Comparison of extra- and within-stimulus prompting to teach prepositional discriminations to preschool children with developmental disabilities

Journal of Behavioral Education -     

Comparison of extra- and within-stimulus prompting to teach prepositional discriminations to preschool children with developmental disabilities

This study compared extra-stimulus to within-stimulus prompts in teaching children with developmental disabilities to discriminate the prepositional concepts In and On. Five preschool-aged children who had difficulty discriminating verbal instructions participated. Extra-stimulus prompts involved modeling, gestures, positioning, and auditory cues which did not form part of the target discrimination. Within-stimulus prompts manipulated the volume and intonational pattern of the verbal stimuli. Four children did not learn the discrimination with extra-stimulus prompting. All four of these children, plus a fifth child who did not have prior experience with extra-stimulus prompting, reached criterion in the within-stimulus prompting condition. The success of the within-stimulus prompts may be related to their enhancing phonetic differences between the verbal stimuli.     

‘Liars are less detailed’ …So what? Comparing two recall instructions to detect deception within-subject

Most deception research provides between-subject results (e.g., liars give on average less detailed accounts), which might be of limited value for professionals evaluating credibility on an individual basis. This study examines the optimal instructions of a within-subject multiple recalls strategy to detect deception. A total of 110 participants, divided into a Lie and Truth group, were randomly placed into four interview conditions: two Basic report-everything instructions (1), a Basic recall followed by an Open depth instruction (2), a Basic recall followed by the Verifiability Approach and Information Protocol (3), and two recalls with the Verifiability Approach and Information Protocol (4). All recalls were coded for total details and verifiable details. Group (lie and truth) × Recall (first and second) was only significant in condition 3, with truth tellers providing more verifiable details in the second recall than the first. A simple within-subject decision rule was derived, allowing a 76.9% discrimination rate. Professionals can optimally evaluate credibility using two recalls (Basic recall followed by Verifiability Approach and Information Protocol) and observing the evolution of verifiable details.     

Teaching Strategies for Personality Assessment at the Undergraduate Level

Personality assessment is a crucial component of clinical practice, and the training and proficiency criteria to develop competence are complex and multifaceted. Like many advanced topics, the field of personality assessment would benefit from early exposure in undergraduate classroom settings. This research evaluates how an undergraduate personality course can be enhanced through 2 enrichment activities (self-assessments and a personality project). Students completed several self-assessments of their personality and wrote a comprehensive and integrative personality assessment about themselves. Results demonstrated that these activities increased interest in personality assessment, deepened understanding of course material, and promoted student growth and self-exploration. We discuss the benefits of these enrichment activities for the student, instructor, and field of personality science.     

Attention and interpretation processes and trait anger experience,expression, and control

This study explored attention and interpretation biases in processing facial expressions as correlates of theoretically distinct self-reported anger experience, expression, and control. Non-selected undergraduate students (N?=?101) completed cognitive tasks measuring attention bias, interpretation bias, and Spielberger’s State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI-2). Attention bias toward angry faces was associated with higher trait anger and anger expression and with lower anger control-in and anger control-out. The propensity to quickly interpret ambiguous faces as angry was associated with greater anger expression and its subcomponent of anger expression-out and with lower anger control-out. Interactions between attention and interpretation biases did not contribute to the prediction of any anger component suggesting that attention and interpretation biases may function as distinct mechanisms. Theoretical and possible clinical implications are discussed.     

Too tired to tell the truth: Self-control resource depletion and dishonesty

The opportunity to profit from dishonesty evokes a motivational conflict between the temptation to cheat for selfish gain and the desire to act in a socially appropriate manner. Honesty may depend on self-control given that self-control is the capacity that enables people to override antisocial selfish responses in favor of socially desirable responses. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that dishonesty would increase when people’s self-control resources were depleted by an initial act of self-control. Depleted participants misrepresented their performance for monetary gain to a greater extent than did non-depleted participants (Experiment 1). Perhaps more troubling, depleted participants were more likely than non-depleted participants to expose themselves to the temptation to cheat, thereby aggravating the effects of depletion on cheating (Experiment 2). Results indicate that dishonesty increases when people’s capacity to exert self-control is impaired, and that people may be particularly vulnerable to this effect because they do not predict it.     

Blinded by anger or feeling the love: how emotions influence advice taking

Across 2 experiments, the authors demonstrate that emotional states influence how receptive people are to advice. The focus of these experiments is on incidental emotions, emotions triggered by a prior experience that is irrelevant to the current situation. The authors demonstrate that people who feel incidental gratitude are more trusting and more receptive to advice than are people in a neutral emotional state, and people in a neutral state are more trusting and more receptive to advice than are people who feel incidental anger. In these experiments, greater receptivity to advice increased judgment accuracy. People who felt incidental gratitude were more accurate than were people in a neutral state, and people in a neutral state were more accurate than were people who felt incidental anger. The results offer insight into how people use advice, and the authors identify conditions under which leaders, policy makers, and advisors may be particularly influential.     

Embedded Cognition and Mental Causation: Setting Empirical Bounds on Metaphysics

In this paper, we challenge Jaegwon Kim’s version of neural reductionism according to which the causal powers of mental properties are pre-empted by those of neural properties. Using empirical and theoretical developments from the field of embedded cognition, we articulate and defend a notion of process externalism that extends Clark and Chalmers’ notion of an extended mind. We argue that process externalism undermines one of Kim’s key premises leading to the alternative conclusion that mental causation cannot be reduced to neural causation. Instead, mental properties have their own new causal powers just like other scientifically established macroproperties.     

Detection theory analysis of scaling and discrimination tasks: responses to noxious thermal stimuli

This study's main purpose was to examine the sensitivity estimates obtained from scaling and discrimination approaches for nociception assessment in healthy individuals. This investigation may inform future applications in diagnostic procedures for painful conditions. Models of psychophysical judgment based on those of Durlach and Braida (1969), Laming (1984), and Irwin and Whitehead (1991) were used as the common analytical framework. Noxious thermal contact stimuli were used. The results show that the scaling approach produced lower detection theory sensitivity estimates than did the discrimination approach. The additional judgment variance in scaling tasks could explain this lowered sensitivity. The relative judgmental variance value of 2.18 obtained in this study is lower than variance values found i n previous investigations. This discrepancy i s probably due to the relatively smaller stimulus range employed in this study. The authors propose that the theoretical framework used in this study may be used in future studies to investigate the different dimensions of pain perception.