TEACHER POPULARITY AND CONTRAST EFFECTS IN A CLASSROOM TOKEN ECONOMY

There is a common fear that the use of a token economy in one classroom might harm pupil performance in situations where the contingencies are not in effect. This study investigated potential contrast effects on measures of children's productivity and attitudes toward teachers. Six children with reading deficits participated. A multiple baseline design was used to assess the effects of a token economy which was systematically introduced across three teachers. Dependent measures included two rating forms of teacher popularity and work rate on a programmed reading series. The results indicated that the token system was effective in increasing the children's productivity and that no consistent behavioral contrast effects occurred. Furthermore, children's attitudes toward teachers did not appear to be influenced by the token economy until only one teacher was not delivering tokens. At this point, her popularity declined until she also delivered tokens. The token economy manipulation appeared to have a specific, desirable effect on the targeted behavior (i.e., work rate) and had minimal negative or positive “side effects” on teacher popularity.     

An experimental space combining individual and social performances

This report describes several primate environments in which two or more animals shared a common social area. Automatic programming was used to permit concurrent individual sessions. Some of the behavioral phenomena observed in these environments, including reinforcing properties of social interactions, are discussed.     

Methodological challenges in union commitment studies

Methodological problems in studies of union commitment were identified and illustrated with data from 4,641 members and 479 stewards in 297 local teachers' unions. Using a 20-item union commitment scale, results confirmed the existence of 3 substantive factors and 1 method factor at the individual level of analysis: loyalty to the union, responsibility to the union, willingness to work for the union, and a factor of negatively worded items. Tests of measurement invariance showed that the scale captured commitment for rank-and-file members but not for union stewards. The authors also found partial measurement invariance between long-time and newer members and full measurement invariance between men and women. Finally, the authors found that violation of the statistical assumption of independence reduced model fit when individual commitment scores were analyzed without attention to the hierarchical nature of the data.     

Contingency experiences of 3-month-old children and their relation to later developmental achievements

In this study, the authors investigated the relation between early social contingency experiences and infants' competencies to detect nonsocial contingencies. In this study of 87 three-month-old infants, the authors operationalized early social contingencies as prompt, contingent maternal responses and coded microanalytically on the basis of video-recorded mother-infant interactions. The authors assessed competence to detect nonsocial contingencies by 2 methods: (a) the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm, which focuses on detecting contingencies between the infants' actions (kicking) and nonsocial consequences (mobile moving) and (b) the visual expectation paradigm, which focuses on detecting contingencies between 1 event (a smiley face projected on a screen) that was followed by a 2nd event (a complex picture projected on the other side of the screen). The results showed that early social contingencies are related to the competency to detect nonsocial action-consequence contingencies in the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm.     

Children's perception of media-portrayed sex roles

The immediate impact on preschool and elementary school children of a televised presentation in which the traditional sex roles of physician and nurse were reversed was examined. After viewing a videotape of a male nurse and a female physician, subjects were asked to identify photographs or names of the physician and nurse. Preschool, first-, and fourth-grade children selected male names or pictures for the physician and female names or pictures for the nurse, thereby reversing genders. Their immediate recall appeared strongly influenced by their stereotypes rather than by the film they had just viewed. Seventh-grade children correctly identified the names of the physician and nurse.The authors wish to thank Dr. Edward F. Meydrech, Assistant Professor, Department of Preventive Medicine and Chief of the Division of Biostatistics, University of Mississippi Medical Center, for his invaluable assistance in the analysis of the data.     

Is it enough to be willing to win or do you have to be smart? The relationship between competitive worldviews,cognitive abilities,and applicant faking in personality tests

Recent research has highlighted competitive worldviews as a key predictor of faking—the intentional distortion of answers by candidates in the selection context. According to theoretical assumptions, applicants’ abilities, and especially their cognitive abilities, should influence whether faking motivation, triggered by competitive worldviews, can be turned into successful faking behavior. Therefore, we examined the influence of competitive worldviews on faking in personality tests and investigated a possible moderation of this relationship by cognitive abilities in three independent high school and university student samples (N₁ = 133, N₂ = 137, N₃ = 268). Our data showed neither an influence of the two variables nor of their interaction on faking behavior. We discuss possible reasons for these findings and give suggestions for further research.     

The phenotypic consequences of MECP2 mutations extend beyond Rett syndrome

Although MECP2 was initially identified as the causative gene in classic Rett syndrome (RTT), the gene has now been implicated in several phenotypes that extend well beyond the clinically defined disorder. MECP2 mutations have been found in people with various disorders, including neonatal onset encephalopathy, X-linked recessive mental retardation (MRX), classic and atypical RTT, autism, and Angelman syndrome, as well as mildly affected females and normal carrier females. To make matters more complex, in approximately 20% of classic sporadic RTT cases and more than 50% of affected sister pairs, no mutation in MECP2 has been found. X-chromosome inactivation patterns can clearly affect the phenotypic expression in females, while the effect of the type and position of the mutation is more apparent in the broader phenotype than in RTT. Both males and females are at risk, although an excess of paternally derived mutations are found in most cases of classic RTT. Thus, because of the range of disparate phenotypes, the gene may account for a relatively large portion of mental retardation in the population.     

Assessing automatic activation of valence: a multinomial model of EAST performance

The Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST; De Houwer, 2003) has been introduced as an indirect measure of automatic activation of valence. EAST effects provide nonrelative valence measures of single stimuli compared to relative measures (e.g., Implicit Association Test) that imply a comparison between two stimuli or concepts. However, EAST effects can be biased by response tendencies. A multinomial process dissociation model of EAST performance is proposed and successfully validated in four experiments. Its parameters provide pure and unbiased measures of automatic valence activation, controlled processing of task-relevant features, and response tendency. A first application of latent-class hierarchical multinomial models reveals a significant amount of parameter heterogeneity resulting from interindividual differences in accuracy motivation.     

Interactions between working memory and language in young children with specific language impairment (SLI)

The underlying structure of working memory (WM) in young children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) was examined. The associations between the components of WM and the language abilities of young children with SLI were then analyzed. The Automated Working Memory Assessment and four linguistic tasks were administered to 58 children with SLI and 58 children without SLI, aged 4–5 years. The WM of the children was best represented by a model with four separate but interacting components of verbal storage, visuospatial storage, verbal central executive (CE), and visuospatial CE. The associations between the four components of WM did not differ significantly for the two groups of children. However, the individual components of WM showed varying associations with the language abilities of the children with SLI. The verbal CE component of WM was moderately to strongly associated with all the language abilities in children with SLI: receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, verbal comprehension, and syntactic development. These results show verbal CE to be involved in a wide range of linguistic skills; the limited ability of young children with SLI to simultaneously store and process verbal information may constrain their acquisition of linguistic skills. Attention should thus be paid to the language problems of children with SLI, but also to the WM impairments that can contribute to their language problems.