Peer and Teacher-Selected Peer Buddies for Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorders: The Role of Social,Emotional, and Mentalizing Abilities

This study examined mentalizing abilities, social behavior, and social impact of adolescents who expressed the willingness to become peer buddies for adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders, and adolescents selected by their teachers and peers. Twenty-seven teachers and 395 adolescents from public high schools completed mentalizing abilities, social status, behavioral, and peer buddy nomination measures. Findings suggest that social status and preference play a significant role in the selection of peer buddies by both teachers and classmates. Furthermore, more advanced Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities and the engagement in prosocial behaviors differentiated peers selected as buddies from other classmates. When compared with nonparticipating students, adolescents who expressed willingness to participate were more often girls, and were more prosocial. Agreement between teacher and peer nominations of best peer was moderate.     

Meaning in Life: In Defense of the Hybrid View

According to Susan Wolf's hybrid view about meaning in life, a life is meaningful in virtue of subjective attraction to objectively valuable pursuits. Recently, several philosophers have presented counterexamples to the subjective element in Wolf's view. We argue that these examples are not clearly successful and present a modified version which is even stronger in the face of them. Finally, we offer some positive reasons for accepting a subjective condition on a meaningful life.     

Frege's Puzzle for Perception

According to an influential variety of the representational view of perceptual experience—the singular content view—the contents of perceptual experiences include singular propositions partly composed of the particular physical object(s) a given experience is about or of. The singular content view faces well‐known difficulties accommodating hallucinations; I maintain that there is also an analogue of Frege's puzzle that poses a significant problem for this view. In fact, I believe that this puzzle presents difficulties for the theory that are unique to perception in that strategies that have been developed to respond to Frege's puzzle in the case of belief cannot be employed successfully in the case of perception. Ultimately, I maintain that this perceptual analogue of Frege's puzzle provides a compelling reason to reject the singular content view of perceptual experience.     

Paranormal Believers' Susceptibility to Confirmatory Versus Disconfirmatory Conjunctions

This study examines paranormal believers' susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy for confirmatory versus non‐confirmatory conjunctive events. Members of the UK public (N = 207) read 16 hypothetical vignettes before judging the likelihood that each constituent and their conjunction would (co) occur. Event type (paranormal versus non‐paranormal), outcome type (confirming versus disconfirming) and level of paranormal belief (in either extrasensory perception, psychokinesis or life after death)—plus relevant interaction terms—were entered into a linear mixed model analysis. As hypothesised, paranormal belief was associated with more conjunction errors regardless of event type with, in general, more errors made for confirmatory over disconfirmatory conjunctions. These trends existed for extrasensory perception and psychokinesis believers with those for life after death believers approaching significance. Consistent with Crupi and Tentori's Confirmation–Theoretical Framework, current findings suggest that paranormal believers are prone to a generic and confirmatory conjunction fallacy. Theoretical implications, methodological limitations and future research ideas are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Training Pediatric Psychologists for Perinatal Behavioral Health Services in a Pediatric Hospital

Although pediatric hospitals specialize in providing care to children and adolescents, at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), our team has been providing behavioral health services for two unique parent populations—parents with a child in the Newborn Infant Intensive Care Unit and pregnant women carrying fetuses with specific birth defects and receiving prenatal care in the Center for Fetal Diagnosis and Treatment. A new training program was developed to expand the scope of pediatric psychologists’ practice to include perinatal behavioral health services, specifically for these two unique parent populations served at CHOP. The program includes direct service provision for adult mental health concerns, as well as education and support to help families cope with the existing medical conditions. This article describes the training program and its implementation as a model of training for other pediatric hospitals. The roles of psychologists embedded in these units and hospital privileges are discussed.     

How do Physicians Decide to Refer Their Patients for Psychiatric Genetic Counseling? A Qualitative Study of Physicians’ Practice

Psychiatric genetic counseling (PGC) is an emerging specialty discipline within the genetic counseling profession. A specialist PGC service was founded in 2012 in Vancouver, Canada, and though patient benefits have been demonstrated, many physicians do not regularly refer patients to the service despite awareness of its availability. We conducted a qualitative study involving semi-structured telephone interviews with Vancouver-based physicians who were aware of the PGC service to explore this phenomenon. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, coded, and analysed for emergent themes. Consistent with a grounded theory approach, constant comparison was employed throughout data collection and analysis. Analyses of interviews conducted with 12 physicians revealed that referral practices were informed by perceptions about the purpose of PGC and interpretation of patient cues. Physicians perceived PGC as an information-focused intervention, and considered referral when patients explicitly expressed desire for information about recurrence risk or etiology that they felt unable to adequately address themselves. Even when physicians identified psychotherapeutic benefits of PGC, patient needs of this nature were not perceived as cues prompting referral to PGC. These data suggest that further work is necessary to position PGC in physicians’ minds as a service that could potentially benefit most individuals with psychiatric disorders and their families, and that it encompasses more than information provision. It is important to increase physicians’ awareness of the complementary role that genetic counselors can play to that of the physician in providing psychotherapeutically oriented counselling about illness etiology.     

Building Buddhism in England: The Flourishing of a Minority Faith Heritage

From the earliest days of Buddhism in Britain, individuals and communities have sought out buildings to provide locations where they might practise and teach Buddhism. In this paper, we focus on this neglected area of the study of minority faith traditions in Britain. Our research, which was commissioned by Historic England, examines how Buddhist communities have used buildings and what this tells us about how a minority tradition is initially established and how it subsequently changes and develops. In this context, we suggest that buildings are more than bricks and mortar and provide a richly rewarding analytical lens to tell stories about migration, socio-economic status, religious diversity and integration and the complexity of processes around secularisation and religious change, as well shifting policy agendas in the UK that have begun to take faith seriously. This contributes to deepening the picture of the migration and adaptation of Buddhism and Buddhist practice across the globe.     

Contextual repetition facilitates word learning via fast mapping

The current study explores whether contextual repetition during fast mapping facilitates word learning. Three-year-old children completed fast mapping and test trials using a touchscreen computer. For half of the children, the non-targets (competitors) repeated across learning trials and for other children there was no repetition. All children received the same test trials. Children who experienced contextual repetition, that is, children for whom the competitors repeated during the initial fast mapping task, demonstrated word learning. These data demonstrate that children's word learning is facilitated by the presence of extraneous yet predictable information in the initial fast mapping task.     

Mental health in Swedish children living in joint physical custody and their parents' life satisfaction: A cross‐sectional study

This study compared the psychological symptoms of 129 children in joint physical custody with children in single care and nuclear families, using a nationally representative 2011 survey of 1,297 Swedish children aged between four and 18 years. The outcome measure was the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and its association with three dimensions of parental life satisfaction was investigated. Linear regression analyses showed higher SDQ‐scores for children in joint physical custody (B = 1.4, p < 0.001) and single care (B = 2.2, p < 0.001) than in nuclear families, after adjustment for socio‐demographic variables. The estimates decreased to 1.1 and 1.3, respectively, after being adjusted for parental life satisfaction ( p < 0.01). Our findings confirm previous research that showed lower symptom scores for children in nuclear families than children in single care and joint physical custody. Parental life satisfaction should be investigated further as a possible explanation of differences in symptom load between children in different living arrangements.