Cognitive changes associated with social skills training

Changes in locus of control and self-esteem during social skills training and at 6 month follow-up were investigated. Forty-four adolescent, male offenders were randomly assigned to a social skills training, attention-placebo, or no-treatment control procedure. The results showed that pre- to post-training increases in self-esteem were produced for both the social skills training and attention-placebo control groups, but not for the no-treatment control group. These increases did not continue during the follow-up phase; the social skills training group, which showed the greatest improvement during training, displayed a decrease in self- esteem during follow-up.The locus of control measures showed a statistically significant shift towards internality for the social skills training group during training, which was not found for the attention-placebo and no-treatment controls. During the follow-up phase, all three groups showed a statistically significant shift towards externality, suggesting a tendency for boys to view their behaviour and consequences as being under the control of chance factors or powerful others, during institutionalization. This effect was partly reversed during training for the social skills training group, but the effect was not long lasting. It seems therefore that social skills training is effective in producing an increase in self-esteem and a shift towards internal locus of control. These changes are, however, of short duration and the self-esteem shift may be the result of increased staff contact or other non-specific therapy factors.     

Habit reversal vs. negative practice treatment of nailbiting

A previous study of the habit reversal treatment of nailbiting was extended by using more subjects (97) and a comparison with an alternative method (negative practice). Negative practice reduced nailbiting episodes by about 60% whereas habit reversal reduced nailbiting episodes by about 99% throughout the 5-month follow-up.     

Suppression and substitution in the treatment of nailbiting

The effectiveness of a package treatment for reducing nailbiting was studied. The package was composed of both positive procedures aimed at teaching adaptive behavior to substitute for nailbiting and negative procedures aimed at advancing skills for suppressing nailbiting. The design of the study permitted an analysis of the contributions of both positive and negative components of the package. Subjects assigned to combined, positive, negative and placebo groups received four weekly treatment sessions, and changes in their nailbiting behavior were compared with untreated controls. As in previous studies, nonspecific factors such as demand and attention to ones nails were found to be important determinants of outcome. In addition, positive procedures were found to be substantially more important than negative procedures in the maintenance of reductions in nailbiting over a 4-month follow-up period.     

Infant search tasks reveal early concepts of containment and canonical usage of objects

It is difficult to gain unambiguous evidence on the use of concepts by infants. Many results can be accounted for in terms of action-based strategies. The evidence reported here fulfils the minimal criteria for the operation of working concepts in infants. Search tasks are used with a filled interval which forces memory-search, and the object is hidden in containers which fulfil their customary job or violate it. Infants treat an upright cup as a more reliable location marker than an inverted one. A series of experiments probes the phenomenon. The results indicate that the infants have a working concept of containment which can be triggered by the provision of containers in their canonical orientation. Even “object permanence tasks” lead infants to access their knowledge of the relationships into which things typically enter in the world outside the laboratory.     

Self-report and physiologic responding during in vivo flooding

Self-report and physiologic measures of arousal were obtained during in vivo flooding sessions. Minimal correspondence was found between these two assessment modalities. The significance of these findings for treatment is discussed.     

BOOK REVIEW

Marshall H. Segall, Cross-cultural psychology: human behavior in global perspective. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. 1979. $ 12.95.     

APPLICATION OF A SOCIAL SKILLS TRAINING PROGRAM IN THE MODIFICATION OF INTERPERSONAL DEFICITS AMONG RETARDED ADULTS: A CLINICAL REPLICATION

Six mentally retarded adults, equally divided into two treatment groups, were provided with individualized social skills training programs. Treatment, evaluated via a multiple-baseline design strategy, was sequentially and cumulatively applied across target behaviors over a four-week intervention period. Behavioral observation probes and social validation measures served as the primary dependent variables. Results indicated that (a) treatment was effective for virtually all behaviors across all subjects, (b) improvements occurred for both training and generalization scenes, and (c) behavioral performance was maintained one month following the termination of treatment.     

Picture superiority in free recall: The effects of organization and elaboration

A conception of semantic memory structure is presented in which elaboration is considered to vary both between and within items. Pictures and their verbal labels are suggested to activate common abstract memory representations, but these activations will differ in their degree of within-item elaboration. However, pictures and words should show comparable between-item elaboration properties, such as might be revealed by the category-recall relationship and clustering in free recall. Children were presented pictures and words in either a category-recall situation, where between-item elaboration was emphasized, or in a control situation where between-item elaboration was minimized. No differences between pictures and words in either recall or clustering were found in the category-recall task. However, when the same items were presented in the control situation the typical picture superiority effect in free recall was found. The results are interpreted as consistent with a two-factor theory of semantic elaboration, and indicate that these basic properties of memory encoding hold even for young children.     

Active and passive observers' attraction to a self-disclosing other

Active observer (participant) subjects were induced to make either a high or a low intimacy disclosure about themselves to a partner. Their (videotaped confederate) partner then disclosed either intimately or non-intimately in return. The impressions and attributions of these subjects were compared to the predictions of passive observer subjects (non-participants) who were each furnished with the original instructions, heard a tape recording of a different active observer's disclosure, and watched the same videotape of the confederate that person had seen. As expected, both active observers' responses and passive observers' predictions indicated a preference for the intimate partner. In addition, passive observers' attraction predictions were less positive than active observers' reports. But contrary to the hypotheses, passive observers predicted that active observers would attribute the partner's disclosure more to personalistic causes than was actually the case, and guessed inaccurately that active observers would interpret the partner's intimacy as an indicator of attraction. The methodological implications of these active-passive observer differences for research in self-disclosure and relationships are discussed.