Operant conditioning of autogrooming in vervet monkeys: Cercopithecus aethiops

Vervet monkeys received food reinforcement contingent on autogrooming. Experiment 1 reinforced grooming on a schedule of increasing intermittency and grooming increased in frequency and duration; with only pauses reinforced, grooming decreased in frequency and duration. Experiment 2 demonstrated differentiation of operant autogrooming; in each session a different single form of grooming was reinforced (for example, grooming the tail only), and that form increased in frequency while other forms became less frequent. In Experiment 3 scratching was succesfully conditioned with a method that selectively reinforced variety in behavior; reinforcement was contingent on a shift in scratching form. In Experiment 4, with no contingencies on grooming, a prefood stimulus did not increase autogrooming whether or not grooming had previously resulted in contingent reinforcement. The form of conditioned autogrooming resembled the form of unconditioned autogrooming. The discussion suggests how reinforcement principles can account for changes in the topography of operant behavior.     

Current sex role conceptions and conflict

Beliefs about role sharing or sex typing in occupations, positions of authority, the care of infants and children, housekeeping chores, responsibility for the economic support of the family, and the handling of family finances were investigated for 1,048 men and women residing in New York City. Beliefs about goals of the women's movement, about equality of the sexes, and about the elimination of sex typing in the socialization of children were also investigated. Questionnaires were distributed in the spring and fall of 1973 at several business firms, university campuses, shopping centers in black and white working class districts, and at a professional building. All of the independent variables — gender, age, marital status, occupation, educational level, religion, and ethnicity — were significantly related to beliefs about sex roles. Gender was the overriding independent variable, however. Significant differences in beliefs between the sexes persisted within the categories established by the other independent variables. For the total sample, discrepancies in the beliefs of men and women ranged from very highly significant to significant on almost all items on the questionnaire, although a majority of both sexes opted for more equality, less sex typing, and more role sharing. Role conflict, insofar as this stems from a lack of mutuality in role definitions and expectations, would appear to be a likely experience of many of the men and women interviewed. The role conflict model is a valuable tool that should be applied to actual interactional settings, involving men and women, in future research.     

Parent and sibling comprehension of children's speech

In this research, the capacity of parents and siblings to understand the speech of children in early phases of language development was investigated. The utterances of young children were video tape recorded and presented to family members and nonparent and nonsibling controls. Family members showed a comprehension advantage over the appropriate control groups.     

USING PRESCHOOL MATERIALS TO MODIFY THE LANGUAGE OF DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN1

Although language remediation programs have generally been conducted with the use of special materials in structured group settings, traditional preschool practice emphasizes “incidental teaching” incorporated into children's free play. To determine if incidental teaching practices could be effective in improving children's speech, this study investigated the spontaneous speech of 12 disadvantaged children during free-play periods over eight months of a preschool program. Whenever the children selected a preschool play material, they were prompted and required to ask for it, first by name (noun), then by name plus a word that described the material (adjective-noun combination), then by use of a color adjective-noun combination, and finally by requesting the material and describing how they were going to use it (compound sentence). As each requirement was made, the children's general use of that aspect of language markedly increased, but little change was noted in the amount or nature of the children's interactions with teachers or their use of a set of materials to which they had free access. This study demonstrates that preschool free-play periods can be powerful “incidental teaching” periods by capitalizing on moments when children seek new play materials.     

Measures of interobserver agreement: Calculation formulas and distribution effects

Seventeen measures of association for observer reliability (interobserver agreement) are reviewed and computational formulas are given in a common notational system. An empirical comparison of 10 of these measures is made over a range of potential reliability check results. The effects on percentage and correlational measures of occurrence frequency, error frequency, and error distribution are examined. The question of which is the best measure of interobserver agreement is discussed in terms of critical issues to be considered     

IN VIVO LANGUAGE INTERVENTION: UNANTICIPATED GENERAL EFFECTS

After observing the lack of generalization of language trained in highly structured training sessions using established behavior modification techniques, “incidental teaching” procedures were developed to change the use of specified language behaviors in the natural environment. This paper reports an analysis of the general changes in the language, other than that specifically targeted by the incidental teaching procedures, used by disadvantaged preschool children. The daily language samples of disadvantaged children involved in a previously reported experiment to increase compound sentence usage were reexamined and compared to comparable records of other disadvantaged children and of middle-class children of college parents in order to assess possible general effects of the intervention program. Whereas the language that both groups of comparison children used changed little across the preschool year, the amount of talking by the children in the experimental program increased markedly. Their use of more elaborate vocabulary and more elaborate sentences also increased in direct proportion to the increases in overall language use, such that both language use and language elaboration in the experimental group of children changed from a pattern similar to the comparison group of disadvantaged children to a pattern similar to the comparison group of middle-class children. It is argued that some general features of the incidental teaching procedure—differentially attending to child overtures and responding relative to the child's selected topic (reinforcer)—contributed to the increase in overall language use beyond the specific language behavior targeted, and that this increase in the probability of children's talking itself resulted in the substantial increases in elaboration seen in the children's spontaneous language. Because, at least in children with fairly well-developed language repertoires, language use is contextually controlled, talking more involves talking in more varied and complex contexts, which inevitably produces the use of more elaborate language.     

Family therapy for continuing professional education

This is a report on a program of family therapy instruction intended as a continuing professional education service to mental health personnel. The rapid expansion of the program since its inception in late 1971 is due to increasing demand from human service agencies in and around the Greater Philadelphia area. By the end of 1978 more than 550 had participated. Approximately 15% went on to higher levels of family therapy training available at the Department of Family Psychiatry of Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute. Some characteristics of participants are described: most are master's level personnel representing a wide variety of human service agencies within a 100-mile radius of Philadelphia; most had a positive response to the training; most did not intend to become family therapists but wanted an exposure to theory and methods. Comments are included by selected category of how participants use what they learn.     

Stress,strain, and hardiness as predictors of adaptation in farm and ranch families

We examined the relationship between potential family vulnerability factors (stressor and strains), manifestations of maladaptation (family discord and distress), family strengths (hardiness), and measures of bonadaptation (quality of life) as reported by 188 men and women representing 100 Idaho farm and ranch families. Family strains, and stressors unique to farming and ranching, were positively associated with family discord and distress but negatively associated with hardiness and quality of life. Greater family hardiness as reported by both wives and husbands was positively correlated with their perceptions of family quality of life. The results have implications for mental health professionals and family life educators whose goal is to help farm and ranch families manage stress more effectively, increase hardiness, and enhance their overall quality of life.     

Evaluation of a dynamical model of speech perception

Previous work (Tuller, Case, Ding, & Kelso, 1994) has revealed signature properties of nonlinear dynamical systems in how people categorize speech sounds. The data were modeled by using a twowell potential function that deformed with stimulus properties and was sensitive to context. Here we evaluate one prediction of the model—namely, that the rate of change of the potential’s slope should increase when the category is repeatedly perceived. Judged goodness of category membership was used as an index of the slope of the potential. Stimuli from a “say”-“stay” continuum were presented with gap duration changing sequentially throughout the range from 0 to 76 to 0 msec, or from 76 to 0 to 76 msec. Subjects identified each token as either “say” or “stay” and rated how good an exemplar it was of the identified category. As predicted, the same physical stimulus presented at the end of a sequence was judged a better exemplar of the category than was the identical stimulus presented at the beginning of the sequence. In contrast, stimuli presented twice near the middle of a sequence with few (or no) stimuli between them, as well as stimuli presented with an intervening random set, showed no such differences. These results confirm the hypothesis of a context-sensitive dynamical representation underlying speech.     

Cacao Beans and Chili Peppers: Gender Socialization in the Cosmology of a Yucatec Maya Curing Ceremony

Maya symbols associate cultural interpretationsof biological reproduction with gender roles within acosmological model of the natural world. Thesetraditional symbols were used in a ceremony performed to cure the pubescent daughter of a modernizingfamily. She was suffering "ataques de nervios"(nervous attacks, including muscle spasms and loss ofconsciousness) believed to be caused by a delay in the onset of menarche. Analysis of thesymbols relied on multiple approaches that alloweddecoding of ceremonial symbols as references to (1) thegendered pairing of marriage, (2) the socialreproduction of gender through the generations, (3) thereproductive aspects of human bodies as symbols ofinterdependency, and (4) maleness and femaleness asprimary forces of the Maya cosmos. The traditionalsymbols, combined with the teachings of the healer,provided an interpretation of the biological differencesbetween male and female bodies within an overarchingcosmological system. The primary symbols referred explicitly to male and female genitalia andmenstrual blood as symbols for the reproduction ofgender through generations of mothers and daughters,fathers and sons. The ceremony was apparentlyeffective-despite a context of rapid modernization in whichfamily planning, formal education, and new economicopportunities increasingly result in employment of womenoutside the home.