OBSERVATIONAL EFFECTS ON THE PREFERENCES OF CHILDREN WITH AUTISM

Children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may play with limited objects or toys, making it difficult for teachers to identify reinforcers to use in teaching new skills. The goal of this study was to alter children's preferences from highly preferred toys to toys that were originally less preferred using an observational pairing procedure. Child participants observed a preferred adult playing with toys that were initially less preferred by the child. This intervention resulted in a shift in preference toward the item manipulated by the adult. Maintenance of the changed preference was idiosyncratic across participants. Results suggest a procedure for expanding the range of items that students with ASD will select.     

Can,and should,behavioural neuroscience influence public policy?

Recent years have seen enormous demand amongst policy makers for new insights from the behavioural sciences, especially neuroscience. This demand is matched by an increasing willingness on behalf of behavioural scientists to translate the policy implications of their work. But can neuroscience really help shape the governance of a nation? Or does this represent growing misuse of neuroscience to attach scientific authority to policy, plus a clutch of neuroscientists trying to overstate their findings for a taste of power?     

On the role of social interaction in social cognition: a mechanistic alternative to enactivism

Researchers in the enactivist tradition have recently argued that social interaction can constitute social cognition, rather than simply serve as the context for social cognition. They contend that a focus on social interaction corrects the overemphasis on mechanisms inside the individual in the explanation of social cognition. I critically assess enactivism??s claims about the explanatory role of social interaction in social cognition. After sketching the enactivist approach to cognition in general and social cognition in particular, I identify problems with an enactivist taxonomy of roles for social interaction in the explanation of social cognition (contextual, enabling, and constitutive). In particular, I show that this enactivist taxonomy does not clearly distinguish between enabling conditions and constitutive elements, which would make them in danger of committing the coupling-constitution fallacy found in some attempts to extend cognition. I explore resources enactivism has to more clearly demarcate constitutive parts of a cognitive system, but identify problems in applying them to some of the main cases of social cognition enactivists characterize as being constituted by social interaction. I offer the mechanistic approach to explanation as an alternative that captures much of what enactivists want to say about the relations between social and individual levels, but views social interactions from the perspective of embedded cognition rather than as being constitutive of social cognition.     

Moderators of the internalization–body dissatisfaction relationship in middle school girls

The purpose of the present study was to replicate and extend previous research by examining the moderating effects of self-esteem, physical self-concept, physical appearance comparisons, BMI, pubertal status, and cardiorespiratory fitness, on the internalization–body dissatisfaction relationship in middle school girls. Hierarchical multiple regression (HMR) was used to examine direct and moderating effects of these variables. Internalization was related directly and significantly to body dissatisfaction, as were the proposed moderators (i.e., self-esteem, physical self-concept, physical appearance comparisons, BMI, pubertal status, and cardiorespiratory fitness); however, these variables failed to significantly influence the internalization–body dissatisfaction relationship. Possible explanations for the lack of moderating effects and directions for future research are discussed.     

Individual differences in the anterior insula are associated with the likelihood of financially helping versus harming others

The neural basis of individual differences in positive and negative social decisions and behaviors in healthy populations is yet undetermined. Recent work has focused on the potential role of the anterior insula in guiding social and nonsocial decision making, but the specific nature of its activation during such decision making remains unclear. To identify the neural regions mediating individual differences in helpful and harmful decisions and to assess the nature of insula activation during such decisions, in the present study we used a novel fMRI task featuring intentional and unintentional decisions to financially harm or help persons in need. Based on a whole-brain, unbiased approach, our findings indicate that individual differences in dorsal anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and right temporo-parietal junction activation are associated with behavioral tendencies to financially harm or help another. Furthermore, activity in the dorsal anterior insula and ACC was greatest during unintended outcomes, whether these were gains or losses for a charity or for oneself, supporting models of the role of these regions in salience prediction error signaling. Together, the results suggest that individual differences in risk anticipation, as reflected in the dorsal anterior insula and dorsal ACC, guide social decisions to refrain from harming others.     

State-trace analysis can be an appropriate tool for assessing the number of cognitive systems: A reply to Ashby (2014)

Ashby (2014) has argued that state-trace analysis (STA) is not an appropriate tool for assessing the number of cognitive systems, because it fails in its primary goal of distinguishing single-parameter and multiple-parameter models. We show that this is based on a misunderstanding of the logic of STA, which depends solely on nearly universal assumptions about psychological measurement and clearly supersedes inferences based on functional dissociation and the analysis of interactions in analyses of variance. We demonstrate that STA can be used to draw inferences concerning the number of latent variables mediating the effects of a set of independent variables on a set of dependent variables. We suggest that STA is an appropriate tool to use when making arguments about the number of cognitive systems that must be posited to explain behavior. However, no statistical or inferential procedure is able to provide definitive answers to questions about the number of cognitive systems, simply because the concept of a “system” is not defined in an appropriate way.     

Sacred Communities: Contestations and Connections

This article discusses a project whose purpose was to review existing qualitative and quantitative data from two separate studies to provide new insights about everyday religion and belonging. Researchers engaged in knowledge exchange and dialogue with new and former research participants, with other researchers involved in similar research, and with wider academic networks beyond the core disciplines represented here, principally anthropology and geography. Key concluding themes related to the ambivalent nature of ‘faith’, connections over place and time, and the contested nature of community. Implicit in terms like ‘faith’, ‘community’, and ‘life course’ are larger interwoven narratives of space, time, place, corporeality, and emotion. The authors found that understanding how places, communities, and faiths differ and intersect requires an understanding of social relatedness and boundaries.     

The correlates of traditional religious beliefs in Britain

This study provides an across time analysis of traditional religious beliefs and examines the socio-structural and religious correlates of such beliefs in Britain. It examines belief in God, life after death, hell, heaven, sin, as well as the notion of a personal God. It undertakes multivariate analysis of a recurrent social survey conducted over several decades. The main findings are that there is no uniform decline in traditional beliefs, with the picture one of change and continuity. Women, religious adherents and those showing greater religious commitment are more likely to hold traditional beliefs. There is a mixed picture for age effects while higher socio-economic status tends to lead to a lower likelihood of holding religious beliefs, as hypothesised by ‘deprivation theory’.