Effects of Mothers' Overestimations and Underestimations of Their Children's Intellectual Ability: A Reanalysis of Hunt and Paraskevopoulos

Hunt and Paraskevopoulos reported (1980a) that mothers' tendency to overestimate their children's performances on intelligence-test items had a strongly negative correlation with children's intellectual ability, whereas their tendency to underestimate had a negligible correlation. Those findings were misleading side effects of the method used to measure mothers' tendencies to overestimate and underestimate. Appropriate alternative measures are suggested in the present article, and results that would have been obtained with them are approximated. According to this reanalysis, mothers' tendencies to both overestimate and underestimate have modest but significant negative correlations with children's intellectual ability. Mothers' tendency to make accurate estimations has a moderately strong positive correlation with children's intellectual ability.     

FTAP: A Linux-based program for tapping and music experiments

This paper describes FTAP, a flexible data collection system for tapping and music experiments. FTAP runs on standard PC hardware with the Linux operating system and can process input keystrokes and auditory output with reliable millisecond resolution. It uses standard MIDI devices for input and output and is particularly flexible in the area of auditory feedback manipulation. FTAP can run a wide variety of experiments, including synchronization/continuation tasks (Wing & Kristofferson, 1973), synchronization tasks combined with delayed auditory feedback (Aschersleben & Prinz, 1997), continuation tasks with isolated feedback perturbations (Wing, 1977), and complex alterations of feedback in music performance (Finney, 1997). Such experiments have often been implemented with custom hardware and software systems, but with FTAP they can be specified by a simple ASCII text parameter file. FTAP is available at no cost in source-code form.     

CHOICE MAKING TO PROMOTE ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR FOR STUDENTS WITH EMOTIONAL AND BEHAVIORAL CHALLENGES

Two analyses investigated the effects of choice making on the responding of elementary school students with emotional and behavioral challenges. In the first analysis, 2 participants were given choices from menus of academic tasks, all of which were pertinent to their educational objectives in English and spelling, respectively. Reversal designs showed that the choice-making conditions increased task engagement and reduced disruptive behavior for both students. An additional analysis was performed with a 3rd student in an effort to further distinguish the effects of choice making from preference. In this study, one of the no-choice phases was yoked to a previous choice-making condition. This analysis demonstrated that the choice-making condition was superior to baseline and yoked control phases as determined by levels of task engagement and disruptive behavior. The findings of the two analyses contribute information relevant to students with emotional and behavioral disorders, and to a growing literature on the desirable effects of choice making for students with disabilities and challenging behaviors.     

Suicide Risk Prediction: A New Approach*

A computer program that collects suicide risk factors by computer interview from persons with thoughts of suicide and processes the data to provide risk predictions has been written and pilot tested. Patient acceptance of the interviewing technique was good; more than half of the patients interviewed preferred the computer to a doctor as an interviewer. Bayes Theorem is used to process the data collected against a subjective data base. In a retrospective study comparing risk predictions made by the computer with predictions by experienced clinicians, the computer was more accurate in predicting suicide attempters (p .01) and slightly less accurate in predicting nonattempters. The program is economical, can be used wherever a telephone and a computer terminal are available, and is readily and uniformly modified to include new data.     

FORGIVENESS AND INTERPRETATION

This paper explores the relationship between our interpretations of another's actions and our readiness to forgive. It begins by articulating an account of forgiveness drawn from the New Testament. It then employs the work of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer to investigate ways in which our interpretations of an act or agent can promote or prevent such forgiveness. It concludes with a discussion of some ethical restrictions that may pertain to the interpretation of actions or agents as opposed to utterances and a look at the significance of these restrictions for forgiveness‐promoting interpretation.     

PROMOTING PARENT-PROVIDER INTERACTION DURING YOUNG CHILDREN'S HEALTH-SUPERVISION VISITS

We prompted parents to increase their interactions with health-care providers during their children's health-supervision visits. Before scheduled appointments we asked parents of 32 infants and young children if they had specific child health questions or concerns. Sixteen parents randomly assigned to the prompted group were then prompted to initiate discussions of their concerns. Sixteen control parents discussed unrelated topics before their appointments. Prompted parents initiated significantly more interactions with health-care providers and more health and behavioral topics were discussed during their appointments. Both parent groups reported satisfaction with health-care services. Further research is needed to determine the clinical significance of outcomes associated with enhanced parent-provider interaction during children's health-supervision visits. These visits are ideal settings for behavioral research on improving health care for children and their families.