Teaching children with autism to respond to and initiate bids for joint attention

A multiple baseline design across 3 children with autism was used to assess the effects of prompting and social reinforcement to teach participants to respond to an adult's bid for joint attention and to initiate bids for joint attention. Participants were taught to respond to an adult's bid for joint attention by looking in the direction of an object at which the adult pointed, by making a comment about the object, and by looking back at the adult. Additional training and reinforcement were needed to teach the participants to initiate bids for joint attention. Findings are discussed in terms of the social relevance of teaching children with autism to respond to and initiate bids for joint attention.     

Time perspective, depression, and substance misuse among the homeless

Using the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI; P. G. Zimbardo & J. N. Boyd, 1999), the authors found that homeless people, in comparison with a control group, had a significantly more negative outlook concerning their past and present as evinced by high Past-Negative and Present-Fatalistic scores and low Past-Positive scores on the ZTPI. However, the homeless individuals were almost indistinguishable from control participants on measures of Present-Hedonism and Future thinking. The homeless individuals had significantly higher levels of depression, with 31 out of 50 (62%) reaching criteria for probable depression. However, this finding was unrelated to their atypical time perspective. There was no significant relation between substance misuse and time perspective. Despite their current difficulties, including depression and drug abuse, the homeless individuals maintained a propensity toward future thinking characterized by striving to achieve their goals.     

Mechanisms for enhancing the credibility of an adviser: prepayment and aligned incentives

We tested the effectiveness of prepayment for advice and aligned incentives as mechanisms for enhancing trust in unfamiliar advisers in decision‐making under uncertainty. Participants were low‐income Zimbabweans who played two rounds of the Monty Hall three‐door game. In round 1, participants who purchased advice were significantly more likely to follow advice for how to win the game than were participants who received free advice. In round 2, the apparent effectiveness of advisers' suggestions in round 1 moderated participants' propensity to follow advice. If the round 1 advice appeared wrong, the credibility enhancing benefits of prepayment diminished. If the advice appeared right, the benefits of prepayment maintained. Hypotheses with regard to the benefits of aligned incentives received only weak support. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychopathic traits in nursing and criminal justice majors: a pilot study

Prior findings suggest presence of psychopathic personality traits may be prevalent outside of the criminal sphere, such as in the business world. It is possible that particular work environments are attractive to individuals with higher psychopathic personality traits. To test this hypothesis, the current study investigated whether psychopathic personality scores could predict students' choices between two university majors, criminal justice or nursing (N= 174; 53 men, 121 women). Nursing education espouses nurturance and care, while criminal justice education teaches students informal and formal social control. Given these two educational mandates, it was predicted that students who scored higher on a scale of psychopathy would tend to enter criminal justice rather than nursing. Using logistic regression, results showed students with higher overall scores on the Psychopathic Personality Inventory, specifically higher scores on the subscale Machiavellian Egocentricity, were more likely to have chosen to major in criminal justice than nursing. Effects were generally weak but significant, accounting for between 5% to 25% of the variance in choice of major. Furthermore, this finding was not due to sex differences.     

The sad truth about depressive realism

In one form of a contingency judgement task individuals must judge the relationship between an action and an outcome. There are reports that depressed individuals are more accurate than are nondepressed individuals in this task. In particular, nondepressed individuals are influenced by manipulations that affect the salience of the outcome, especially outcome probability. They overestimate a contingency if the probability of an outcome is high—the “outcome-density effect”. In contrast, depressed individuals display little or no outcome-density effect. This apparent knack for depressives not to be misled by outcome density in their contingency judgements has been termed “depressive realism”, and the absence of an outcome-density effect has led to the characterization of depressives as “sadder but wiser”. We present a critical summary of the depressive realism literature and provide a novel interpretation of the phenomenon. We suggest that depressive realism may be understood from a psychophysical analysis of contingency judgements.*     

The generous elderly: naturalistic studies of donations across the life span

The relation between age and altruism was examined in two experiments conducted in naturalistic settings. In both studies, individuals from 5 to over 75 years of age had opportunities to donate money to a charity concerned with the welfare of infants with birth defects. The effect of a variable designed to evoke the needs rule was also observed by using both pregnant and nonpregnant charitable solicitors. Results of both studies yielded a significant main effect of solicitor condition on donations. Study 1 yielded a linear increase with age in numbers of people donating; however, retired persons generally donated less money than did younger adults. In Study 2, which controlled for financial costs, elderly persons proved to be the most generous. These results underscore the importance of personal resources and helping opportunities in influencing altruism among older persons.     

The effect of context during word perception in schizophrenic patients

Hospitalized chronic and acute schizophrenics were compared with age- and social-status-matched controls on word perception tests to measure the effect of context on recognition thresholds. In Experiment 1 the method of J. Morton (1964, British Journal of Psychology, 55, 165-180) was adopted to see how related and unrelated contexts influenced word recognition thresholds when both context and stimulus word were presented visually. Experiment 2 was an auditory analog of Experiment 1 and in addition the chronic schizophrenics were selected on the basis of a presence or absence of auditory hallucinations. The influence of context on perceptual thresholds was quite normal in all schizophrenics. However, analysis of the incorrect responses elicited showed that some schizophrenic subjects do produce bizarre or irrelevant responses or perseveration to a greater extent than their controls. These results are explained in terms of automatic and strategic modes of information processing. The automatic processes responsible for the adjustment of perceptual thresholds operate normally in schizophrenics but response production which demands strategic selection and editing of responses is prone to malfunction which results in the observed deviations in the normal use of language.