A Picture-Based Activity Schedule Intervention to Teach Adults with Mild Intellectual Disability to Use an iPad During a Leisure Activity

Individuals with developmental disabilities have limited opportunities to participate in leisure activities, frequently due to lack of skills. The purpose of the current study was to teach three adults diagnosed with mild intellectual disability to use an iPad in the context of playing the video game Angry Birds. We used an adapted multiple baseline across participants research design to teach the task, which included opening the cover of the iPad, unlocking the device, opening Angry Birds, playing the game, and putting the iPad away. Instruction took place during breaks in a private room at a sheltered workshop. During intervention, participants had access to an activity schedule to aid in completion of the task. In some cases, extra prompts were provided to increase attention to the activity schedule. All three participants showed improvement in the target skill with intervention and gains were sustained during the maintenance phase.     

The need for public policies to promote healthier food consumption: A comment on Wansink and Chandon (2014)

Current approaches to addressing obesity have fallen short. This is largely due to the many environmental forces that undermine people's self-regulatory capacity to be personally responsible for their food choices. Novel insights from the social sciences are needed to inform voluntary, health-promoting actions by companies, institutions, and citizens as well as the design of public health policies. Voluntary interventions that rely on nudges should complement traditional public health strategies such as taxation and restriction of child-targeted marketing in schools. In this commentary, we discuss four food policy issues that would benefit from consumer psychology research: (a) the restriction of food marketing to children, (b) provision of nutrition information through food labels, (c) improving school food environments, and (d) placing limits on portion sizes. Identifying effective solutions for obesity will require approaches that integrate psychological, public health, and legal perspectives and methods.     

Evidence-Based Assessment in Children and Adolescents with Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder

The assessment of varied psychiatric disorders, including obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), is shifting towards the use of evidence-based assessments (EBAs). This shift has fostered the development, validation and adaptation of several measures to rate obsessive–compulsive symptoms and other related problematic areas such as functional impairment or family attitudes among others. The aim of this paper is to present a systematic review of psychometric studies on pediatric OCD-specific measures to classify these according to assessment evidence-based criteria. Selection criteria that determined which studies were included in the review were: (1) analyzing an OCD measure and (2) including participants’ age being 18 years or younger. The literature search procedure was conducted in Medline, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, ERIC, Cochrane Library, and Scholar Google databases and enabled us to locate 42 studies which analyzed psychometric properties of 14 OCD measures studied in children and adolescents. Instruments were grouped into the following assessment areas: symptom presence and severity, functional impairment, family functioning and cognitive dimensions of OCD. Psychometric data regarding internal structure, internal consistency, reliability, validity and diagnostic precision were also reported. Further, measures were classified as well-established, approaching well-established and promising assessments in terms of reliability and validity. We concluded that the assessment of OCD in pediatric populations is a growing field that in a short-medium term could provide a wide variety of EBAs for the evaluation obsessive–compulsive symptoms and other OCD-related dimensions. The paper concludes by highlighting directions for future research.     

The Role Maturity of Parents of Emerging Adult Children: Validity of a Parental Maturity Measure

Parental maturity refers to parents’ ability to see their child as an independent adult with limitations and needs, and relate to him/her accordingly. In this study, we had two main aims: (a) develop a measure of parental maturity and test its construct validity in a sample of middle-aged parents with an emerging adult child, and (b) examine how the dimensions of parental maturity varied with a child’s gender and life course transitions (i.e., employment and leaving the parental home). A sample of 343 Portuguese parents (187 mothers and 156 fathers) aged 40–68 participated in this study. Factorial validity of the Parental Maturity Measure was tested using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses and measurement invariance across mothers and fathers. Results gave support for a two-factor measure—Comprehending (6 items) and Letting Go (4 items)—with an equivalent meaning across parents. Dimensions of parental maturity were associated with differentiated and positive parent–child relationship qualities, but were quite independent of the child’s gender and life course transitions.     

Integration of visuospatial information encoded from different viewpoints

Two experiments investigated whether separate sets of objects viewed in the same environment but from different views were encoded as a single integrated representation or maintained as distinct representations. Participants viewed two circular layouts of objects that were placed around them in a round (Experiment 1) or a square (Experiment 2) room and were later tested on perspective-taking trials requiring retrieval of either one layout (within-layout trials) or both layouts (between-layout trials). Results from Experiment 1 indicated that participants did not integrate the two layouts into a single representation. Imagined perspective taking was more efficient on within- than on between-layout trials. Furthermore, performance for within-layout trials was best from the perspective that each layout was studied. Results from Experiment 2 indicated that the stable environmental reference frame provided by the square room caused many, but not all, participants to integrate all locations within a common representation. Participants who integrated performed equally well for within-layout and between-layout judgments and also represented both layouts using a common reference frame. Overall, these findings highlight the flexibility of organizing information in spatial memory.     

Dirty Hands and Moral Conflict – Lessons from the Philosophy of Evil

Philosophia - According to one understanding of the problem of dirty hands, every case of dirty hands is an instance of moral conflict, but not every instance of moral conflict is a case of dirty...     

All units are equal in humpback whale songs,but some are more equal than others

Animal Cognition - Flexible production and perception of vocalizations is linked to an impressive array of cognitive capacities including language acquisition by humans, song learning by birds,...     

Perceiving by proxy: Effect-based action control with unperceivable effects

Anticipations of future sensory events have the potential of priming motor actions that would typically cause these events. Such effect anticipations are generally assumed to rely on previous physical experiences of the contingency of own actions and their ensuing effects. Here we propose that merely imagined action effects may influence behaviour similarly as physically experienced action effects do. Three experiments in the response–effect compatibility paradigm show that the mere knowledge of action–effect contingencies is indeed sufficient to incorporate these effects into action control even if the effects are never experienced as causally linked to own actions. The experiments further highlight constraints for this mechanism which seems to be rather effortful and to depend on explicit intentions.