Social Validity of a Training and Coaching Program for Parents of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder on a Waiting List for Early Behavioral Intervention

Due to limited public resources, many children with autism spectrum disorder and their families must wait several months, if not years, to access early behavioral intervention (EBI) services. Service providers must thus develop alternative support models to assist families placed on waiting lists. The present study assessed the social validity of one such initiative, a training and coaching program for parents whose children had been put on a waiting list for EBI services. This program consisted of group training sessions on strategies to cope with their child’s disorder based on applied behavioral analysis and on one-hour, weekly follow-up meetings to support parents’ interventions with their child over the course of 12 months. Social validity was assessed through parental satisfaction with this program and their perception of its effects on themselves, the family, the child, and parental stress. The 94 participants were generally satisfied with the program overall, although they wished for more frequent and intensive interventions. They reported that the program had positive effects on their psychological well-being, their family’s quality of life, and their child’s behavior. However, parenting stress levels were found to have increased over the 12-month period. These results demonstrate that training and individually supporting parents can be beneficial for families of children with ASD who cannot have access to early behavioral intervention immediately upon receiving a diagnosis. Importantly, however, these lower-cost, parent-focused programs cannot be considered a substitute for more intensive and children-driven services.     

Infants' meaning-making and the development of mental health problems

We argue that infant meaning-making processes are a central mechanism governing both typical and pathological outcomes. Infants, as open dynamic systems, must constantly garner information to increase their complexity and coherence. They fulfill this demand by making nonverbal "meaning"-affects, movements, representations-about themselves in relation to the world and themselves into a "biopsychosocial state of consciousness," which shapes their ongoing engagement with the world. We focus on the operation of the infant-adult communication system, a dyadic, mutually regulated system that scaffolds infants' engagement with the world of people, things, and themselves, and consequently their meaning-making. We argue that infant mental health problems emerge when the meanings infants make in the moment, which increase their complexity and coherence and may be adaptive in the short run, selectively limit their subsequent engagement with the world and, in turn, the growth of their state of consciousness in the long run. When chronic and iterative, these altered meanings can interfere with infants' successful development and heighten their vulnerability to pathological outcomes. Cultural variations in meaning-making and implications for clinical practice are discussed.     

EFFECTS OF MATERNAL DEPRESSION AND PANIC DISORDER ON MOTHER-INFANT INTERACTIVE BEHAVIOR IN THE FACE-TO-FACE STILL-FACE PARADIGM

The present study evaluated the interactive behavior of three groups of mothers and their 3-month-old infants in the Face-to-Face Still-Face paradigm. The mothers had either a clinical diagnosis of major depressive disorder (MDD, n = 33) with no comorbidity, a clinical diagnosis of panic disorder (PD, n = 13) with no comorbidity, or no clinical diagnosis (n = 48). The sample was selected to be at otherwise low social and medical risk, and all mothers with PD or MDD were in treatment. The findings indicated that (a) infants of mothers with PD or MDD displayed the traditional still-face and reunion effects described in previous research with nonclinical samples; (b) the 3-month-old infants in this study showed similar, but not identical, gender effects to those described for older infants; and (c) there were no patterns of maternal or infant interactive behavior that were unique to the PD, MDD, or control groups. These results are discussed in light of mothers' risk status, receipt of treatment, severity of illness, and comorbidity of PD and MDD.     

Identification of Early Child and Family Risk Factors for Aggressive Victim Status in First Grade

This prospective investigation sought to discriminate children who were both aggressive towards and victimized by peers in the first grade, from those who were only aggressive, only victimized, or neither (i.e., socially adjusted), using early child and family risk factors. Two hundred thirty-eight children, their mothers, and teachers participated in a longitudinal study since birth. All three aggressor/victim subgroups showed greater temperamental dysregulation than the socially adjusted children, but only aggressive victims had significantly poorer social perception skills. Aggressive victims were distinguished from aggressors by greater exposure to maternal depression and from victims by lower levels of early inhibition, but they shared the experiences of negative family emotional expressiveness with aggressors and greater mother-child negativity with victims. The identification of early risk factors is crucial to prevention and early intervention efforts that have the potential to attenuate the long term emotional, social, and academic problems associated with aggressive victim status.     

Sample diversity and premise typicality in inductive reasoning: evidence for developmental change

Evaluating whether a limited sample of evidence provides a good basis for induction is a critical cognitive task. We hypothesized that whereas adults evaluate the inductive strength of samples containing multiple pieces of evidence by attending to the relations among the exemplars (e.g., sample diversity), six-year-olds would attend to the degree to which each individual exemplar in a sample independently appears informative (e.g., premise typicality). To test these hypotheses, participants were asked to select between diverse and non-diverse samples to help them learn about basic-level animal categories. Across various between-subject conditions (N=133), we varied the typicality present in the diverse and non-diverse samples. We found that adults reliably selected to examine diverse over non-diverse samples, regardless of exemplar typicality, six-year-olds preferred to examine samples containing typical exemplars, regardless of sample diversity, and nine-year-olds were somewhat in the midst of this developmental transition.     

An evaluation of crisis hotline outcomes. Part 1: Nonsuicidal crisis callers

The effectiveness of telephone crisis services/hotlines, examining proximal outcomes as measured by changes in callers' crisis state from the beginning to the end of their calls to eight centers in the U.S. and intermediate outcomes within 3 weeks of their calls, was evaluated. Between March 2003 and July 2004, 1,617 crisis callers were assessed during their calls and 801 (49.5%) participated in the followup assessment. Significant decreases in callers' crisis states and hopelessness were found during the course of the telephone session, with continuing decreases in crisis states and hopelessness in the following weeks. A majority of callers were provided with referrals and/or plans of actions for their concerns and approximately one third of those provided with mental health referrals had followed up with the referral by the time of the follow-up assessment. While crisis service staff coded these callers as nonsuicidal, at follow-up nearly 12% of them reported having suicidal thoughts either during or since their call to the center. The need to conduct suicide risk assessments with crisis callers and to identify strategies to improve referral follow-up is highlighted.     

Visual discrimination by heifers (Bos taurus) of their own species

Species discrimination has been described in several taxa but rarely in domestic animals. In contrast to wild species, domestic species present a great phenotypic variety. This study investigated whether 10 Prim'Holstein heifers (Bos taurus) could discriminate images of cows from images of other domestic animals. The experiment was based on simultaneous discrimination. Responses were obtained through instrumental conditioning using a food reward. In Experiment 1, the reward was associated with a cow face and, in the reversal learning task, with faces of other domestic species. The results showed that in both tasks, cows were able to reach the criterion in few sessions. Therefore, despite great phenotypic variety (a cognitive challenge) cows were able to visually discriminate their own species from other domestic species.     

Lower extremity kinetics for balance control in children with cerebral palsy

The authors examined and compared the effect of support-surface perturbations of various magnitudes on lower extremity kinetics of 7 children with cerebral palsy (CP) and 8 typically developing (TD) children. Results showed that the highest velocity tolerated without stepping was slower in children with CP than in either age-matched TD or younger TD children. Multimodal torque profiles were more frequent in children with CP than in TD controls. TD groups temporally and spatially organized torque activation, whereas children with CP activated all joints simultaneously and showed altered torque contribution patterns among joints. Those results suggest that impairments in reactive postural control in children with CP result not only from developmental delay but also from pathology. Evidence for pathology included increased numbers of torque bursts required to regain stability and less efficient temporal and spatial organization of torque activation patterns.