Stereotype susceptibility narrows the gender gap in imagined self-rotation performance

Three studies examined the impact of stereotype messages on men’s and women’s performance of a mental rotation task involving imagined self-rotations. Experiment 1 established baseline differences between men and women; women made 12% more errors than did men. Experiment 2 found that exposure to a positive stereotype message enhanced women’s performance in comparison with that of another group of women who received neutral information. In Experiment 3, men who were exposed to the same stereotype message emphasizing a female advantage made more errors than did male controls, and the magnitude of error was similar to that for women from Experiment 1. The results suggest that the gender gap in mental rotation performance is partially caused by experiential factors, particularly those induced by sociocultural stereotypes.     

Teaching social play skills to adults and children with autism as an approach to building rapport

Adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and no intellectual disabilities were taught to increase the social play skills of children with ASD as part of a vocational training program. Participants included 3 adults, aged 21 to 27 years, and 6 children with ASD. Probes conducted throughout the study evaluated whether play skills training affected a measure of rapport between the adult and child. Results demonstrated the effectiveness of behavioral skills training for teaching the adult participants the appropriate play skills. In addition, the children's social engagement increased. Finally, rapport probes showed that play skills training increased levels of proximity, our measure of rapport, between the adults and children.     

Self‐Efficacy Among Adults in Substance Abuse Treatment: The Role of Religious Coping

In substance abuse treatment, general self‐efficacy and religiousness are factors that may support positive outcomes. The authors surveyed clients receiving substance abuse treatment (N = 121) and found that religious coping predicted general self‐efficacy scores. Clinical implications are discussed.     

Using dual-criteria methods to supplement visual inspection: Replication and extension

The dual-criteria and conservative dual-criteria methods effectively supplement visual analysis with both simulated and published datasets. However, extant research evaluating the probability of observing false positive outcomes with published data may be affected by case selection bias and publication bias. Thus, the probability of obtaining false positive outcomes using these methods with data collected in the course of clinical care is unknown. We extracted baseline data from clinical datasets using a consecutive controlled case-series design and calculated the proportion of false positive outcomes for baseline phases of various lengths. Results replicated previous findings from Lanovaz, Huxley, and Dufour (2017), as the proportion of false positive outcomes generally decreased as the number of points in Phase B (but not Phase A) increased using both methods. Extending these findings, results also revealed differences in the rate of false positive outcomes across different types of baselines.     

A study of semantic and syntactic processing in monolinguals and fluent early bilinguals

The present study consists of two reaction-time experiments administered in English. These experiments were designed to compare semantic and syntactic processing in English monolinguals and fluent early French-English bilinguals. Results of both experiments revealed that the bilinguals did not function as the English monolinguals did. That is, their reaction times were slower and they made twice as many errors in response to certain sentences. These findings are especially important for two reasons: (1) The bilinguals were all highly fluent, and in most cases dominant, in English, and (2) the bilinguals exhibited systematic differences in two different linguistic components (the semantic and the syntactic). The results are viewed as evidence of the interdependence of the bilinguals' languages. Some note is made of individual patterns of response, and two interpretations of linguistic interdependence are provided.     

An adult model of preschool children’s speech memory

In previous work, it has been demonstrated that phonetic similarity among the items in a spoken list interferes with recall much more in school-aged children than in preschool children. The basis of this developmental change, however, is unclear. In the present study we examined the possibility that a developmental increase in the use of covert verbal rehearsal accounts for the change in the effects of phonetic similarity. Adults who recalled lists of spoken words during articulatory suppression tasks that blocked covert rehearsal were found to display patterns of recall that resembled those ordinarily found in 5-year-old children. The specific aspects of rehearsal responsible for these effects also were investigated.     

Interpretive habit is strengthened by cognitive bias modification

We investigated the nature of the memory mechanisms underlying cognitive bias modification by applying Jacoby's (1991) process-dissociation procedure to responses during the transfer task. In the two training conditions (negative and benign), students imagined themselves in 100 ambiguous scenarios, most with potentially negative resolutions; the ambiguity was resolved in a consistently negative or benign direction by completing the fragment of a final word. Control participants completed non-ambiguous, non-emotional scenarios. Next all participants responded on a final training block, where half of the scenarios were completed negatively and half benignly. Transfer was assessed by examining choices in the completion of test scenarios when participants were instructed to respond in the same way as they had to a final-block training scenario that was situationally similar. Benign training facilitated correct responding to benign analogues and impaired correct responding to negative analogues. Performance in the negative-training and control conditions was similar. Process-dissociation procedures revealed that this newly established habit and not controlled recollection provided the basis for transfer.     

The young child's representation of depth in drawing: process and product

Two experiments are reported from a series of studies in which plain blocks of various sizes were presented in various spatial orientations to children aged between 3 and 8 years in an attempt to establish how they represent three-dimensional spatial relations pictorially. The major results were that young children represent depth in the array vertically in the picture plane. Two important findings were that even from an early age drawings contain "view-centered" information and that children differentiate between the relative positions of objects in the array by the temporal order of their drawing. These results show the importance of studying the drawing process as well as its product.