Heroes: 100
Most of you know Archer is a psychology student in New Zealand, currently in my first year of a PhD in Clinical Psychology. This year I'm presenting at a conference in a parenting symposium, so I thought I'd post my presentation here for anyone who happens to be interested in psychology. Enjoy?
And here's the spoken part of the presentation for anyone that wants more info than can fit on a powerpoint. Just in case any of you are as nerdy as I am when in comes to psych XD
Conference Presentation Fathers as carers and protectors: Does priming the evolutionary role of the father increase or decrease punitiveness?
Hi. My name is Kayla and I’m a Clinical Psychology student at Massey University in Palmerston North. Today I’ll be discussing Fathers as carers and protectors. NEXT SLIDE Parenting is an increasingly relevant area of interest in New Zealand. With the media covering both ends of the spectrum – from shows by psychologists and child caregivers teaching parents appropriate methods of dealing with their kids, to the highly emotive coverage of appalling child abuse cases – the way New Zealander’s treat their children from infancy through to adulthood is an increasingly talked about issue. As research continues to emerge that illustrates the impact that parents and parenting decisions have on a child and the person that they grow up to be, it is becoming increasingly clear that parenting psychology is highly relevant to professionals as well as to both current and prospective parents in this country.
As suggested by frequent news coverage of abuse cases, New Zealand has a high child abuse and maltreatment-related death rate compared to other countries in the OECD, and this can be considered a significant social issue. NEXT SLIDE This significance has certainly already been noted, with the controversial ‘anti-smacking’ law coming into effect in 2007. This is only one example of a punitive method of control for parents who abuse their children or use inappropriate disciplinary methods, however as critics of the law point out it has had no appreciable effect on child abuse rates. While the anti-smacking law may be an appropriate response to unacceptable treatment of children by their parents and other adults, I do believe more needs to be done to address how parents are interacting with their kids well before disciplinary choice escalates into what we might consider to be abuse. The anti-smacking law is designed to react to child abuse after the fact, but we need ways to prevent parents from ever getting there. What we really want to know is ‘how do parents begin to form patterns of physical discipline escalating into abuse, and how can we prevent this from happening?’ NEXT SLIDE Research shows that in a family situation men are most commonly the major aggressors, and are more likely to be physically abusive and cause injuries to children. Although mothers can and do commit violent acts against their children, fathers are much more frequently the perpetrators of physical child abuse. Children at particular risk of physical harm include those who experience parental inadequacy, unavailability, conflict, harsh punishment and emotional neglect, and fathers who have been abused themselves as children are more likely to be abusive towards their own kids. Furthermore, with changing gender and social roles emerging in society right now fathers are becoming more involved in the role of disciplining their children. For many, this represents a significant change from what they know – that is, how their own father was involved in their lives when they were growing up. Appropriate parenting, including the use of effective but acceptable discipline, is a skill and it’s not fair to expect these Dads to always figure it out on their own.
Parenting is both a rewarding and challenging experience, and often one that involves emotional highs and lows. At times being a father is a demanding, thankless and difficult role. The numerous stresses of raising a family and combining this with other demands such as work can feasibly leave any parent struggling to make decisions and cope with their own resources. Early intervention in preventing child abuse means working with parents, including fathers, long before a child comes to the attention of a Government agency with suspected abuse. It requires working at the earliest possible point with families and including all types of fathers in teaching strategies for discipline that do not involve physical force. Our target should not be limited to fathers suspected or known to be violent; not all child abuse is predictable. Use of force can occur in homes without previous known violence and many fathers who may resort to physical force on occasion would never, under current social standards, be named as child abusers. Nevertheless there is obviously an opportunity with these Dads to improve their parenting skills and support them in making better disciplinary choices. Techniques that influence how a father understands his child’s behaviour and how he chooses to respond to it can benefit all New Zealand parents. NEXT SLIDE The current situation in New Zealand, however, does not adequately provide such techniques for fathers to utilise and therefore develop their parenting skills. Quite rightly, New Zealand social policy has focused on ensuring new mothers have the rights and ability to bond with their children and access resources without impinging on their ability to return to the workforce when they choose to. It may be arguable how successful this actually is, however inarguably new fathers are neglected by comparison. Parenting programs are reasonably widespread and accessible – specific programs helping fathers to adjust, connect with, and live harmoniously with their children on the other hand are rare and restricted to small regions in New Zealand. As a result, we have no real idea of what resources and tasks would be effective and useful for fathers should they seek resources or attend parenting classes. NEXT SLIDE In response to this, I decided to undertake a research project looking at strategies we might incorporate into parenting programs that would be specifically relevant and useful for fathers. In order to be useful these strategies need to be brief, easy for anyone to apply, and effective in particular for father’s unique needs. The use of positive affective priming as a strategy is one example of a simple, fast, inexpensive technique that may reduce a fathers’ likelihood of choosing physical force as a disciplinary method. Therefore my research looked specifically into the use of positive affective priming with emotive images to see whether we could cause a change in the way that fathers think about and respond to their children. NEXT SLIDE The reason priming was chosen as the focus rather than another parenting or change strategy is due to the strength of the priming technique in the literature, and the relative ease with which it could be applied in everyday situations. Priming is a powerful but brief technique for changing people’s cognitions. It has a short term, significant effect on specific feelings without the person’s conscious awareness. Parenting is a highly emotive experience associated with both positive and negative feelings; pride, joy, love, anger, sadness, and stress, for example. Therefore, there is potential for the technique of priming to be used to influence an underlying parenting schema and in doing so change the way parents think about child misbehaviour and which disciplinary choices they might make, in a positive direction. Experimental psychologists introduced priming as an intervention more than twenty years ago in order to understand and manipulate emotional and cognitive processing, and priming as a technique is well-supported in experimental literature. What we were less sure about when we began our priming investigation for my research was whether priming could be used effectively with fathers to have a positive outcome on their parenting choices. NEXT SLIDE In considering the relevance of positive affective priming to fathers specifically, we hypothesised that the content of the primes could be an important factor in how well this technique worked with fathers as a group – that is, how strong their responses to the primes would be. Research around priming as a technique has focused heavily on how people can be influenced by primes to vote in elections in a particular way and has found that images are more powerful than audio, in particular priming people to focus more on a presidential candidate’s personality than their political evaluations. Furthermore, it has been found that the content of a candidate’s campaign powerfully primes voters to focus only on the issues stated, leaving them more likely to ignore a candidate’s weaknesses or less popular political strategies. This suggests that the content of a priming image can significantly impact a person’s underlying schema – certainly in political issues, and therefore this effect probably also occurs with other personal schemas – including beliefs and values around parenting. NEXT SLIDE When deciding on the specific content to use for the priming images, I decided to look at the evolved roles of human fathers. It is well supported in the literature that fathers have distinct roles from mothers in their child’s upbringing and that these differences probably arise from discrete evolutionary pressures and social norms for males and females. For example, it is hypothesised that men and women have different sexual strategies because, due to differing biological processes, specific strategies are more or less beneficial for each gender. Typically male mammals benefit more when they invest energy in multiple sexual partners, while female mammals benefit more by spending their time and energy maximising the resources available to themselves and their offspring. As a result mothers traditionally invest more time and energy into raising their children than fathers do. According to evolutionary theory, however, human offspring must have been more likely to survive when both parents invested in parental care, and this has contributed to fathers having a distinct role in their children’s upbringing. Under this model mothers play a loving, nurturing role and are responsible for discipline, while fathers are protectors, providers, and teachers of life skills – particularly physical skills imparted to their sons. Because these roles are believed to be quite distinct to fathers I hypothesised that the priming images would be more powerful and have a greater impact if the content included references to these specific fathering roles. NEXT SLIDE My interest in working with fathers, with reference to evolutionary psychology and with the aim of exploring how we might increase parenting skills in this relatively neglected group, culminated in 2011 when my research involved exposing two groups of fathers to priming images with the aim of reducing their use of punitive punishment methods. The first group was exposed to general images – photographs of fathers hugging or playing with their children in relatable, everyday settings. This corresponded closely to priming research stating that positive emotive images were required for the priming effect to occur. The second group was exposed to images with content relevant to the evolutionary role of fathers – these images depicted fathers protecting children from danger, rescuing them from disasters, and teaching them life skills. The expectation was that both groups would become less blaming of their children for misbehaviour, perhaps viewing certain behaviours as normal and expected for the child’s age, and consequently would also become less punitive in their disciplinary responses to these behaviours, but that the fathers exposed to evolutionarily-relevant images would show a greater movement away from harsh punishment methods. This was measured by giving both groups of fathers a survey regarding their opinions on child misbehaviour and how they might choose to respond to it both before and after the priming intervention. NEXT SLIDE Interestingly, the results were not exactly what we expected. While the general group did indeed become slightly less punitive and less blaming for child misbehaviour, the evolutionary group became both more blaming and more punitive. This research was a preliminary investigation into the use of priming with fathers in New Zealand and therefore only a small group of participants was used. The results that we obtained cannot be considered a definite outcome until further research has been conducted; however this is an interesting finding that definitely warrants discussion and further exploration. At this stage is appears that exposing fathers to evolutionary-based priming images may have the opposite effect than what was intended, and it is possible this is due specifically to the content of some of the images. NEXT SLIDE One idea to consider is that the evolutionary images based around protecting and rescuing children from danger, a role particularly important to fathers from an evolutionary perspective, may have actually made the participants anxious and therefore more likely to use harsh disciplinary methods in order to protect their children from harm. Several of the evolutionary images depicted men rescuing children from natural disasters or defending children from potential danger to represent the evolutionary role of fathers as protectors, and it is possible this prompted the selection of punitive disciplinary methods with the aim of preventing children from getting themselves into this kind of trouble again.
It is necessary to explore this theory further, and also to consider other reasons the evolutionary group may have become more punitive. Perhaps the images reminded them of more traditional fathering roles, prompting the participants to become more punitive because they believed that was what was expected of them. It is also possible the fathers had a general negative reaction to the images because they may not have represented what they believed their role as fathers to be. In relation to this I interviewed my participants to find out their beliefs and experiences of fatherhood, and the findings in this section of my research were very interesting. NEXT SLIDE One thing that became very clear is that father’s roles have expanded from the traditional roles commonly stated in the evolutionary literature. Although I only had a small sample of fathers to talk to the themes they communicated when we discussed parenting and their experiences of being Dads were strong; love and nurturance is no longer the sole domain of the mother, and on top of this it seems to be more and more common for fathers to be involved equally in disciplining their children. This has traditionally been seen as the mother’s role – with the stereotypical dad away from home for much of the day it makes sense that it fell to the parent who spent more time with the children to coordinate and carry out discipline for bad behaviour. However, even though many of the fathers I worked with had full time jobs, they all firmly believed that discipline was a shared responsibility and stated they were actively involved in deciding how children would be disciplined, and in carrying it out. This may be due to the greater involvement fathers seem to have in their children’s lives as a whole, and from a much younger age than was previously the norm. NEXT SLIDE This may reflect that fact that fathering is also a social construct – we can see how the role of the father has changed over time as different societal norms shape the behaviour of men and women. Traditionally men have been considered the ‘bread-winner’ and therefore have often been assigned the role of the main income earner in the family. Women were far more likely to stop working or reduce their work hours when they had children. However, in recent times changing gender roles have challenged this social norm and it increasingly normal and acceptable for the father to stay home with his children, while women return to work. As a result it is not only typical but expected that fathers are much more involved with many aspects of their children’s lives. Does this represent a move away from the evolved roles of fatherhood, and could this be part of the reason that my participants became more punitive when faced with traditional fathering roles in the priming images? NEXT SLIDE This finding suggests that it is, indeed, important to explore how we can make sure fathers in New Zealand are educated, able and willing to use appropriate disciplinary methods with their children. The overwhelming consensus from the fathers that I worked with is that their roles are no longer obvious or clear – they’re expected to be there more, be more involved, and know what to do and when to do it. I asked my participants to compare their fathering experience with their memories of how their own father was involved with them, and most were of the opinion that far more hands on involvement was expected of them than was ever expected of their fathers. They seemed to view this as a positive development – it was important to these Dads that I understand how much they valued their opportunities and time with their children – but the fact that these men were more involved in aspects of parenting typically left to mothers in the past, even as recently as one generation ago, suggests that an opportunity is available to make sure these Dads – venturing into a new phase of fatherhood they don’t fully understand and don’t have a reliable example for – have the resources and knowledge they need to be confident they’re doing a good job. NEXT SLIDE In order to further explore the results obtained in this experiment, it would be ideal to repeat the priming experiment with a much larger sample of fathers. Four groups could be used – one exposed to general primes, one exposed to evolutionary primes, one exposed to both general and evolutionary primes, and a control group not exposed to any priming images. This larger, more complex design would allow us to explore whether the finding with our original evolutionary group is reliable or not, and to tease out more clearly the reasons behind the findings. We also need to keep talking to fathers in New Zealand to fully understand their experiences and understanding of fatherhood, and ensure this group is not neglected in future research. NEXT SLIDE I believe this research is an early step towards establishing a greater base of knowledge with which to work with a relatively neglected group in the current research – fathers – and hopefully that knowledge will allow us to support these Dads as and when they need it, particularly in forming good parenting skills and habits with the new demands being placed on fathers in mind. I learned from my initial group of participants that many fathers in New Zealand really value being more involved with their children than they felt their Dads were with them, but that they do find these demands challenging. Furthermore, many of the participants were advocates of asking for help when they needed it; in general, these Dads were prepared to look for resources and support when they were struggling. In light of this it seems that we have an obligation to make sure these resources are available, including parenting classes, support, or information aimed specifically at fathers and their unique needs. Positive affective priming is just one technique we are exploring, but I hope that in doing so we can move towards developing more efficient, effective, targeted support for the modern father in New Zealand.