AN ECOBEHAVIORAL EXAMINATION OF A SIMPLE STRATEGY FOR INCREASING MEALTIME LANGUAGE IN RESIDENTIAL FACILITIES

Typically in large residential facilities for retarded persons, meals are served in an institutional style that does not appear to encourage appropriate peer interactions. An ecological program alternative is serving meals in a family style. The present study was designed to examine both the feasibility of serving family style meals and the effects of family style meal service on mealtime language. Five retarded young adult male residents, who had some conversational skills and appropriate table manners, participated in this study. The experimental design involved a multiple baseline analysis across meals (dinner, lunch, and breakfast). Observers coded the youths' mealtime verbalizations according to the type, content, and direction of the verbalizations and they recorded the length of the meals. The analysis of the verbalization data indicated that during family style meals the participants spoke substantially more often than during institutional style meals. Increases in peer-directed conversation about the meals primarily accounted for the verbalization changes. Family style serving also resulted in the youths spending more time with their meals. In addition, social validation measures suggested that the family style procedures were preferred by the consumers (participants, staff, and concerned community members).     

Determinants of cued recall

This paper reports two cued recall experiments in which the degree of preexperimental associative strength between rhyming cues and their respective targets is manipulated whilst holding the extent of informational overlap between them constant. Both experiments show that strong rhyming cues are more efficient than weak rhyming cues in eliciting target retrieval in both a short-term and a long-term memory situation. The results are interpreted as consistent with the generationrecognition theory of retrieval and inconsistent with predictions made by the encoding specificity principle. It is therefore suggested that caution must be applied when extending the encoding specificity principle to experimental situations other than that from which it is derived. Implications for the distinction between scanning and reconstructive modes of retrieval are also briefly considered.     

Sleep,activity, temperature,and performance: Techniques for long-term monitoring in the mouse

This paper describes a test chamber, a food acquisition task, and a training procedure for the long-term testing of an implanted mouse in a circadian rhythm experiment. For the training phase, a special-purpose controller is provided to a single cage. For the experimental phase, behavioral, electrophysiological, and environmental measures are collected by means of a mini-computer.     

Negative attitudes toward masturbation and pelvic vasocongestion: A thermographic analysis

The present study examined differences in pelvic vasocongestion as a function of negative attitudes toward masturbation. Pelvic vasocongestion was measured thermographically, which is a noninvasive means of detecting and photographing individual heat patterns to indicate physiological condition and functional changes within. The results indicated that women, with positive attitudes toward masturbation, who read an erotic story, experienced the greatest increase in pelvic vasocongestion. This and other findings were discussed in terms of masturbation acting to facilitate the patterning of sexual arousal and orgasmic functioning, especially in regard to creating the capacity for pelvic engorgement.     

Sex roles and the link between fertility and employment

Using a sample of Toronto women, we reexamine the relationship between employment and fertility with the aim of clarifying whether employment status is negatively related to the birth rate only among certain categories of women as defined by sex roles. Especially noteworthy is the finding that employed wives who rate their performance as a spouse and mother as better than most have a birth rate which is as high as that for women who are not in the labor force.The authors are indebted to David Johnson, Susan Welch, and Lynn White of the University of Nebraska, and Gordon Irving of Carleton University for their comments on an earlier version of this article. The views expressed here are the authors' and not those of the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs, Government of Canada, which provided funds to conduct the study of urban crowding from which the data reported here were drawn.     

The effects of situational variations in role-play scenes on assertive behavior

The study was conducted to determine the extent to which variations in the situational parameters of role-play scenes affect subjects' levels of assertiveness. Thirty-six psychology undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of three role-play conditions that differed in the situation-setting characteristics presented in the scenes: a Difficult condition, designed to inhibit assertive responding; an Easy condition, designed to facilitate assertive responding; and a Neutral condition. Subjects also completed a self-report assertion inventory. Videotapes of the role-played interactions were rated for a variety of component responses. Results indicate that subjects responded differently in the three conditions. Subjects in the Difficult and Neutral conditions were more compliant, and those in the Easy and Difficult conditions were more fluent. It is suggested that failure to specify the situational parameters of role-play scenes may affect the validity of this assessment procedure.This research was supported in part by NIMH Grant, MH28279 to the third author.     

The effect of phonemic processing on the retention of graphemic representations for words and nonwords

The three experiments reported in this study were each conducted in two phases. The first phase of Experiment 1 involved a same-different comparison task requiring “same” responses for both mixed-case (e.g., MAIN main) and pure-case (e.g., near near) pairs. This was followed by Phase 2, a surprise recognition test in which a graphemic effect on word retention was indicated by the superior recognition accuracy obtained for pure-case compared with mixed-case pairs. The first phases of Experiments 2 and 3 involved pronounceability and imageability judgment tasks, respectively. Graphemic retention was assessed by contrasting recognition accuracy for letter strings presented, during Phase 2, in their original Phase 1 case, with letter strings presented, during Phase 2, in. a graphemically dissimilar new case. The experiments provided evidence that there was minimal retention of the graphemic representations from which the phonemic representations of words are generated and, further, that the locus of this effect is probably postlexical. Nonwords were recognized more accurately than words in all three experiments. The latter result was attributed to differences between nonwords and words in both graphemic retention and semantic distinctiveness.     

DINING OUT WITH CHILDREN: EFFECTIVENESS OF A PARENT ADVICE PACKAGE ON PRE-MEAL INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR

The effectiveness of an advice package designed to restructure the restaurant environment and encourage parent praise was examined. Experiment 1 assessed the usefulness of the package when used with experimenter assistance. Videotapes were used to record the target child's behavior. Pre-meal inappropriate behavior decreased an average of 51% across target children. Mealtime inappropriate behavior and parent praise and disapproval were also measured. Experiment 2 was designed to determine whether families could implement the package without experimenter assistance and whether effects obtained would generalize to a different restaurant. Data were taken in vivo. Nine families were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Group assignment determined the order in which families went to two restaurants, the number of dinners each family participated in, and the point at which parents received the advice package. The order in which the families went to the two restaurants as well as the number of baseline meals was counterbalanced. Results of Experiment 2 showed that, when using the advice package, parents in all sequences were able to decrease pre-meal inappropriate behavior of their children, and that these effects generalized to a second restaurant.