Teacher escape,avoidance, and countercontrol behaviors: Potential resoponses to disruptive and aggressive behaviors of students with severe behavior disorders

We develop hypothese based on the research literature regarding behavioral responses to aversive stimuli. Specifically, escape, avoidance, and countercontrol responses are presented as teacher behaviors which may occur in the presence of disruptive and aggressive behaviors (aversive stimuli) which, in part, characterize many students with severe behavior disorders (SBD). The potential for teacher escape, avoidance, and countercontrol responses to the detrimental for both teachers and students is presented, as well as suggestions for addressing aversive behaviors of students in ways to reduce the potential detrimental impact.     

Is the faith of faith development Christian faith?

The major research with a theological and developmental psychological perspective on the meaning and development of faith has been produced by James Fowler of Emory University and the Candler School of Theology. In this paper, I will present challenges by important critics who pose a significant question. Is this faith of the faith development research Christian faith? To provide an initial answer to the question, I will offer brief summaries of some of Fowler's writings that he has listed as most important for responding to the question. I will also present evidence from his writings and from the writings of other authors that he is indeed interpreting Christian faith.     

Reasonableness,bias, and the untapped power of procedure

I am grateful to Jeffrey Blustein, Dan Boone, and Michael Stocker for helpful comments. Special thanks to Catherine Elgin, particularly for her comments on Sections 5 and 8.1. This article was written under a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to whom I extend my gratitude.     

Affective deficits and pain insensitivity in schizophrenia

Affective deficits have long been considered a prominent feature of schizophrenia and play a central role in recent theory and research on the pathophysiology of this disorder. However, it has recently been argued that current approaches to the conceptualization and assessment of affective flattening in schizophrenia are confounded by the social and neuromotor deficits that are also prevalent in this disorder. Insensitivity to pain in individuals with schizophrenia — a phenomenon that has been reported frequently but never systematically investigated — provides one approach to examining affective flattening unconfounded by social and neuromotor deficits. Two studies are described in which signal detection theory measures of thermal pain sensitivity were examined in patients with schizophrenia, mood disorder, and normal controls; in addition, in the patients with schizophrenia, the relationships between these measures and measures of affective deficits were examined. Patients with schizophrenia had significantly poorer sensory discrimination of painful thermal stimuli than control subjects, but did not differ from controls with respect to their response criterion for reports of pain; patients with mood disorder had a significantly higher (i.e., more stoical) criterion for reports of pain than controls. As predicted, among the patients with schizophrenia, higher response criterion was significantly correlated with greater affective flattening and less intense affective experience (as well as with fewer positive symptoms and poorer premorbid adjustment). The results of these studies suggest that pain insensitivity in schizophrenia may reflect affective as well as sensory abnormalities, and that pain insensitivity in schizophrenia may provide a method for studying affective flattening in this disorder that is relatively independent of the social and neuromotor deficits that confound existing measures of this symptom. Continued examination of the relationship between pain insensitivity and affective deficits in schizophrenia is also important because numerous clinical reports have suggested that pain insensitivity is detrimental to health and can have life-threatening consequences in individuals with this disorder.This research was supported, in part, by research grants from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to Robert H. Dworkin (NS-30714) and W. Crawford Clark (NS-09263, NS-20248).     

Counterexample to the hypothesis of functional similarity between tactile and visual pattern perception

In earlier work, the author has demonstrated that tactile pattern perception and visual pattern perception exhibit many parallels when the effective spatial resolution of vision is reduced to that of touch, thus supporting the hypothesis that the two pattern senses are functionally similar when matched in spatial bandwidth. The present experiments demonstrate a clear counter-example to this hypothesis of functional similarity. Specifically, it was found that the lateral masking effect of a surround on tactile character recognition increases when the surround changes in composition from solid lines to dots, whereas for vision, recognition performance goes in the opposite direction. This finding necessitates some modification of the model of character recognition proposed by the author (Loornis, 1990) as it applies to the sensing of raised tactile patterns. One possible modification would be to incorporate, as the initial stage of pattern transformation, the continuum mechanics model for the skin that was developed by Phillips and Johnson (1981b).     

Other-race face perception

The other-race effect (or own-race bias or cross-racial identification effect) refers to the finding that recognition memory tends to be better for faces of members of subjects' own race than for faces of members of other races. The current study was designed to test the hypothesis that perceptual skills specific to identifying faces of particular racial groups contribute to this effect. On each of 50 trials, a photograph of a face was tachistoscopically presented for 120 ms, followed by a pattern mask and then a plain-view test pair composed of the previously presented face and a matched foil. As predicted, an other-race effect was obtained on this perceptual task: White subjects performed significantly more poorly on trials involving African American faces than on trials involving White faces, whereas no such difference was obtained among African American subjects.     

Factors influencing perceived angular velocity

The assumption that humans are able to perceive and process-angular kinematics is critical to many structure-from-motion and optical flow models. The current studies investigate this sensitivity, and examine several factors likely to influence angular velocity perception. In particular, three factors are considered: (1) the extent to which perceived angular velocity is determined by edge transitions of surface elements, (2) the extent to which angular velocity estimates are influenced by instantaneous linear velocities of surface elements, and (3) whether element-velocity effects are related to three-dimensional (3-D) tangential velocities or to two-dimensional (2-D) image velocities. Edge-transition rate biased angular velocity estimates only when edges were highly salient. Element velocities influenced perceived angular velocity; this bias was related to 2-D image velocity rather than 3-D tangential velocity. Despite these biases, however, judgments were most strongly determined by the true angular velocity. Sensitivity to this higher order motion parameter was surprisingly good, for rotations both in depth (y-axis) and parallel to the line of sight (z-axis).     

Past success and convergent thinking in groups: The role of group‐focused attributions

Past success often causes groups to think narrowly around strategies that have worked in the past, even when environmental change has rendered these strategies ineffective. From a psychological perspective, this research seems to indicate that past success may give rise to convergent thinking in groups. Why might successful groups be prone to convergent thinking? I argue that the relationship between past success and convergent thinking may depend on the attributions that groups generate to explain their shared success. In this paper, I focus on two distinct attributions at the group level: Individual‐focused attributions that reflect the idiosyncratic characteristics of individual group members and group‐focused attributions that reflect the emergent properties of the group as a whole. I found that group‐focused attributions for past success cause groups to generate fewer ideas that are, on average, more convergent. In contrast, individual‐focused attributions cause groups to generate more ideas that are on average more divergent. These findings suggest that the experience of success may actually stimulate divergent thinking depending on how a group chooses to explain it. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.