TRAINING STAFF TO INCREASE MANDING IN STUDENTS WITH AUTISM: TWO PRELIMINARY CASE STUDIES

Two case studies evaluated two versions of behavioral skills training on peer‐to‐peer manding. Case Study 1 evaluated the full package of instructions, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback, and Case Study 2 used modeling and feedback only. Both case studies employed AB designs. In both case studies, staff increased correct teaching responses, and students increased the number of independent peer‐to peer mands. These pilot data suggest that staff can readily acquire teaching skills to increase peer‐to‐peer manding and that modeling and feedback may be sufficient to train staff to do so. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Legalising Toleration: a Reply to Balint

I re-present my account of how a liberal democratic society can be tolerant and do so in a way designed to meet Peter Balint??s objections. In particular, I explain how toleration can be approached from a third-party perspective, which is that of neither tolerator nor tolerated but of rule-makers providing for the toleration that the citizens of a society are to extend to one another. Constructing a regime of toleration should not be confused with engaging in toleration. Negative appraisal and power remain ??possibility conditions?? of toleration but they are not necessary features of either a regime of toleration or the sponsors of such a regime.     

Sociocultural antecedents of academic motivation and achievement: Role of values and achievement motives in achievement goals and academic performance

With a view to understand the influence of culture on achievement motivation, the study aimed to test the hypothesized mediating role of individual‐oriented and social‐oriented achievement motives in linking value orientations (e.g. achievement, security, conformity, hedonism) to achievement goals (i.e. mastery‐approach, mastery‐avoidance, performance‐approach, and performance‐avoidance goals) as predictors of English and mathematics achievements. These hypothesized relationships were tested in the one‐path analytic model with a sample of Indonesian high‐school students (n = 356; 46% girls, M age = 16.20 years). The findings showed that security and conformity values positively predicted social‐oriented achievement motive; self‐direction values positively predicted individual‐oriented achievement motive; and hedonism values negatively predicted both achievement motive orientations. Both individual‐oriented and social‐oriented achievement motives positively predicted mastery‐approach and performance‐approach goals. Interestingly, social‐oriented achievement motive also positively predicted mastery‐avoidance and performance‐avoidance goals, which in turn, negatively predicted English and mathematic achievement. There was also some evidence for the direct effects of values on performance‐approach goals and achievement. Taken together, the findings evinced the relevance of achievement goal constructs to Indonesian students and the psychometric properties of the Indonesian version of the Achievement Goals Questionnaire for further use in Indonesia. The study concludes that the meanings of academic motivation and achievement should be seen from a sociocultural perspective relevant to the context in which they are being studied.     

A Lover’s Shame

Shame is one of the more painful consequences of loving someone; my beloved’s doing something immoral can cause me to be ashamed of her. The guiding thought behind this paper is that explaining this phenomenon can tell us something about what it means to love. The phenomenon of beloved-induced shame has been largely neglected by philosophers working on shame, most of whom conceive of shame as being a reflexive attitude. Bennett Helm has recently suggested that in order to account for beloved-induced shame, we should deny the reflexivity of shame. After arguing that Helm’s account is inadequate, I proceed to develop an account of beloved-induced shame that rightly preserves its reflexivity. A familiar feature of love is that it involves an evaluative dependence; when I love someone, my well-being depends upon her life’s going well. I argue that loving someone also involves a persistent tendency to believe that her life is going well, in the sense that she is a good person, that she is not prone to wickedness. Lovers are inclined, more strongly than they otherwise would be, to give their beloveds the moral benefit of the doubt. These two features of loving—an evaluative dependence and a persistent tendency to believe in the beloved’s moral goodness—provide the conditions for a lover to experience shame when he discovers that his beloved has morally transgressed.     

Dopaminergic modulation of incentive motivation in adolescence: age-related changes in signaling, individual differences, and implications for the development of self-regulation

Behavioral activation that is associated with incentive-reward motivation increases in adolescence relative to childhood and adulthood. This quadratic developmental pattern is generally supported by behavioral and experimental neuroscience findings. It is suggested that a focus on changes in dopamine neurotransmission is informative in understanding the mechanism for this adolescent increase in reward-related behavioral activation and subsequent decline into adulthood. Evidence is presented to indicate that incentive-reward motivation is modulated by mesoaccumbens dopamine, and that it increases in adolescence before declining into adulthood because of normative developmental changes at the molecular level. Potential mechanisms of variation in functional mesoaccumbens dopamine transmission are discussed with a focus on the interplay between tonic and phasic modes of dopamine transmission in modulating both general incentive-motivational biases and the efficacy of reward learning during exposure to novel reward experiences. Interactions between individual difference factors and these age-related trends are discussed.     

Religion, Contraception, and Method Choice of Married Women in Ghana

Using pooled data from the 1998 and 2003 Demographic and Health Surveys, this paper investigates the association between religion and contraceptive behavior of married women in Ghana. Guided by the particularized theology and characteristics hypotheses, multinomial logit and complementary log-log models are used to explore denominational differences in contraceptive adoption among currently married women and assess whether the differences could be explained through other characteristics. We found that while there were no differences between women of different Christian faiths, non-Christian women (Muslim and Traditional) were significantly more likely to have never used contraception compared with Christian women. Similar observations were made on current use of contraception, although the differences were greatly reduced in the multivariate models.     

A synchronization account of false recognition

We describe a computational model to explain a variety of results in both standard and false recognition. A key attribute of the model is that it uses plausible semantic representations for words, built through exposure to a linguistic corpus. A study list is encoded in the model as a gist trace, similar to the proposal of fuzzy trace theory (Brainerd & Reyna, 2002), but based on realistically structured semantic representations of the component words. The model uses a decision process based on the principles of neural synchronization and information accumulation. The decision process operates by synchronizing a probe with the gist trace of a study context, allowing information to be accumulated about whether the word did or did not occur on the study list, and the efficiency of synchronization determines recognition. We demonstrate that the model is capable of accounting for standard recognition results that are challenging for classic global memory models, and can also explain a wide variety of false recognition effects and make item-specific predictions for critical lures. The model demonstrates that both standard and false recognition results may be explained within a single formal framework by integrating realistic representation assumptions with a simple processing mechanism.     

Developmental change in young children's use of haptic information in a visual task: the role of hand movements

Preschoolers who explore objects haptically often fail to recognize those objects in subsequent visual tests. This suggests that children may represent qualitatively different information in vision and haptics and/or that children’s haptic perception may be poor. In this study, 72 children (2½-5 years of age) and 20 adults explored unfamiliar objects either haptically or visually and then chose a visual match from among three test objects, each matching the exemplar on one perceptual dimension. All age groups chose shape-based matches after visual exploration. Both 5-year-olds and adults also chose shape-based matches after haptic exploration, but younger children did not match consistently in this condition. Certain hand movements performed by children during haptic exploration reliably predicted shape-based matches but occurred at very low frequencies. Thus, younger children’s difficulties with haptic-to-visual information transfer appeared to stem from their failure to use their hands to obtain reliable haptic information about objects.