Parent and Family Impact of Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Review and Proposed Model for Intervention Evaluation

Raising a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be an overwhelming experience for parents and families. The pervasive and severe deficits often present in children with ASD are associated with a plethora of difficulties in caregivers, including decreased parenting efficacy, increased parenting stress, and an increase in mental and physical health problems compared with parents of both typically developing children and children with other developmental disorders. In addition to significant financial strain and time pressures, high rates of divorce and lower overall family well-being highlight the burden that having a child with an ASD can place on families. These parent and family effects reciprocally and negatively impact the diagnosed child and can even serve to diminish the positive effects of intervention. However, most interventions for ASD are evaluated only in terms of child outcomes, ignoring parent and family factors that may have an influence on both the immediate and long-term effects of therapy. It cannot be assumed that even significant improvements in the diagnosed child will ameliorate the parent and family distress already present, especially as the time and expense of intervention can add further family disruption. Thus, a new model of intervention evaluation is proposed, which incorporates these factors and better captures the transactional nature of these relationships.     

Modeling single versus multiple systems in implicit and explicit memory

It is currently controversial whether priming on implicit tasks and discrimination on explicit recognition tests are supported by a single memory system or by multiple, independent systems. In a Psychological Review article, Berry and colleagues used mathematical modeling to address this question and provide compelling evidence against the independent-systems approach.     

Doing the best for one’s child: satisficing versus optimizing parentalism

The maxim ??parents should do what is in the best interests of their child?? seems like an unassailable truth, and yet, as I argue here, there are serious problems with it when it is taken seriously. One problem concerns the sort of demands such a principle places on parents; the other concerns its larger social implications when conceived as part of a national policy for the rearing of children. The theory of parenting that creates these problems I call ??optimizing parentalism.?? To avoid them, I define and defend a new and more morally appealing theory, ??satisficing parentalism.??     

Cross-modal recognition of human individuals in domestic horses (Equus caballus)

This study has shown that domestic horses are capable of cross-modal recognition of familiar humans. It was demonstrated that horses are able to discriminate between the voices of a familiar and an unfamiliar human without seeing or smelling them at the same moment. Conversely, they were able to discriminate the same persons when only exposed to their visual and olfactory cues, without being stimulated by their voices. A cross-modal expectancy violation setup was employed; subjects were exposed both to trials with incongruent auditory and visual/olfactory identity cues and trials with congruent cues. It was found that subjects responded more quickly, longer and more often in incongruent trials, exhibiting heightened interest in unmatched cues of identity. This suggests that the equine brain is able to integrate multisensory identity cues from a familiar human into a person representation that allows the brain, when deprived of one or two senses, to maintain recognition of this person.     

Development of the coordination between posture and manual control

Studies have suggested that proper postural control is essential for the development of reaching. However, little research has examined the development of the coordination between posture and manual control throughout childhood. We investigated the coordination between posture and manual control in children (7- and 10-year-olds) and adults during a precision fitting task as task constraints became more difficult. Participants fit a block through an opening as arm kinematics, trunk kinematics, and center of pressure data were collected. During the fitting task, the precision, postural, and visual constraints of the task were manipulated. Young children adopted a strategy where they first move their trunk toward the opening and then stabilize their trunk (freeze degrees of freedom) as the precision manual task is being performed. In contrast, adults and older children make compensatory trunk movements as the task is being performed. The 10-year-olds were similar to adults under the less constrained task conditions, but they resembled the 7-year-olds under the more challenging tasks. The ability to either suppress or allow postural fluctuations based on the constraints of a suprapostural task begins to develop at around 10 years of age. This ability, once developed, allows children to learn specific segmental movements required to complete a task within an environmental context.     

Information theoretical approaches to chick-a-dee calls of Carolina chickadees (Poecile carolinensis)

One aim of this study was to apply information theoretical analyses to understanding the structural complexity of chick-a-dee calls of Carolina chickadees, Poecile carolinensis. A second aim of this study was to compare this structural complexity to that of the calls of black-capped chickadees, P. atricapillus, described in an earlier published report (Hailman, Ficken, & Ficken, 1985). Chick-a-dee calls were recorded from Carolina chickadees in a naturalistic observation study in eastern Tennessee. Calls were analyzed using approaches from information theory, including transition probability matrices, Zipf's rules, entropies, and information coding capacities of calls and notes of calls. As described for black-capped chickadees, calls of Carolina chickadees exhibited considerable structural complexity. Most results suggested that the call of Carolina chickadees is more structurally complex than that of black-capped chickadees. These findings add support to the growing literature on the complexity of this call system in Paridae species. Furthermore, these results point to the feasibility of detailed cross-species comparative analyses that may allow strong testing of hypotheses regarding signal evolution.     

A computer-based program to teach braille reading to sighted individuals

Instructors of the visually impaired need efficient braille‐training methods. This study conducted a preliminary evaluation of a computer‐based program intended to teach the relation between braille characters and English letters using a matching‐to‐sample format with 4 sighted college students. Each participant mastered matching visual depictions of the braille alphabet to their printed‐word counterparts. Further, each participant increased the number of words they read in a braille passage following this training. These gains were maintained at variable levels on a maintenance probe conducted 2 to 4 weeks after training.     

Disentangling stereotype activation and stereotype application in the stereotype misperception task

When forming impressions about other people, stereotypes about the individual's social group often influence the resulting impression. At least 2 distinguishable processes underlie stereotypic impression formation: stereotype activation and stereotype application. Most previous research has used implicit measures to assess stereotype activation and explicit measures to assess stereotype application, which has several disadvantages. The authors propose a measure of stereotypic impression formation, the stereotype misperception task (SMT), together with a multinomial model that quantitatively disentangles the contributions of stereotype activation and application to responses in the SMT. The validity of the SMT and of the multinomial model was confirmed in 5 studies. The authors hope to advance research on stereotyping by providing a measurement tool that separates multiple processes underlying impression formation.     

Missed It By That Much: Austin on Norms of Truth

A principal challenge for a deflationary theory is to explain the value of truth: why we aim for true beliefs, abhor dishonesty, and so on. The problem arises because deflationism sees truth as a mere logical property and the truth predicate as serving primarily as a device of generalization. Paul Horwich, attempts to show how deflationism can account for the value of truth. Drawing on the work of J. L. Austin, I argue that his account, which focuses on belief, cannot adequately accommodate the complex role that truth plays in the norms governing assertion and similar speech acts.     

Predicting maternal sensitivity: The roles of postnatal depressive symptoms and parasympathetic dysregulation

Previous research has established that maternal depression is a risk factor for a variety of negative developmental outcomes among infants and children. Although low levels of maternal sensitivity have been hypothesized to explain this risk, the biological mechanisms underlying the association between maternal depressive symptoms and low levels of maternal sensitivity have been largely underexplored. This study examined the roles of postnatal depressive symptoms and parasympathetic nervous system functioning as predictors of low levels of maternal sensitivity, during a stressful mother–infant interaction—the reunion phase of the Still‐Face Paradigm. Depressive symptoms and traitlike predispositions toward parasympathetic dysregulation, as indexed by low resting levels of respiratory sinus arrhythmia, were associated independently with less sensitive parenting. Discussion considers that during stressful mother–infant interactions, both mothers with depressive symptoms and mothers predisposed to parasympathetic dysregulation may have fewer emotional, physiological, and psychological resources with which to respond sensitively to their infants' cues.