BEHAVIORAL ASSESSMENT AND TREATMENT OF CHRONIC FOOD REFUSAL IN HANDICAPPED CHILDREN

In this study, we examined the eating behavior of four handicapped children, none of whom exhibited self-feeding skills. All children had a history of food refusal and were nutritionally at risk; one child received all nourishment by way of a gastrostomy tube. Baseline data taken during mealtimes indicated that all children accepted very little food, expelled food frequently, and engaged in a number of disruptive behaviors. Treatments consisted of one or more of the following contingent events: social praise, access to preferred foods, brief periods of toy play, and forced feeding. Results of multiple-baseline and reversal designs showed marked behavioral improvement for each child and increases in the amount of food consumed. Further improvements were noted at follow-up, which ranged from 7 to 30 months posttreatment.     

Self-schemas,depression, and the processing of personal information in children

Recent research in information processing has yielded evidence supporting the self-as-schema model with adults. Further self-schema research with depressed and nondepressed persons has suggested the existence of negative self-schemas in depression, lending support to a content-specificity self-schema model. The present studies were designed to investigate the applicability of the self-as-schema model to children and to examine the extent of negative self-schemas in relatively depressed children. A depth-of-processing incidental recall memory paradigm was employed with two groups of normal third- to sixth-grade children. Results supported the self-as-schema model as applied to children, even the youngest group, by indicating superior recall for words encoded under self-reference instructions, compared to semantic or structural orienting instructions. The content-specificity hypotheses were tested with relatively depressed and nondepressed children, and were supported only for the nondepressed children, who recalled mostly positive content words. The relatively depressed children did not demonstrate content specificity in their recall, showing a more “confused” pattern, and the results were discussed in terms of a developmental model of acquisition of depression vulnerability requiring repeated depressive experiences over time. Although the results were consistent with a self-schema approach, current controversies over the implications of depth-of-processing methods require further research to clarify mechanisms of enhanced self-reference recall.     

Reading skill and the use of orthographic knowledge by Mature Readers

Summary Butler and Hains (1979) found individual differences in the effect of word length on RT in word naming and lexical-decision tasks; subjects scoring high on a vocabulary test were much less affected by word length than subjects with low scores. The present study attempted to determine whether such differences could be due to differences in the use of intraword structure, since word recognition has been linked, both empirically (Mason, 1978; Scheerer-Neumann, 1981) and theoretically (Mewhort & Campbell, 1981) to the use of orthographic redundancy. In Experiment 1, subjects were shown tachistoscopically presented letter strings varying in approximation to English. High vocabulary subjects were more capable of capitalizing on the redundancy with the higher-order approximations. Experiment 2 then established that performance on the vocabulary test was correlated with reading skill, measured by the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, and that skilled readers were more sensitive to the syllable structure in words. In the experiment, subjects were shown eight-letter words presented as three separate word units which either matched or violated syllable boundaries in the word. Skilled readers were more sensitive to the difference between syllable and nonsyllable units than were less skilled readers. The results obtained by Butler and Hains appear to reflect differences in reading skill and the efficiency of letter sequence parsing prior to word recognition.     

Eyewitness Testimony: The Effects of Discussion on Recall Accuracy and Agreement

While some previous research has suggested that group discussion may facilitate eyewitness accuracy, other research has drawn attention to the potential dangers of such discussion. The present studies examine this controversy and the interaction between accuracy and agreement following group discussion. It was found that individuals tend to agree in their testimony following group discussion, and are liable to change their original replies to bring themselves into agreement with group leaders' recall. A second experiment focused upon the actual items which witnesses agreed on following discussion. Changing the mode of questioning from interrogative to narrative eliminated differences in magnitude of agreement between discussion and no-discussion groups. As narrative recall leads to reporting of "easy" items, it was suggested that only certain "difficult" items are susceptible to discussion effects. The need for caution regarding the reliance on testimony following witness discussion was stressed.     

The possible connection between “private speech” and prayer

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the psychological origins of prayer through a preliminary examination of certain aspects of social and cognitive development in early childhood. Specifically, it is the thesis of this essay that the phenomenon of “private speech” in early childhood can tell us something about prayer activity as it occurs in older persons. It is not the intention of this essay to present a detailed or complete theology of prayer from the perspective of pastoral theology or pastoral care. This essay is a prolegomena to the future study of the origins of prayer as social communication and personal regulation.     

Discrimination of mirror-image shapes by young children

Experiments were conducted to examine the difficulty six-year-old children have in discriminating visually between a shape and its lateral reversal, relative to the difficulty in discriminating between a shape and its inversion. Contrary to results with simultaneous presentation, under successive presentation there was no difference between the difficulty of discriminating lateral reversals and difficulty of discriminating inversions. This was also the case for successive presentation with trial-to-trial variation in position of shapes. Spatial adjacency of the shapes to a reference feature of the visual background accounted for the variations in difficulty between discrimination of lateral reversals and discrimination of inversions which obtained under simultaneous presentation.     

Oculomotor adaptation to prisms is not simply a muscle potentiation effect

An experiment is reported in which subjects pointed to a visual target before and after exposure to prisms. The exposure condition required the subject to look at his feet through leftward deviating prisms while holding his eyes to the right. Aftereffects on pointing were significantly to the right. This result is opposite to that predicted by the muscle potentiation hypothesis put forward by Ebenholtz and Wolfson (1975), but consistent with recalibration of the visual direction system caused by spatial discordance.