CHOICE-MAKING TREATMENT OF YOUNG CHILDREN'S SEVERE BEHAVIOR PROBLEMS

The choice-making behavior of 5 young children with developmental disabilities who engaged in aberrant behavior was studied within a concurrent operants framework. Experimental analyses were conducted to identify reinforcers that maintained aberrant behavior, and functional communication training packages were implemented to teach the participants to gain reinforcement using mands. Next, a choice-making analysis, in which the participants chose one of two responses (either a mand or an alternative neutral response) to obtain different durations and qualities of reinforcement, was conducted. Finally, treatment packages involving choice making via manding were implemented to decrease inappropriate behavior and to increase mands. The results extended previous applications of choice making to severe behavior disorders and across behaviors maintained by positive and negative reinforcement.     

Helping Children Accept Death and Dying Through Group Counseling

This article suggests that the new wave of openness about death in our culture and the elimination of the death taboo will not be completely accomplished without developing a generalized practice in death counseling with children. A brief historical perspective of research confirms the necessity of including children in discussions about death education. A taped counseling session with several preadolescent boys in a rural midwestern school demonstrates the importance of accepting the deep feelings and fears that children must deal with in order to be free from unnatural anxiety about death and dying as adults.     

Active and passive observers' attraction to a self-disclosing other

Active observer (participant) subjects were induced to make either a high or a low intimacy disclosure about themselves to a partner. Their (videotaped confederate) partner then disclosed either intimately or non-intimately in return. The impressions and attributions of these subjects were compared to the predictions of passive observer subjects (non-participants) who were each furnished with the original instructions, heard a tape recording of a different active observer's disclosure, and watched the same videotape of the confederate that person had seen. As expected, both active observers' responses and passive observers' predictions indicated a preference for the intimate partner. In addition, passive observers' attraction predictions were less positive than active observers' reports. But contrary to the hypotheses, passive observers predicted that active observers would attribute the partner's disclosure more to personalistic causes than was actually the case, and guessed inaccurately that active observers would interpret the partner's intimacy as an indicator of attraction. The methodological implications of these active-passive observer differences for research in self-disclosure and relationships are discussed.     

Instructed versus pharmacological effects of alcohol in alcoholics and social drinkers

Twelve alcoholics and 12 social drinkers were studied in an experiment where instructions about alcohol or placebo were orthogonally crossed with administration of alcohol or placebo in a Balanced Placebo Design. Three subjects were simultaneously observed while watching soccer games on the TV together and having free access to a mixed drink, which in the alcohol conditions contained 150ml of 80% proof vodka. The assessment procedure included several aspects of drinking behavior, behavioral observations during the session, psychiatric ratings and nurse observations before and after each session, ratings for craving, self-reported state anxiety and physiological changes (heart rate and blood pressure). In general, the results showed the alcoholic's behavior to be controlled by instruction-induced expectancies rather than by the actual beverage given, whereas the social drinkers showed tendencies in the opposite direction. The implications of these results for the traditional disease conception of alcoholism and for learning theory approaches are discussed.     

Behavioral thresholds for tones during infancy

An adaptive up-down tracking procedure was used in combination with a visually reinforced head turn response to examine auditory sensitivity for 500, 2000, and 8000-Hz tone bursts in infants 6 to 18 months of age. Six- and 10-month-old infants were tested with headphone presentation of stimuli, while 10-, 14, and 18-month-olds were tested in sound field. Infant threshold estimates for both headphone and sound field were within 15 dB of adult comparisons for all frequencies and age groups. Six-month-olds were significantly less sensitive to the 8000-Hz tone than to either of the lower frequency stimuli, but older infants demonstrated approximately equal sensitivity for all three frequencies tested.     

Work-Home Role Conflict,Family Climate,and Domestic Responsibilities Among Men and Women in Dual-earner Families1

Correlates of work-home role conflict for dual-earner couples were examined. Respondents (N= 208) were an equal number of married, employed men and women with children. Data were collected in the northeastern U.S.A. through a survey which measured work-home role conflict, family climate, domestic responsibilities, and activities performed during one's free time. LISREL was used to determine if domestic responsibilities mediate the correlation between gender and work-home conflict. A regression analysis was used to determine the relative effects of domestic responsibilities and family climate on work-home conflict. Results indicate that (a) work-home role conflict is negatively related to family climate for men as well as for women, (b) gender differences in role conflict are partially attributable to gender differences in domestic responsibilities, and (c) domestic responsibilities and family climate each correlate significantly with work-home role conflict. Findings suggest that how one works hard (the conditions under which one lives) may be just as important as how hard one works (the number of tasks one performs).     

The linguistic organization of public controversy: A note on the pragmatics of political discourse

Conclusion This paper does not mean to imply that it is only public controversy that can meaningfully affect political outcomes, or even that it is the most important factor. Rather, we have attempted to indicate that public controversy constitutes a forum on which political actorsact; on which they attempt to implicate each other and the public in terms of some preferred view of the controversy at hand. It is certainly the case that the formal structure of the government and power relationships provides important constraints in terms of which controversy may take place. Yet within these constraints, actors can meaningfully construct various views of the structure of the controversy which differently construe the rights and obligations of participants. In this sense, the course of public controversy may in part be understood as a function of the language employed by these actors, both to the extent that particular expressions stand as documentary evidence of underlying discrepancies about the shape of the controversy and to the extent that the logic of certain speech-acts constrains the forms subsequent statements may take.     

Temperamental Factors in the Execution of Interrupted Editing Tasks

The question investigated in this study is how the temperament traits of strength of excitation (SE), strength of inhibition (SI), and mobility (MO) affect behaviour during the execution of computer tasks and tasks interrupting them. Several hypotheses, partly derived from the regulative theory of temperament, were tested in an experiment in which the natural environment and the types of task commonly performed by secretaries were simulated. The sample consisted of 39 female secretaries (21–64 years old). It was found that individuals high on SE and MO needed less time to resume tasks after an interruption than individuals low on these temperament traits. Interruptions similar to the main task resulted in longer resumption times for low-SE individuals. MO was negatively related to the time needed to perform the main task. A model describing the relationship between the frequency of switches between tasks and the speed of task performance in low-MO and high-MO individuals is presented.     

Scale invariance in near space: pointing under influence of context

This paper describes the results of a pointing task close to the observer. Unlike most research reported in literature, the stimuli were composed of real solid objects in an unambiguous context, free of any cue conflict. Moreover, the stimuli were either within arm-reach or just beyond arm-reach, thus having strong binocular depth cues. Surprisingly, systematic errors up to four times the standard deviation were found. These errors depended mainly on the variations in context and hardly on egocentric distance. In good first approximation, the results were scale invariant. These results are in direct conflict with classic theories about visual space. The stimuli were unambiguous real 3-D equivalents of the computer-generated stimuli we used in a previous experiment. A comparison of the results did not reveal a clear effect of a depth cue conflict between accommodation and disparity.