Reinforced practice and reduction of different kinds of fears in adults and children

The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not fears with different origins, course and chronicity could be reduced by a common treatment program. A number of therapeutic procedures that had been experimentally demonstrated to be individually important in prior behavior modification studies with neurotic disorders were combined into a single therapeutic program called ‘reinforced practice.’ The combined elements were: graduated and repeated practice in approaching actual phobic stimuli: reinforcement for gains in performance; feedback of measurable progress; and instructions designed to arouse expectations of gradual success. In each of four experiments involving four different fears, namely fear of heights, snakes and electric shock in adults, and fear of darkness in young children, Ss who expeienced the ‘reinforced practice’ procedure improved their performance by a significant and substantial margin as compared to untreated control Ss. These results suggest that regardless of different etiologies, regardless of whether or not the fears are ‘rational’ or ‘irrational,’ and regardless of whether or not the fears are transitory or long lasting, the same treatment procedure can be equally effective in reducing escape-avoidance behavior.     

Landmark Discrimination Learning in the Dog

Allocentric spatial memory was studied in dogs of varying ages and sources using a landmark discrimination task. The primary goal of this study was to develop a protocol to test landmark discrimination learning in the dog. Using a modified version of a landmark test developed for use in monkeys, we successfully trained dogs to make a spatial discrimination on the basis of the position of a visual landmark relative to two identical discriminanda. Task performance decreased, however, as the distance between the landmark and the “discriminandum” was increased. A subgroup of these dogs was also tested on a delayed nonmatching to position spatial memory task (DNMP), which relies on egocentric spatial cues. These findings suggest that dogs can acquire both allocentric and egocentric spatial tasks. These data provide a useful tool for evaluating the ability of canines to use allocentric cues in spatial learning.     

Impulsivity in suicidal and nonsuicidal adolescents

Nonsuicidal and suicidal adolescent inpatients were compared to community high school students using behavioral measures of impulsivity. Measures of problem solving ability, hopelessness, and depression were also administered to all groups. The suicidal inpatients were characterized by greater impulsivity, hopelessness, and depression than both nonsuicidal inpatients and community high school students. There were no differences in problemsolving abilities found between the suicidal inpatients and either the nonsuicidal inpatients or the community controls.     

MMPI differences among Mexican-American male and female psychiatric inpatients

The purpose of this study was to examine to what extent Mexican-American male and female psychiatric patients, who share similar DSM-III--R diagnoses, differ on the MMPI. Differences were found on the Infrequency, Masculinity-Femininity, and Paranoia scales, with the 39 men obtaining significantly higher scores than the 21 women. These results, while suggesting possible differences in the phenomenology of depression, also suggest that MMPI differences between Mexican-American men and women may be reflective of culturally-defined sex roles. These results, when taken within the context of Mexican-American MMPI literature, indicate that researchers should always attempt to account for "gender" when conducting cross-ethnic MMPI comparisons. The practice of grouping the MMPIs of Mexican-American men and women for comparison with other ethnic groups should be discontinued in favor of comparisons that consider the effects of gender and ethnicity.     

Multiple schedules with response interruption and redirection to reduce stereotypy in children with autism spectrum disorder: Generalization and social validity

Although response interruption and redirection (RIRD) and multiple schedule arrangements have sometimes been shown to be effective in reducing stereotypy for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), important questions remain about optimal methods for facilitating generalization and social validity. In the current study, we sought to extend the literature on stereotypy treatment and MSAs in several ways. First, we programmed for generalization by conducting sessions with two exemplars of two different categories of activities (i.e., school work, toy play) and assessing generalization with novel exemplars and activities and during the participant's typical instructional program. Second, we used RIRD instructions that were contextual models of appropriate behavior relevant to each activity. Third, during the free access component of the multiple schedule, we used a child's play tent as a first step toward teaching participants to engage in stereotypy during private free time. For all three participants with ASD, stereotypy decreased quickly and substantially, with reductions generalizing to novel activities and contexts. An extensive social validity assessment with board-certified behavior analysts indicated high social acceptability of the goals, procedures, and outcomes.     

One factor underlies individual differences in auditory informational masking within and across age groups

Masked threshold for a pure-tone signal can be substantially elevated whenever the listener is uncertain about the spectral or temporal properties of the masker, an effect referred to as auditory informational masking. Individual differences in the effect are large, with young children being most susceptible. When masker uncertainty is introduced by randomizing the frequencies of a multitone masker on each presentation, the function relating a child's pure-tone signal threshold to the number of masker components is found to be substantially elevated above that of most adults. The age effect and the individual differences among adults are not well understood, though a difference in the shapes of the masking functions suggests that different detection strategies may be involved. The present study reports results from a principal components analysis of informational masking functions obtained from 38 normal-hearing children ranging in age from 4 to 16 years and 46 normal-hearing adults ranging in age from 19 to 38 years. The premise underlying the analysis is that if different detection strategies are involved, they should add independent sources of variance to the masking functions. Hence, more than one principal component (PC) should be required to account for a substantial proportion of the variance in these functions. The results, instead, supported the operation of a single underlying strategy with all but 17% of the variance accounted for by the first PC within and across age groups. An analysis of variance on the first two PCs showed that only the first changed with age, and a cluster analysis of the masking functions showed complete separation of clusters along this PC for all but 1 listener. The results are taken to suggest that large individual differences informational masking at all ages reflect differences in the extent to which masker uncertainty adds variance to the decision variable of an otherwise optimal decision strategy.     

Factor analyses of the DIB-R in adolescents

The goal of this study was to examine the factor structure of the Revised Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines (DIB-R; Zanarini, Gunderson, Franckenburg, & Chauncey, 1989) in a nonpatient sample of 118 adolescents. A principal components factor analysis with a Varimax rotation extracted three factors. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that this three-factor model provided an adequate fit. The first factor, which included depression, anxiety, helplessness/hopelessness, loneliness/emptiness, and also encompassed odd thinking/unusual perceptive experiences and quasi-psychotic experiences, appeared to be centered on painful feelings and dissociative defense. The second factor, labeled "impulsivity," consisted of impulse action patterns, counterdependency, and stormy relationships. This factor seemed to be centered on defensive acting-out. The third factor, called "aggressiveness," consisted of anger, hypomania, devaluation/manipulation/sadism, and demand/entitlement, and might express manic/narcissistic defenses. These analyses suggest that there may be homogeneous components of borderline symptomatology in adolescents that may reflect affective disturbances and defensive mechanisms.     

Adolescent Suicidal Risk: Psychological,Problem Solving,and Environmental Factors

This study examined the life stress and problem-solving interactional model of suicide proposed by Clum, Patsiokas, and Luscomb (1979) . Thirty-three hospitalized suicidal adolescents were compared with 21 adolescents hospitalized for other psychiatric problems and with 89 controls. The assessment battery was composed of psychological measures, problem-solving measures, and environmental and family measures. The discriminant analyses revealed that the suicide group could be discriminated from the psychiatric control group but not from the high school control group. Unexpectedly, life stresses did not contribute to the identification of current suicide risk. The results suggest the importance of assessing suicide risk at the time of admission to minimize any subsequent changes in the risk group.