The influence of activity choice on problem behaviors maintained by escape versus attention

This study assessed whether the function of an individual's problem behavior was related to the effectiveness of an intervention involving choice among tasks. Analogue functional analyses were conducted with 7 students with various diagnoses to determine whether problem behaviors were maintained by escape or attention. Following identification of the function of each student's problem behavior, reversal designs were used to assess the effectiveness of an intervention that allowed the students to choose their own instructional tasks. Results showed that students who displayed escape-maintained problem behavior showed substantial reductions in such behavior when they were provided with opportunities to choose among tasks. On the other hand, students who displayed attention-maintained problem behavior did not show any effects as a result of the choice intervention. These findings are discussed in terms of the effective use of behavior management programs involving choice and the reduction of problem behavior.     

Do you see what I see? Testing horses’ ability to recognise real-life objects from 2D computer projections

Animal Cognition - The use of 2-dimensional representations (e.g. photographs or digital images) of real-life physical objects has been an important tool in studies of animal cognition. Horses are...     

The structure ofAND coordinations in children's narratives

Narratives of 3 1/2-to 9 1/2-year-old children were searched for AND coordinations. Only half of the AND utterances of the youngest compared to four-fifths of those of the oldest children were fully formed, syntactically correct coordinations. The latter were classified as phrasal coordinations, redundant sententials (i.e., potential phrasals), or nonredundant sentential coordinations. Sentential coordinations predominated, especially among older children. Direction of redundancy (or potential redundancy) was important: forward forms predominated over backward forms. Differences in form of the children's coordinations often reflected differences in meaning; this was true for backward direction forms of phrasal versus sentential coordination, although not for most forward direction forms.The authors would like to thank Michael Bruce-Lockhart for the development and use of the NARRAN software package. For more information about NARRAN or its availability, write to the first author. This research was supported by National Science and Engineering Research Council grant A-0513 to the first author.     

The Cognitive, Learned-Helplessness and Hopelessness Theories of Depression: A Review with Implications for Counsellors

Four theories of depression and the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) are described and their implications for counselling discussed. Recent research has focused upon the testing of the diathesis-stress component of the reformulated learned-helplessness theory of depression, and in particular upon the role which a hypothesised depressogenic causal attributional style towards events in general, and/or 'depressive attributions' towards specific events, play in the development of depression. It is suggested that the recently revised version of this theory — the hopelessness theory of depression — is both a more fruitful area of future research and of more interest to the counsellor, since it emphasises the role which attributions and other cognitive factors play in the maintenance and prevention of depression, rather than concentrating on a continued search for a cause.     

Personal Constructs of Students with Eating Disorders: Implications for Counselling

Members of two self-help groupsfor university andpolytechnic students with eating disorders were asked to generale personal constructs. The analysis of the subsequent grids showed that the students were concerned with similar emotional issues. Il also produceda significant difference between ratings of'self and 'ideal self, butfailed to produce evidence of' tight' construing. Discussion ofthe grids made a positive contribution to the self-help process.     

Distributive justice in marriage: Equality or equity?

Experimental studies of distributive justice suggest that men prefer an equity rule for allocating rewards, whereas women prefer equality. These differences are likely to carry implications for distributive justice in the context of marriage. There is a popular view in Western societies that marriage should be regarded as a partnership of equals, and this is also an implicit assumption in microeconomic accounts of the family. However, inequality between spouses is still commonplace, with the husband more likely to have overall financial control and greater access to money for personal spending (PSM). This paper investigates the issue of sharing in marriage, with particular reference to PSM, using data from an in-depth interview study supplemented by some follow-up questionnaires. The participants were 13 women and nine of their partners, mainly ‘middle class’ and aged between 30 and 50. After classifying each couple's system of financial management, the paper focuses upon eight couples with a philosophy of sharing. The findings show that, despite attempts to equalize outcomes for both partners, a sense of ‘ownership’ associated with having earned the money seemed to render it more salient than other, non-financial contributions to the marriage. As a result, patterns of control and personal spending appeared to be based upon equity rather than equality.     

The gender-marking effect in spoken word recognition

In this paper we examine whether the recognition of a spoken noun is affected by the gender marking—masculine or feminine—that is carried by a preceding word. In the first of two experiments, the gating paradigm was used to study the access of French nouns that were preceded by an appropriate gender marking, carried by an article, or preceded by no gender marking. In the second experiment, subjects were asked to make a lexical decision on the same material. A very strong facilitatory effect was found in both cases. The origin of the gender-marking effect is discussed, as well as the level of processing involved—lexical or syntactic.     

Understanding “because”: How important is the task?

The causal connective because requires the order of clauses within a sentence to violate the order of events in the real world; i.e., effect because cause is correct. Children's (4, 6, and 8 years of age) ability to comprehend because was explored in a series of four studies. The first, a replication with variations of existing studies, assessed children's ability to judge as anomalous sentences in which the order of clauses is reversed. Comprehension of impersonal sentences is better than of sentences derived from narratives of their own experiences, although children do poorly at this task until age 8. However, results of study 2 suggest that children's poor understanding of task requirements is partly responsible, since increased task instructions and modeling led to significant improvement in the ability of preschoolers to judge sentences as anomalous. In the third study, children named the cause event after being told a causal sequence (involving either psychological or physical causality) of the form: Event A, Event C (effect) because Event B (cause), Event D. Comprehension of physical causality sequences is superior, but again, only 8-year-olds showed good performance. In Study 4, children were asked to find the cause event in four-clause sequences of the same form as in Study 3, but memory props were added in the form of pictures of events A, B, and D. Near perfect performance was shown by all children. Overall, comprehension studies of because are judged to be rife with methodological problems, and memory demands are seen to be particularly important.The authors wish to thank Lynn Anne Pye for her contributions to Study 4, which formed part of her undergraduate honors degree research, as well as F. Michael Rabinowitz for his comments and statistical aid. This research was supported by NSERC grant A7911 to the senior author.     

Written language acquisition after left or right hemidecortication in infancy

When written language is acquired in only one hemisphere because of hemidecortication in infancy, the left hemisphere is superior to the right at using morphophonemic rules to read and spell unfamiliar words, and at exploiting the structure of sentence units to achieve rapid reading of meaning in prose. The ability to learn names for logographs, however, is better in the right hemisphere than in the left. The greater mastery of written language in the left hemisphere is a result, not of an enhanced facility for making cross-modal associations between sounds and signs, but of a superior access to the morphophonemic rule system and the higher-order textual constraints of English.     

The “Flash” System: A Field Study of Altruism1

This study evaluated the effectiveness of an experimental automated highway-help system for stranded motorists (the Flash system). Direct and indirect helping behavior rates as a function of the race and sex of supposedly stranded drivers on the Flash-equipped highway were compared to helping rates on a comparable, non-Flash-equipped highway. The results indicated that the automated system produced (a) higher overall helping rates and (b) higher helping rates for white persons, with type of help (direct or indirect) interacting with confederate sex.