Comparison of blocking strategies informed by precursor assessment to decrease pica

Pica is dangerous behavior and often maintained by automatic reinforcement. We conducted a latency functional analysis (FA) using safe consumption items to verify that pica was maintained in part by automatic reinforcement and exclude participants for whom pica was likely maintained solely by attention. Next, we identified precursors to pica through a probability analysis and conducted a brief blocking assessment for participants' whose pica occurred in the alone and attention conditions of the FA. Finally, we compared blocking precursors with pica, touching an inedible item and the pica itself. Results showed that five of the six participants' pica was likely maintained by automatic reinforcement, and pica decreased during the brief blocking assessment for three of four participants. Results of the blocking comparison showed that blocking behaviors earlier in the response hierarchy was as effective as only blocking pica attempts for two participants and more effective for one participant.     

Semantic Similarity of Alternatives Fostered by Conversational Negation

Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., “This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver”). Entities that are semantically similar to a negated entity tend to be judged as better alternatives (Kruszewski et al., 2016). In fact, Kruszewski et al. (2016) show that the cosine similarity scores between the distributional semantics representations of a negated noun and its potential alternatives are highly correlated with the negated noun-alternatives human plausibility ratings. In a series of cloze tasks, we show that negation likewise restricts the production of plausible alternatives to similar entities. Furthermore, completions to negative sentences appear to be even more restricted than completions to an affirmative conjunctive context, hinting at a peculiarity of negation.     

Relational Complexity and Ethical Responsibility

Richard Miller uses the concepts of alterity and intimacy as touchstones for analyzing neglected aspects of our interpersonal and social relationships. He argues that, as persons in relation, we oscillate between experiences of alterity and intimacy, and it is with a greater awareness of this oscillation that we do best to consider our ethical responsibilities. This paper affirms the value of thinking about—and potentially reimagining—how we conceive and relate to various others. It also makes explicit that, as persons, each of us is separate, not only from some, but from all other persons, even as we are also one with them. Moreover, each of us is different from all other persons, even as we are also like them. The aspects of persons and relationships on which we focus, in a given situation, matter because they partly determine the choices that we make in another’s regard.