Testing measures of the quality of residential care: A pilot study

This paper summarizes the results from a pilot study, designed to test a method of measuring the quality of care provided in two residential units for severely mentally handicapped children. The overall aim has been to devise general measures of the learning conditions (the quality of care) within residential units, which relate to groups of clients, and which are equally applicable at different times of the waking day. Such measures will only constitute a helpful monitoring instrument if they are shown to be reliable; to have, at least, face-validity: to be based upon representative and accurate data; and if they differentiate between settings which, intuitively, appear to differ in the extent to which the clients' appropriate behaviour is prompted and reinforced.     

Mood state changes of women as a function of regular aerobic exercise

The present study examined mood states of aerobic exercisers before and after completing a 15-wk. program. The subjects (ages 18 to 36 yr.) were 86 women enrolled in activity classes at a large state school in the southeast. Subjects were initially classified according to previous exercise habits. Analysis indicated both groups of frequent and infrequent exercisers were similar in mood states. Participation in regular exercise did not significantly change or enhance the mood states from pretreatment measures. Pretest measures of mood states provided poor prediction of posttest measures, indicating extreme variability in subjects' scores.     

A tracking procedure for determining the cat's frequency discrimination

A tracking procedure was used to investigate the time required to train cats to discriminate between a frequency-modulated tone and a steady tone. The animal was reinforced with food on a VR schedule only when the steady tone was present and the animal pressed the correct bar (one of two). After reinforcement, the steady tone usually changed to a frequency-modulated signal; by pressing the other bar, the tone could be changed to its steady state and the reinforcement then obtained as before. A major difficulty was the lack of control by the auditory stimulus on the cat's responses. This problem was solved by introducing interpress time outs which forced the animal to hesitate after every press. The use of light cues to signal the time outs and the correct bar to press accelerated the rate at which the training progressed.

With cats, this conditioning procedure apparently requires a much longer training period before the actual threshold determinations than the more commonly used avoidance conditioning procedures. However, when animals are to be tested repeatedly over a period of several months or longer, the procedure may prove the more desirable one because it reduces experimental neurosis.

     

Cognitive engagement variations among students of different ability level and sex in a computer problem solving game

The study investigated the cognitive engagement processes used by more and less successful learners in a computer problem solving game. These engagement variations were also related to sex and ability differences among students. Performance and engagement were monitored interactively as students learned a computer problem solving game; student comments and notes were also recorded. Results showed the records of more and less successful students to be distinguished by the spontaneous use of self-regulated learning processes — a sophisticated form of cognitive engagement. More successful students also appeared to shift cognitive engagement levels in response to computer game feedback. Success on the computer task and cognitive engagement variations were correlated with student differences in both ability and sex in this sample.This study was funded by the National Institute of Education, Grant No. 400-83-0017. Opinions, findings, conclusions, and recommendations expressed in this study do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Institute of Education. The authors wish to thank Marcia Linn and Charles Fisher for their helpful advice, and Susanne Lajoie who served as second rater. Mary Rohrkemper and the Education and Child Development doctoral students at Bryn Mawr College also provided critical suggestions.     

The Behavioral Approach System (BAS) Model of Vulnerability to Bipolar Disorder: Evidence of a Continuum in BAS Sensitivity across Adolescence

Behavioral Approach System (BAS) sensitivity has been implicated in the development of a variety of different psychiatric disorders. Prominent among these in the empirical literature are bipolar spectrum disorders (BSDs). Given that adolescence represents a critical developmental stage of risk for the onset of BSDs, it is important to clarify the latent structure of BAS sensitivity in this period of development. A statistical approach especially well-suited for delineating the latent structure of BAS sensitivity is taxometric analysis, which is designed to evaluate whether the latent structure of a construct is taxonic (i.e., categorical) or dimensional (i.e., continuous) in nature. The current study applied three mathematically non-redundant taxometric procedures (i.e., MAMBAC, MAXEIG, and L-Mode) to a large community sample of adolescents (n = 12,494) who completed two separate measures of BAS sensitivity: the BIS/BAS Scales Carver and White (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 319–333. 1994) and the Sensitivity to Reward and Sensitivity to Punishment Questionnaire (Torrubia et al. Personality and Individual Differences, 31, 837–862. 2001). Given the significant developmental changes in reward sensitivity that occur across adolescence, the current investigation aimed to provide a fine-grained evaluation of the data by performing taxometric analyses at an age-by-age level (14–19 years; n for each age ≥ 883). Results derived from taxometric procedures, across all ages tested, were highly consistent, providing strong evidence that BAS sensitivity is best conceptualized as dimensional in nature. Thus, the findings suggest that BAS-related vulnerability to BSDs exists along a continuum of severity, with no natural cut-point qualitatively differentiating high- and low-risk adolescents. Clinical and research implications for the assessment of BSD-related vulnerability are discussed.     

Virtual reality goes to war: a brief review of the future of military behavioral healthcare

Numerous reports indicate that the incidence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in returning OEF/OIF military personnel is creating a significant healthcare challenge. These findings have served to motivate research on how to better develop and disseminate evidence-based treatments for PTSD. Virtual Reality delivered exposure therapy for PTSD has been previously used with reports of positive outcomes. This article details how virtual reality applications are being designed and implemented across various points in the military deployment cycle to prevent, identify and treat combat-related PTSD in OIF/OEF Service Members and Veterans. The summarized projects in these areas have been developed at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, a U.S. Army University Affiliated Research Center, and this paper will detail efforts to use virtual reality to deliver exposure therapy, assess PTSD and cognitive function and provide stress resilience training prior to deployment.     

The role of socio-communicative rearing environments in the development of social and physical cognition in apes

The cultural intelligence hypothesis (CIH) claims that humans’ advanced cognition is a direct result of human culture and that children are uniquely specialized to absorb and utilize this cultural experience ( Tomasello, 2000 ). Comparative data demonstrating that 2.5‐year‐old human children outperform apes on measures of social cognition but not on measures of physical cognition support this claim ( Herrmann et al., 2007 ). However, the previous study failed to control for rearing when comparing these two species. Specifically, the human children were raised in a human culture whereas the apes were raised in standard sanctuary settings. To further explore the CIH, here we compared the performance on multiple measures of social and physical cognition in a group of standard reared apes raised in conditions typical of zoo and biomedical laboratory settings to that of apes reared in an enculturated socio‐communicatively rich environment. Overall, the enculturated apes significantly outperformed their standard reared counterparts on the cognitive tasks and this was particularly true for measures of communication. Furthermore, the performance of the enculturated apes was very similar to previously reported data from 2.5‐year‐old children. We conclude that apes who are reared in a human‐like socio‐communicatively rich environment develop superior communicative abilities compared to apes reared in standard laboratory settings, which supports some assumptions of the cultural intelligence hypothesis.     

The effect of tangible reinforcement on the learning and retention of programmed material in academically retarded children

The effect of three reinforcement conditions was determined with respect to the learning and retention of a commercially available program purporting to teach simple nouns. The addition of candy reward to a novel method of presenting knowledge of results produced no change in performance when given on a continuous schedule, but reduced rate of responding when given on a partial schedule, i.e., only terninal frames.