Stress Prevention and Management: A Workshop Approach

This article presents a theoretical rationale for a workshop on stress prevention and management and describes the “Stress and the Classroom Teacher” workshop as an approach that has applicability in various counseling settings, including those outside the educational field. The goals of this workshop include reducing participants' sense of isolation, increasing their self-awareness of the causes and effects of distress, identifying job-related successes and strengths, and formulating a tenative plan and action steps to prevent or alleviate the distress: workshop activities are outlined. Several conclusions are drawn regarding the value and significance of this intervention mold.     

Conceptualizing Self-determination from a Behavioral Perspective: The Role of Choice,Self-control,and Self-management

The goal of education can be defined in many ways; but in searching the literature, we found that in most cases, people consider the goal of education to be developing a self-determined individual. Self-determination is an abstract term. Behavior analysts may find this term difficult to define. Therefore, it may be difficult to observe and measure whether “self-determined behaviors” have developed. Many other service providers use this term frequently; thus, behavior analysts working with these service providers must come to terms with this concept in order to better collaborate. We argue that self-determination can be operationally defined with the concepts of choice, self-control, and self-management. By using the measurable behaviors included in these concepts, we believe that services can be developed to teach self-determination skills. This paper explores these concepts and how they can contribute to an operational definition of self-determination, and ultimately, help behavior analysts work with other providers to effectively teach self-determination to individuals with developmental disabilities.

     

A Dyadic IRT Model

Psychometrika - We propose a dyadic Item Response Theory (dIRT) model for measuring interactions of pairs of individuals when the responses to items represent the actions (or behaviors,...     

EARSHOT: A Minimal Neural Network Model of Incremental Human Speech Recognition

Despite the lack of invariance problem (the many-to-many mapping between acoustics and percepts), human listeners experience phonetic constancy and typically perceive what a speaker intends. Most models of human speech recognition (HSR) have side-stepped this problem, working with abstract, idealized inputs and deferring the challenge of working with real speech. In contrast, carefully engineered deep learning networks allow robust, real-world automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the complexities of deep learning architectures and training regimens make it difficult to use them to provide direct insights into mechanisms that may support HSR. In this brief article, we report preliminary results from a two-layer network that borrows one element from ASR, long short-term memory nodes, which provide dynamic memory for a range of temporal spans. This allows the model to learn to map real speech from multiple talkers to semantic targets with high accuracy, with human-like timecourse of lexical access and phonological competition. Internal representations emerge that resemble phonetically organized responses in human superior temporal gyrus, suggesting that the model develops a distributed phonological code despite no explicit training on phonetic or phonemic targets. The ability to work with real speech is a major advance for cognitive models of HSR.     

Why People Join Terrorist Groups in Kuwait: A Qualitative Examination

Qualitative interviews were conducted with nine members of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda currently incarcerated in Kuwait's Central Prison. The semistructured interviews attempted to understand psychosocial factors in Kuwait that contributed to their decision to join extremist organizations. Interviews were analyzed using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and the emergent themes identified the following core themes explaining their involvement: (1) religious identity development; (2) personal connections; (3) propaganda; (4) defense of Islam; and (5) social marginalization. Participants described a process whereby their religion became a central part of their personal identity. As their religious identity developed, they became involved in Islamic organizations where they met people involved with ISIS or Al-Qaeda. These social connections exposed them to jihadi propaganda which, in addition to increased military conflict in the Middle East, crystallized their beliefs that Islam is under attack, and they were religiously obligated to defend it. The results also identified societal factors that increased the probability of engaging in terrorism including relatively low levels of education, coming from low socioeconomic groups in Kuwait, and feeling socially marginalized by broader Kuwaiti society.     

Changing counterproductive beliefs about attention,memory, and multitasking: Impacts of a brief,fully online module

Ubiquitous mobile technology is part of contemporary life, bringing with it the potential for distraction and reduction in performance associated with multitasking. The predisposition toward dysfunctional multitasking may be shaped in part by beliefs that individuals hold about memory and attention. The issue is particularly pressing for college students, given established links between distraction, multitasking, and learning. This project assessed the impact of an online learning module on beliefs about attention, memory, and learning in college students. It also contrasted these beliefs in a college and non-college community sample. Significant reductions in counterproductive beliefs were associated with completing the module; counterproductive beliefs were also no more prevalent in the college vs. the non-college sample. Our findings suggest that brief online modules are a practical way to address counterproductive beliefs related to multitasking with technology, and add to the literature on metacognition, attention, and multitasking in college and non-college populations.     

Effects of socially appropriate singing on the vocal stereotypy of children with autism spectrum disorder

This study evaluated the effects of children with autism spectrum disorder engaging in socially acceptable singing on their vocal stereotypy. A multiple‐baseline across four participants with embedded multielement designs was used to assess the effects of the singing intervention upon later occurrence of vocal stereotypy for each participant. Results showed that fewer instances of vocal stereotypy occurred during and after singing intervention sessions. Additionally, two children began to emit appropriate singing after intervention, which suggests that the topography of their vocal stereotypy (e.g., monosyllabic or screeching sounds) was altered to some extent. Overall, results suggest positive implications for teaching appropriate vocal behaviors as functional replacements for vocal stereotypy.