TEACHING EARLY READING SKILLS TO CHILDREN WITH AUTISM USING MIMIOSPROUT EARLY READING

A number of studies have demonstrated positive outcomes for typical learners from the internet‐based reading program, MimioSprout® Early Reading (MER). In the present study, a preliminary evaluation of MER was conducted with four children with autism who attended an applied behavior analysis educational program in a school setting. The primary aim was to investigate whether it would be feasible to use MER with children with autism and whether any adaptations to the standard teaching procedure would be needed. A secondary aim was to investigate whether completing MER would improve early reading skills. When additional discrete‐trial table top activities were designed to supplement each child's progress, every child was able to complete all 80 lessons and showed similar correct performance to that reported for typically developing learners. Results from a standardized test of reading ability showed an improvement in word recognition reading age for all children from 14 months to more than three years over the 14 weeks of teaching. A follow‐up test showed that gains were maintained eight weeks after the end of the intervention. MER can be successfully used with children with autism and can improve their early reading skills. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Paranoid thinking in mass shooters

Mass murderers, particularly school shooters, are depicted in the literature as either reacting with rage to taunts and bullying or as being psychopathic. However, examination of diaries and Web sites left by a subset of mass shooters (e.g., Eric Harris, Kimveer Gil, Seung-Hui Cho, Anders Breivik) reveals a different phenomenology than that typically proposed. This group greatly exaggerates the negativity of their treatment as reported by third-party school peers. They become and remain fixated and obsessed with rejection by what they see as an elite in-group whom they see as having unfairly achieved success. Instead of transcending the rejection, they formulate plans to annihilate the transgressors, which they justify as vengeance for the transgressions made against them. The self-exacerbating and obsessive qualities of these perceptions are more consistent with paranoid thinking than with psychopathy. The perceptions feed on themselves and, being part of a closed belief system, expand with time. In the rare cases where the perpetrator survives the mass shooting, they are diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. We focus on the pre-psychotic deterioration of their thinking.     

A Dual-Process Discrete-Time Survival Analysis Model: Application to the Gateway Drug Hypothesis

The gateway drug model is a popular conceptualization of a progression most substance users are hypothesized to follow as they try different legal and illegal drugs. Most forms of the gateway hypothesis are that “softer” drugs lead to “harder,” illicit drugs. However, the gateway hypothesis has been notably difficult to directly test—that is, to test as competing hypotheses in a single model that licit drug use might lead to illicit drug use or the reverse. This article presents a novel statistical technique, dual-process discrete-time survival analysis, which enables this comparison. This method uses mixture-modeling software to estimate 2 concurrent time-to-event processes and their effects on each other. Using this method, support for the gateway hypothesis in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997, was weak. However, this article was not designed as a strong test of causal direction but more as a technical demonstration and suffered from certain technological limitations. Both these limitations and future directions are discussed.     

Problems for contrastive closure: resolved and regained

The standard contextualist solution to the skeptical paradox is intended to provide a way to retain epistemic closure while avoiding the excessive modesty of radical skepticism and the immodesty of Moorean dogmatism. However, contextualism’s opponents charge that its solution suffers from epistemic immodesty comparable to Moorean dogmatism. According to the standard contextualist solution, all contexts where an agent knows some ordinary proposition to be true are contexts where she also knows that the skeptical hypotheses are false. It has been hoped that contrastivist theories of knowledge can mirror the contextualist solution while avoiding this epistemic immodesty. I review the main problems for contrastive closure and argue that none of the arguments currently in the literature pose an insurmountable problem for the contrastivist solution. However, I argue that contrastivist theories of knowledge, like their contextualist rivals, are indeed committed to epistemic immodesty.     

What are groups?

In this paper I argue for a view of groups, things like teams, committees, clubs and courts. I begin by examining features all groups seem to share. I formulate a list of six features of groups that serve as criteria any adequate theory of groups must capture. Next, I examine four of the most prominent views of groups currently on offer—that groups are non-singular pluralities, fusions, aggregates and sets. I argue that each fails to capture one or more of the criteria. Last, I develop a view of groups as realizations of structures. The view has two components. First, groups are entities with structure. Second, since groups are concreta, they exist only when a group structure is realized. A structure is realized when each of its functionally defined nodes or places are occupied. I show how such a view captures the six criteria for groups, which no other view of groups adequately does, while offering a substantive answer to the question, “What are groups?”     

A Review of “Child Anxiety Disorders: A Family-Based Treatment Manual for Practitioners”

This study investigated the relationship between intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetrated by women and the attachment style of each partner in 20 couples in which the male partner was in therapy for abusive men. Results confirmed the presence of a relationship between IPV and attachment style. Men with an avoidant attachment reported higher physical abuse victimization and higher use of negotiation during conflict, as revealed by their partner. Women with an anxious attachment reported having inflected more injuries and were less likely to use negotiation during conflict, as revealed by their partner. Findings highlight the relational basis of IPV.     

A developmental approach to treating dual-career couples

Abstract

While skills development may help some dual-career couples, for others such methods may result in feelings of frustration until certain developmental difficulties are resolved. This article: 1) addresses some problem areas that dual-career couples encounter; 2) reviews proposed solutions for these problems; 3) specifies the necessary personal requirements for mastering these solutions; and 4) suggests some of the unresolved developmental conflicts that can interfere with such mastery. The list of conflicts, proposed solutions, and typical impeding developmental difficulties is not meant to be exhaustive. Rather, this article is intended to convey a way of conceptualizing “problems surrounding problem solving” for dual-career couples.     

General knowledge norms: Updated and expanded from the Nelson and Narens (1980) norms

The Nelson and Narens (Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 19:338–368, 1980) general knowledge norms have been valuable to researchers in many fields. However, much has changed over the 32 years since the 1980 norms. For example, in 1980, most people knew the answer to the question “What is the name of the Lone Ranger’s Indian sidekick?” (answer: Tonto), whereas in 2012, few people know this answer. Thus, we updated the 1980 norms and expanded them by providing new measures. In particular, we report two new metacognitive measures (confidence judgments and peer judgments) and provide a detailed report of commission errors. Each of these measures will be valuable to researchers, and together they are likely to facilitate future research in a number of fields, such as research investigating memory illusions, metamemory processes, and error correction. The presence of substantial generational shifts from 1980 to 2012 necessitates the use of updated norms.     

Comparison of price change and health message interventions in promoting healthy food choices.

This study examines the feasibility and effectiveness of an environmental intervention for improving diet by comparing the impact of health messages, lowered prices, and their combination on the purchase of healthy food items in a restaurant. Price decreases alone, rather than a combination of price decreases and health messages, were associated with a higher level of increased purchases of some healthy food items as compared with control items over a 4-month period. Price decreases may be a more powerful means than health messages of increasing consumption of healthy foods. Health messages may have paradoxical effects if foods labeled as healthy are assumed to taste bad.