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...     

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.     

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.     

Cooperative learning revisited

The endeavor to teach academic skills known as cooperative learningis of interest to behavioral educators due to its record of effectiveness, its use of behavioral procedures, and its relatively widespread adoption by regular educators. All forms of cooperative learning emphasize operations that encourage students to work together to achieve commonly held goals rather than competing with or ignoring the efforts of others. Despite the apparent soundness of the approach, the present commentary raises several issues. First, it states that some cooperative learning proponents fail to describe the behavioral processes underlying the approach. Second, it is pointed out that it is unclear whether cooperative learning is an independent or dependent variable. Given that cooperative learning applies group contingencies to academic behavior, the question is raised as to whether group contingencies do, in fact, produce desirable social interactions, and whether group contingencies are appropriate for academic behaviors. A concern is also raised as to whether the spontaneous peer tutoring generated by cooperative learning compares favorably with planned peer tutoring. Finally, it is claimed that the minor variations from academic group contingencies that cooperative learning proponents have introduced do not require identifying a new process.     

Inequality,Justice, and the Myth of Unsituated Market Exchange

This article examines inequality from a framework of justice that attends to the socially situated nature of market activity, including exchange. I argue that accounts of unsituated exchange—accounts of market exchange that abstract from social situations, such as philosopher Robert Nozick’s influential libertarian account of justice—overlook various factors that contribute to growing economic inequality in contemporary society. Analyses of market exchange must incorporate the role of “third parties” who play a role in shaping and/or who are affected by economic transactions. The involvement of these additional parties, including the government and future generations, is not interference but, instead, an integral part of the economic and moral accounting of exchange. An approach to justice and inequality which embeds exchange within multiple dimensions of economy and society is needed; the latter part of this article traces such a socially situated approach.     

Sensitivity to Inflectional Morphemes in the Absence of Meaning: Evidence from a Novel Task

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - A number of studies in different languages have shown that speakers may be sensitive to the presence of inflectional morphology in the absence of verb meaning...     

Problem-oriented training promotes spontaneous analogical transfer: Memory-oriented training promotes memory for training

Spontaneous analogical transfer is the use of information from one problem to solve another problem, without an explicit hint to use the previous information. The results of five experiments were that if subjects tried to solve a training problem before hearing its solution, or tried to explain a training story's solution before hearing the correct explanation, spontaneous transfer was more likely than it was if subjects had studied the same training passage for memory before hearing its solution or explanation. The advantage of problem-oriented processing over memory-oriented processing occurred even though solution attempts nearly always failed, and the advantage was not reduced if the target problem was tested 15 min later rather than immediately after training. We propose that problem-oriented processes performed at study are appropriate processes to use at test. Further support for the account comes from subjects' memory for the training passages; the advantage for problem-oriented processing on solution tasks was mirrored by an equally substantial advantage for the memory-oriented subjects on a recall task.     

Adolescent substance use disorders: findings from a 14-year follow-up of speech/language-impaired and control children.

Intervening on the development of adolescent addiction requires an understanding of the role of precursors. In a community sample of youth with and without early childhood speech/language (S/L) impairments, 12.7% of participants had a substance use disorder (SUD). Among these participants, 42.0% met criteria for more than 1 SUD. Interestingly, rates of SUDs did not differ by S/L status. However, S/L-impaired participants did show greater psychiatric comorbidity and poorer functioning. A total of 80% of S/L participants with SUDs had a concurrent diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, compared with 43.8% of SUDs controls. In a logistic regression analysis, we found age 5 mother-rated problem behavior scores and an interaction between S/L status and teacher-rated conduct problem scores were predictive of SUDs. High conduct scores were predictive of SUDs development among control participants but not among S/L-impaired participants. First substance use and initial SUDs symptoms suggest that a window of opportunity exists to reach these troubled young people before they spiral into addiction.     

The semantic side of decision making

The research reported in this paper follows the perspective that decision making is a meaningful act that conveys information. Furthermore, the potential meanings associated with decision options may affect the decisions themselves. This idea is examined in the contexts of compensation, donation, and exchange. In general, judgments were relation dependent and meaning dependent. Furthermore, the results show nonmonotonicities and limited substitutability in a pattern that challenges straightforward ways of mapping decisions onto a common currency of utility.