Evaluating the evidence base for relational frame theory: a citation analysis

Relational frame theory (RFT) is a contemporary behavior-analytic account of language and cognition. Since it was first outlined in 1985, RFT has generated considerable controversy and debate, and several claims have been made concerning its evidence base. The present study sought to evaluate the evidence base for RFT by undertaking a citation analysis and by categorizing all articles that cited RFT-related search terms. A total of 174 articles were identified between 1991 and 2008, 62 (36%) of which were empirical and 112 (64%) were nonempirical articles. Further analyses revealed that 42 (68%) of the empirical articles were classified as empirical RFT and 20 (32%) as empirical other, whereas 27 (24%) of the nonempirical articles were assigned to the nonempirical reviews category and 85 (76%) to the nonempirical conceptual category. In addition, the present findings show that the majority of empirical research on RFT has been conducted with typically developing adult populations, on the relational frame of sameness, and has tended to be published in either The Psychological Record or the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. Overall, RFT has made a substantial contribution to the literature in a relatively short period of time.     

Is Traditional Gender Ideology Associated with Sex-Typed Mate Preferences? A Test in Nine Nations

Social role theory (Eagly, Wood, & Diekman, 2000) predicts that traditional gender ideology is associated with preferences for qualities in a mate that reflect a conventional homemaker-provider division of labor. This study assessed traditional gender ideology using Glick and Fiske's (1996, 1999) indexes of ambivalent attitudes toward women and men and related these attitudes to the sex-typed mate preferences of men for younger mates with homemaker skills and of women for older mates with breadwinning potential. Results from a nine-nation sample revealed that, to the extent that participants had a traditional gender ideology, they exhibited greater sex-typing of mate preferences. These relations were generally stable across the nine nations.     

Feminism and the Evolution of Sex Differences and Similarities

Distrust between most evolutionary psychologists and most feminist psychologists is evident in the majority of the articles contained in this Special Issue. The debates between proponents of these perspectives reflect different views of the potential for transforming gender relations from patriarchal to gender-equal. Yet, with respect to the overall prevalence of sex differences or similarities, the articles in the Special Issue show that neither feminist psychologists nor evolutionary psychologists have uniform positions. Questions about how and if women and men differ are still under negotiation in the articles in this Special Issue as well as in other research related to evolutionary and feminist psychology. Clearer conclusions would be fostered by standardized metrics for representing male?Cfemale comparisons, more varied research methods for assessing both psychological and biological processes, greater diversity in populations sampled, and more researcher openness to taking into account findings that challenge their theories. Theoretical growth also is needed, especially to develop and integrate the many individual feminism-influenced theories represented in this Special Issue. To this end, we propose an integrative evolutionary framework that recognizes human culture in both ultimate and proximal causes of female and male behavior.     

Internal models for bi-manual tasks

Co-ordinated bi-manual actions form the basis for many everyday motor skills. In this review, the internal model approach to the problem of bi-manual co-ordination is presented. Bi-manual coordinative tasks are often regarded as a hallmark of complex action. They are often associated with object manipulation, whether the holding of a single object between the two hands or holding an object in each hand. However, the task of movement and control is deceptively difficult even when we execute an action with a single hand without holding an object. The simplest voluntary action requires the problems of co-ordination, timing and interaction between neural, muscular and skeletal structures to be overcome. When we are making a movement whilst holding an object, a further requirement is that an internal model is able to predict the dynamics of the object that is being held as well as the dynamics of the motor system. There has been extensive work examining the formation of internal models when acting in novel environments. The majority of studies examine uni-lateral learning of a task generally to the participant's dominant hand. However, many everyday motor tasks are bi-manual, and the existing findings regarding the learning of internal models in uni-manual tasks and their subsequent generalization highlights the complexities that must underlie the formation of bi-manual tasks. Our ability to perform bi-manual tasks raises interesting questions about how internal models are specified for co-ordinative actions, and also for how the motor system learns to represent the properties of objects.     

Developmental changes in the linguistic brain after puberty

The development of reading skills is a complex and very long-lasting process. In an influential study Booth et al. demonstrated age-related changes in the activation of a network of left hemisphere regions, including the inferior frontal area, the superior temporal gyrus, and the angular gyrus. Interestingly, they found that the angular gyrus, which is involved in the mapping between phonological and orthographic representation, is automatically activated in adults during visual orthographic tasks not requiring this operation.     

Does number data entry rely on the phonological loop?

Two experiments investigated effects of articulatory processing on number data entry. Participants entered four-digit numbers presented as either words or numerals on a keyboard, either under an articulatory condition or in silence. In Experiment 1, the articulatory condition was articulatory suppression; in Experiment 2, it was vocalisation. In Experiment 1, the articulatory suppression group typed initial digits faster than the silent group, but for subsequent digits, the opposite pattern occurred at least with word stimuli. In Experiment 2, the silent group typed initial digits faster but typed subsequent digits somewhat slower than the vocalisation group. Thus, articulation of numbers, which promotes entry into the phonological loop of working memory, retards processing of initial digits but enhances processing of subsequent digits.     

Friendly or just polite? The effect of self-esteem on attributions

Studied the effect of a person's self-esteem on his inferences about another person's feelings toward him. Fifty-six mule and female college student subjects of high or low chronic self-esteem (median split; modified version of Janis and Field's ‘Feelings of Inadequacy Scale’) received either a negative or a positive evaluation of themselves. They were told that the evaluation had been written by another subject who had acted either under ‘sincere’ instructions, which allowed him to give his own opinion, or under ‘role-playing’ instructions, which assigned him to write either a positive or a negative evaluation. The subject's take was to decide under which instruction his evaluation had been written. It was predicted from a self-concistency logic that low self-esteem subjects would attribute negative evaluations to ‘sincere’ and positive evaluations to ‘role-playing’ instructions, while high self-esteem subjects would make the reverse attributions. A significant self-esteem × evaluation positivity interaction (p <.01) supported this prediction.     

An intentional cohesion call in male chimpanzees of Budongo Forest

Animal Cognition - Many social animals travel in cohesive groups but some species, including chimpanzees, form flexible fission–fusion systems where individuals have some control over group...     

The Infant–Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (ITSEA): Factor Structure, Reliability, and Validity

In this paper the refinement and psychometric properties of the Infant–Toddler Social and Emotional Assessment (ITSEA) are described. Results from a sociodemographically diverse birth cohort sample of 1,235 parents of children between the ages of 12 and 36 months are presented. Confirmatory factor analyses supported the hypothesized Internalizing, Externalizing, Regulatory, and Competence domains as well as the 17 individual scales that comprise the ITSEA. Findings for 3 additional indices useful in identifying significant psychopathology are presented. Subgroup analyses revealed structural invariance and expected mean level differences across both child sex and 6-month age bands. Child sex differences emerged for some problem and most competence scales, with boys rated as higher on Activity–Impulsivity and girls rated higher on Anxiety and most Competence scales. All competence scores increased across age groups. Problem behaviors showed a more mixed developmental pattern. Test–retest and interrater reliability were acceptable. Associations between the ITSEA and independent evaluator ratings and parental ratings of child behavior problems, temperament, and parental distress support the validity of the instrument.