THE USE OF BEHAVIORAL ASSESSMENT TO PRESCRIBE AND EVALUATE TREATMENTS FOR SEVERELY HANDICAPPED CHILDREN

Behavioral assessment procedures were used to prescribe and evaluate treatments of maladaptive behavior for 2 children with severe multiple handicaps. In Experiment 1, the results of an assessment of reinforcer preference were used in conjunction with a functional analysis of the conditions maintaining self-injurious behavior to prescribe a treatment for a child with severe disabilities. The treatment procedure involved the use of a pressure-sensitive microswitch to activate reinforcing stimuli during two solitary conditions, during which self-injurious behavior had occurred at high rates. The results were evaluated with a multiple baseline across settings design and indicated that self-injury decreased with concomitant increases in microswitch activation. Results were maintained at 6 weeks, 8 weeks, and 6 months. In Experiment 2, the results of behavioral assessments of reinforcer preference and self-injurious behavior were combined to develop a treatment for a second severely handicapped child, who exhibited high rates of self-injury in demand situations. This treatment was evaluated with a multiple baseline across tasks design and resulted in the elimination of self-injury for up to 15 months.     

EVALUATION OF TACTILE PROMPTS WITH A STUDENT WHO IS DEAF,BLIND, AND MENTALLY RETARDED

We provided tactile cues to a student who was deaf, blind, and mentally retarded to guide her performance on a variety of packaging tasks. The student had previously received extensive training on multiple packaging and sequencing tasks through her vocational education program. Although she was able to complete these tasks, each change in materials necessitated that similar levels of retraining be conducted in order for her to perform revised tasks. Tactile cues were introduced and evaluated through a multiple baseline with sequential withdrawal design for two envelope-stuffing tasks and one bagging task. Results indicated that the tactile prompts were effective in guiding her performance on the training task and in promoting generalization to novel tasks and cues. Continued use of the cues was necessary to maintain the student's performance. Our findings suggest that tactile prompts function similarly to picture prompts and may be an effective alternative external prompting system for persons for whom picture prompts would not be appropriate.     

Left-handedness in twin families: support of an environmental hypothesis

Information on handedness, assessed as writing-hand, was collected from 197 MZ twin pairs and 203 DZ twin pairs and from their parents, spouses, and children. Associations for pairs of relatives were studied by 2 X 2 tables, computing chi squared-values and tetrachoric correlations. Correlations of about .3 were obtained for mother-offspring and sibling pairs, while for cousins the correlation was .25 (in a small sample). No other significant associations were found, not even for twins. These results suggest only a small, if any, genetic effect, and only a small environmental between family effect, most of which seems to be a maternal effect. The lack of cotwin correlations and correlations for one of the twins with her/his ordinary brothers/sisters suggest the existence of an effect specific to twins, since the correlation for pairs of ordinary siblings is significant. Conclusions drawn from twin studies alone may be biased. The frequency of left-hand writers has increased from 1% to 10% in the different age groups born during the last century in Norway. This age effect is present mainly in hand writing and not so much in handedness generally, suggesting a decrease in cultural repression against left-hand writing.     

Time went by so slowly: Overestimation of event duration by males and females

In three experiments, 469 subjects watched a short videotape of a bank robbery and later estimated the duration of the tape. Subjects invariably overestimated the durations. Accuracy of time estimation was unrelated to amount of free recall (Experiment 1) or accuracy of memory (Experiment 2). Females overestimated to a greater degree than males (Experiments 2 and 3). A more stressful version of the event produced greater overestimates than a less stressful version (Experiment 3). The relationship between induced arousal and time estimation appears to be different for men and women.     

Empathy and the expert witness

This paper argues that the expert witness who offers empathic testimony may significantly assist the trial lawyer in defending certain personal injury cases. The author considers his own congenital deformity from a subjective and objective analysis of experience. He then uses this deformity and the analysis to illustrate empathic testimony. A courtroom example is given. The conclusion argues the importance of permitting the experience of psychic trauma to speak for itself. It is also concluded that such experience and its analysis cannot be easily refuted as psychological projection. Trial lawyers could find the use of empathic testimony and its analysis of experience an effective tactic.     

The role of factor analysis in the development and evaluation of personality scales

The purpose of this paper is to examine the usefulness of factor analysis in developing and evaluating personality scales that measure limited domain constructs The approach advocated follows from several assumptions that a single scale ought to measure a single construct, that factor analysis ought to be applied routinely to new personality scales, and that the factors of a scale are important if it can be demonstrated that they are differentially related to other measures A detailed study of the Self-Monitoring Scale illustrates how factor analysis can help us to understand what a scale measures A second example uses the self-esteem literature to illustrate how factor analysis can clarify the proliferation of scales within a single content domain Both examples show how factor analysis can be used to identify important conceptual distinctions Confirmatory techniques are also introduced as a means for testing specific hypotheses It is concluded that factor analysis can make an important contribution to programmatic research in personality psychology     

Further evaluation of prompt density,rate of reinforcement,and the persistence of manding

Previous research has evaluated the effects of prompt rates on the rate of communicative behavior. More recent research has suggested that dense prompting can result in communicative behavior that is more resistant to change. However, existing research has not considered the impact that higher response rates had on reinforcement rate, a variable known to impact response persistence. The current study systematically replicated previous research by evaluating communicative responding in contexts associated with dense- and lean-prompt schedules and extended existing research by (a) holding reinforcement rates similar across the two prompting schedules (lean and dense), and (b) evaluating the persistence of communicative responding in the contexts associated with each prompting schedule. The results for Experiment 1 clearly replicated and extended previous research. The results for Experiment 2 were equivocal and suggested that previous reinforcement history and response class size impacted outcomes.