TRAINING STAFF TO INCREASE MANDING IN STUDENTS WITH AUTISM: TWO PRELIMINARY CASE STUDIES

Two case studies evaluated two versions of behavioral skills training on peer‐to‐peer manding. Case Study 1 evaluated the full package of instructions, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback, and Case Study 2 used modeling and feedback only. Both case studies employed AB designs. In both case studies, staff increased correct teaching responses, and students increased the number of independent peer‐to peer mands. These pilot data suggest that staff can readily acquire teaching skills to increase peer‐to‐peer manding and that modeling and feedback may be sufficient to train staff to do so. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Legalising Toleration: a Reply to Balint

I re-present my account of how a liberal democratic society can be tolerant and do so in a way designed to meet Peter Balint??s objections. In particular, I explain how toleration can be approached from a third-party perspective, which is that of neither tolerator nor tolerated but of rule-makers providing for the toleration that the citizens of a society are to extend to one another. Constructing a regime of toleration should not be confused with engaging in toleration. Negative appraisal and power remain ??possibility conditions?? of toleration but they are not necessary features of either a regime of toleration or the sponsors of such a regime.     

A Lover’s Shame

Shame is one of the more painful consequences of loving someone; my beloved’s doing something immoral can cause me to be ashamed of her. The guiding thought behind this paper is that explaining this phenomenon can tell us something about what it means to love. The phenomenon of beloved-induced shame has been largely neglected by philosophers working on shame, most of whom conceive of shame as being a reflexive attitude. Bennett Helm has recently suggested that in order to account for beloved-induced shame, we should deny the reflexivity of shame. After arguing that Helm’s account is inadequate, I proceed to develop an account of beloved-induced shame that rightly preserves its reflexivity. A familiar feature of love is that it involves an evaluative dependence; when I love someone, my well-being depends upon her life’s going well. I argue that loving someone also involves a persistent tendency to believe that her life is going well, in the sense that she is a good person, that she is not prone to wickedness. Lovers are inclined, more strongly than they otherwise would be, to give their beloveds the moral benefit of the doubt. These two features of loving—an evaluative dependence and a persistent tendency to believe in the beloved’s moral goodness—provide the conditions for a lover to experience shame when he discovers that his beloved has morally transgressed.     

Evolutionary psychology is compatible with equity feminism, but not with gender feminism: A reply to Eagly and Wood (2011)

I comment on Eagly and Wood's biosocial constructionist evolutionary theory (2011; DOI: 10.1007/s11199-011-9949-9). Although this gender feminist theory allows for evolved physical differences between men and women and evolved psychological similarities for men and women, it fails to consider evolutionary accounts of psychological sex differences. I hypothesize that gender feminists' reluctance to acknowledge that evolution has left different fingerprints on men's and women's bodies and brains stems from two common misunderstandings of evolutionary psychology: the myth of immutability and the naturalistic fallacy. I conclude that although evolutionary psychology is eminently compatible with equity feminism, evolutionary psychology and feminist psychology will conflict as long as the latter adheres to gender feminism and its unwillingness to acknowledge the evidence for evolved psychological sex differences. Gender feminism's dualistic view of evolution hinders the search for and understanding of the proximate and ultimate causes of inequality. Feminist psychology needs to evolve by embracing equity feminism, which has no a priori stance on the origin or existence of differences between the sexes.     

Creative Activity,Personality, Mental Illness,and Short‐Term Mating Success

It has been argued that creativity evolved, at least in part, through sexual selection to attract mates. Recent research lends support to this view and has also demonstrated a link between certain dimensions of schizotypy, creativity, and short‐term mating. The current study delves deeper into these relationships by focusing on engagement in creative activity and employing an expansive set of personality and mental health measures (Five Factor Model, schizotypy, anxiety, and depression). A general tendency to engage in everyday forms of creative activity was related to number of sexual partners within the past year in males only. Furthermore, schizotypy, anxiety, and Neuroticism were all indirectly related to short‐term mating success, again for males only. The study provides additional support for predictions made by sexual selection theory that men have a higher drive for creative display, and that creativity is linked with higher short‐term mating success. The study also provides support for the contention that certain forms of mental illness may still exist in the gene pool because particular personality traits associated with milder forms of mental illness (i.e., Neuroticism & schizotypy) are also associated directly with creativity and indirectly with short‐term mating success.     

Religion, Contraception, and Method Choice of Married Women in Ghana

Using pooled data from the 1998 and 2003 Demographic and Health Surveys, this paper investigates the association between religion and contraceptive behavior of married women in Ghana. Guided by the particularized theology and characteristics hypotheses, multinomial logit and complementary log-log models are used to explore denominational differences in contraceptive adoption among currently married women and assess whether the differences could be explained through other characteristics. We found that while there were no differences between women of different Christian faiths, non-Christian women (Muslim and Traditional) were significantly more likely to have never used contraception compared with Christian women. Similar observations were made on current use of contraception, although the differences were greatly reduced in the multivariate models.     

Positive fantasies predict low academic achievement in disadvantaged students

Unlike other forms of positive thinking (e.g., expectations), research finds that positive fantasies (experiencing one's thoughts and mental images about the future positively) predict low effort and little success in several domains. However, for vocational education students of low socioeconomic status and minority ethnicity, for whom the present environment is especially difficult, perhaps it would be appropriate to indulge in positive fantasies that depict the future as bright and easily attained. Three studies show that this is not the case. Positive future fantasies measured early in the program predicted more days absent (Studies 2–3) and lower grades at the end of the program (Studies 1–3), even when adjusting for initial academic competence, expectations of successful achievement, and self‐discipline. Expectations of successful achievement predicted fewer days absent and higher grades only when measured midway through the school year, once participants had experience with their own academic standing (Study 3). Results indicate that positive fantasies, which allow people to indulge in images of a bright future, predict poor achievement even in vocational students immersed in a particularly difficult environment. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Co-localisation of abnormal brain structure and function in specific language impairment

We assessed the relationship between brain structure and function in 10 individuals with specific language impairment (SLI), compared to six unaffected siblings, and 16 unrelated control participants with typical language. Voxel-based morphometry indicated that grey matter in the SLI group, relative to controls, was increased in the left inferior frontal cortex and decreased in the right caudate nucleus and superior temporal cortex bilaterally. The unaffected siblings also showed reduced grey matter in the caudate nucleus relative to controls. In an auditory covert naming task, the SLI group showed reduced activation in the left inferior frontal cortex, right putamen, and in the superior temporal cortex bilaterally. Despite spatially coincident structural and functional abnormalities in frontal and temporal areas, the relationships between structure and function in these regions were different. These findings suggest multiple structural and functional abnormalities in SLI that are differently associated with receptive and expressive language processing.