Creating Creativity: A Behavior Analytic Approach

The Psychological Record - Creativity and innovation have brought about phenomenal changes throughout human history. Art, science, medicine, industry, and technology have all grown through creative...     

Development of the infant's hand preference for visually directed reaching: Preliminary report of a longitudinal study

The development of hand preference in infancy was investigated longitudinally by using a visually-directed reaching task. Thirty-two infants, equally divided into groups of familial right- and left-handed boys and girls, were tested every 3 weeks from 24 to 39 weeks of age and once again at 52 weeks. Group trends for the development of hand preference were differentiated by familial handedness and sex of the infant. At all ages, test object position (to the infant's right or left) strongly influenced the hand used for reaching. Marked variability both between and within infants demonstrated an instability of early hand preference, an effect that could be appreciated fully only with a prospective longitudinal design. The results thus suggest that the development of hand preference for reaching is highly variable, discontinuous, and related to the interaction of sex and familial handedness.     

Student volunteer social support and infant intervention: A case study

The emphases in infant mental health have been in the three areas of supporting the mother-infant dyad through education, psychotherapy to help parents resolve emotional conflicts that interfere with the parent-infant interaction, and support during the acute crisis that follows an abnormal birth. The case described herein involves a child with a genetic defect born to competent parents, a chronic stressful situation that does not fit these categories. It became apparent in the first few months after the birth that both the child and parents were in need of some help in coping with the situation. An intervention was designed to help provide both the necessary stimulation for the baby and the needed emotional support for the family, while it acknowledged their skill and competencies as parents. This was done through the help of college student volunteers, who assisted the mother in the home. Developmental data recorded at birth, 7 months, 12 months, and 39 months indicate that the child is severely multiply handicapped. Interview data with the parents at those times document their personal and family difficulties, the eventual resolution as a family in dealing with this problem, and the importance of the volunteer help during that process.     

Parenting Sensitivity,Parental Depression and Child Health: The Mediational Role of Parental Self-Efficacy

This paper discusses the theoretical role of parental self-efficacy, or parents' beliefs in their competence and effectiveness in the parental role, as a mediator of relations between parent–child risk and parental sensitivity. Evidence is marshalled from studies of parenting in the contexts of maternal depression and child health risk to support the premise that parent–child characteristics affect parental sensitivity indirectly via their more direct impact on parental feelings of efficacy, and that parenting efficacy represents the ‘final common pathway’ in the prediction of parenting sensitivity. Also considered in this working model are specific social-contextual factors as independent contributors to parenting efficacy and as possible moderators of relations between parent–child characteristics and self-efficacy. Implications for intervention are discussed. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interval estimation for linear functions of medians in within-subjects and mixed designs

The currently available distribution-free confidence interval for a difference of medians in a within-subjects design requires an unrealistic assumption of identical distribution shapes. A confidence interval for a general linear function of medians is proposed for within-subjects designs that do not assume identical distribution shapes. The proposed method can be combined with a method for linear functions of independent medians to provide a confidence interval for a linear function of medians in mixed designs. Simulation results show that the proposed methods have good small-sample properties under a wide range of conditions. The proposed methods are illustrated with examples, and R functions that implement the new methods are provided.     

Exposure to intergroup conspiracy theories promotes prejudice which spreads across groups

This research experimentally examined the effects of exposure to intergroup conspiracy theories on prejudice and discrimination. Study 1 (N = 166) demonstrated that exposure to conspiracy theories concerning immigrants to Britain from the European Union (vs. anti-conspiracy material or a control) exacerbated prejudice towards this group. Study 2 (N = 173) found the same effect in a different intergroup context – exposure to conspiracy theories about Jewish people (vs. anti-conspiracy material or a control) increased prejudice towards this group and reduced participants’ willingness to vote for a Jewish political candidate. Finally, Study 3 (N = 114) demonstrated that exposure to conspiracy theories about Jewish people not only increased prejudice towards this group but was indirectly associated with increased prejudice towards a number of secondary outgroups (e.g., Asians, Arabs, Americans, Irish, Australians). The current research suggests that conspiracy theories may have potentially damaging and widespread consequences for intergroup relations.     

Unfolding Relations among Mindful Parenting,Recurrent Conflict,and Adolescents’ Externalizing and Internalizing Problems

The current study examined unfolding relations among mothers’ mindful parenting, parent–adolescent recurrent conflict, and adolescents’ externalizing and internalizing problems. In a community sample of 117 families (31% black, Asian, American Indian, or Latino), parents and adolescents (52% female; average age = 12.13 years) were followed over 15 months. Parents answered questions about mindful parenting and recurrent conflict, and adolescents reported on their own externalizing and internalizing problems. Path analyses indicated that higher levels of mindful parenting were significantly related to lower levels of recurrent conflict 2–3 months later, controlling for previous levels of recurrent conflict. Moreover, lower levels of recurrent conflict were significantly related to lower levels of externalizing problems and internalizing problems 1 year later, controlling for previous levels of those problems. Subgroup analyses indicated that relations were comparable across subgroups defined by adolescent gender, race, parent marital status, and family financial strain. The effects of mindful parenting were robust even after accounting for other indicators of positive and supportive parenting, namely inductive reasoning and warmth in the parent–adolescent relationship. These findings highlight the potential of mindful parenting to improve family interactions and adolescent adjustment.     

Reducing risky behavior with habit reversal: A review of behavioral strategies to reduce habitual hand-to-head behavior

Habit reversal training (HRT) has been a mainstay of behavior analysts' repertoire for nearly the last 50 years. HRT has been effective in treating a host of repetitive behavior problems. In the face of the current coronavirus pandemic, HRT has practical public health importance as a possible intervention for reducing hand-to-head behaviors that increase the risk of viral infection. The current paper provides a brief review of HRT for hand-to-head habits that is designed for a broad audience and concludes with practical suggestions, based on HRT, for reducing face-touching behaviors.     

Narrative access and production in preschoolers' false belief reasoning

False belief tests seem to show the apparent acquisition at around age 4 of an ability to understand the representational status of mind. In this article, preschoolers' performance on a false belief task was manipulated in terms of their grasp of its narrative base. Five experiments are reported in which 3-year-olds were helped to become familiar with the events that comprise the false belief procedure by going through a picture book version of the task, before being asked to judge the protagonist's mental state. In Experiment 1, children who had failed a traditional task succeeded if they narrated the book version back to the experimenter, particularly if they were fluent in their story recall. Experiment 2 showed that this success occurred either if the child recited the story or if she or he was taken through each page twice in succession. Experiment 3 combined the most effective procedures with a younger group of children (mean age 3;3) and revealed 95% success as long as they could recall the prerequisite events. Experiments 4 and 5 probed possible limiting conditions for success by inserting an extra episode in the story and changing the format of the test question. The results suggest that the structure of 3-year-olds' event memories is central to their poor performance in the traditional false belief task—a clear grasp of the false belief “narrative” is necessary for successful performance. When they are given the opportunity to link discrete events into a coherent narrative, they have no problem demonstrating an understanding of others' minds—being able to recount the narrative is sufficient for successful performance.     

What is learned in sequential learning? An associative model of reward magnitude serial-pattern learning

A computational model of sequence learning is described that is based on pairwise associations and generalization. Simulations by the model predicted that rats should learn a long monotonic pattern of food quantities better than a nonmonotonic pattern, as predicted by rule-learning theory, and that they should learn a short nonmonotonic pattern with highly discriminable elements better than 1 with less discriminable elements, as predicted by interitem association theory. In 2 other studies, the model also simulated behavioral "rule generalization," "extrapolation," and associative transfer data motivated by both rule-learning and associative perspectives. Although these simulations do not rule out the possibility that rats can use rule induction to learn serial patterns, they show that a simple associative model can account for the classical behavioral studies implicating rule learning in reward magnitude serial-pattern learning.