Critical Issues in Causation and Treatment of Autism: Why Fads Continue to Flourish

The increasing incidence of autism and the lack of specific answers regarding causation have given rise to unproven educational interventions and medical treatments. Parents of a newly diagnosed child can easily fall prey to interventions that promise cures. These interventions may be harmful and, thus, pose one of the critical issues in special education today. This article will discuss some of the suspect interventions that have been popularized through the media (i.e., celebrities, journalists, and professional organizations). The authors argue that using the scientific method is clearly the antidote for pseudoscience; the need for accurate research-based decision making is apparent.     

The minister and the birth of a defective child

Summary There now exists a gap in the humanistic and professional care of the newborn defective child and his family—a gap which is so vital that it further adds to the debilitation of the infant and increases force behind the statement, The family with a handicapped child is a handicapped family. The minister in the community is the logical person by reasons of training, sphere of call, and availability to fill this void and assist parents through this most difficult shock or mourning period.In times of death or severe illness, the family minister does not wait to be called by the family before showing his, and the church's, concern. Neither should he wait in the case of defective birth, for no longer is this a subject to be hidden in closets while parents suffer in agonized self-accusation. The very first days are crucial ones, and the minister that makes himself available to the parents during that time in a supportive, listening post role will produce more positive results than will many sessions of counseling in the later years of that infant's childhood.     

The Effect of African American Skin Color on Hiring Preferences1

The role of African American skin color in hiring decisions was investigated in a 2 × 2 × 2 (Participant Sex × Applicant Sex × Applicant Skin Color) design. College‐age participants (N= 107) were presented with stimuli and asked to make 8 employment‐related decisions. An interaction of applicant skin color and participant sex and a skin‐color main effect were predicted. Fair‐skinned applicants were expected to receive better ratings from men, while dark‐skinned applicants were expected to receive better ratings from women or ratings from women would not differ. Additionally, in general, fair‐skinned individuals were expected to receive better ratings than dark‐skinned individuals. The results were consistent with the hypotheses. Results are discussed in terms of the “what is beautiful is good” stereotype and prior research.     

Auditory discrimination in conditions of noise and quiet by black and white disadvantaged children.

The auditory discrimination of first and third grade children of low socio-economic status was investigated. 17 black and 17 white children were randomly selected from the two grades. The condition for listening was varied, i.e., discrimination in condition of quiet and discrimination in condition of noise, through the use of the Goldman-Fristoe-Woodcock Test of Auditory Discrimination. White third graders were superior performers. The expectation, from the literature, that the auditory discrimination of children from low socio-economic levels would be depressed in conditions of noise was not supported. In fact, black children performed in an inferior manner in conditions of quiet.     

Innovative Assessment of Childhood Trauma and Its Link to HIV and Substance Abuse in Post-Incarcerated Women

Women who are incarcerated often report unresolved early life traumas, which research has linked to subsequent HIV and substance abuse risks. This article presents an arts-based counseling technique used with women re-entering society after incarceration. Women were assessed for childhood trauma (i.e. sexual, emotional, and/or physical abuse) in relation to age of onset and frequency of events using an interactive pictorial assessment technique, Healing Me Timeline activity. The technique allowed women to use color-coded graphs in identifying points along a timeline during which traumatic events occurred and to process insights to foster healthy coping strategies. The timeline activity was an innovative and gender-appropriate method for uncovering the nature and extent of women’s trauma and counseling needs. Facilitators used the counseling tool to assist women in processing personal insights and to make referrals to mental health counseling, medical services, and substance use programs.     

Public Engagement with Climate Change as Scientific Citizenship: A Case Study of World Wide Views on Global Warming

World Wide Views (WWViews) is an innovative participatory methodology that scales up formal public engagement in response to global environmental issues that transcend the boundaries of the nation-state. In September 2009, WWViews on Global Warming enrolled 4,400 lay participants from across 38 countries to discuss global climate policy. The most remarkable outcome was how consistently people from across different political regions and social groups called for a stringent global climate policy. Drawing on scientific citizenship as an analytic lens, this result is positioned, not as a straightforward input into global policy but as an output from a highly formalized process. What forms of citizenship are embodied, projected, and negotiated in WWViews? What are the implications of these tacit forms of citizenship for the types of epistemic agency that emerge as a result? WWViews participants were situated as consumers of scientific knowledge tasked with responding to a limited slate of policy options that they had no role in creating, vetting, or altering. WWViews also projected an image of the global citizen shorn of any meaningful geographical, cultural, or political particularity. Effectively tethering the epistemic capacities of its participants to dominant scientific meanings, WWViews offered limited opportunity for alternative issue-framings or perspectives to emerge. Organizers and researchers of formal public engagement should be attentive to the potential for these initiatives, once scaled up to the global, to impose scientistic issue-framings and correspondingly limited models of epistemic agency.     

Antecedent reinforcement contingencies in the stimulus control of an auditory discrimination

In order to assess possible confounding of discriminative stimulus effects with those produced by the reinforcing stimulus, three groups of four rats each were trained for 45 hr on a variable-interval 1-min reinforcement program. Two groups were run on a multiple variable-interval extinction schedule in which the reinforcement stimulus (S^D) and the nonreinforcement stimulus (S^Δ) were two intensities of a 4-kHz (cps) tone separated by 40 or 10 db. The third group was run on a mixed schedule with a single intensity constantly present. The mixed-schedule animals showed no discrimination of the reinforcement program. Under the multiple schedule, the highest S^Δ rates were obtained after S^D intervals, regardless of the reinforcement availability in the S^D interval. These local rate variations in S^Δ were small in proportion to those produced by the S^D versus S^Δ intensities.