THE EFFECTIVENESS OF A CONSTANT TIME-DELAY PROCEDURE TO TEACH CHAINED RESPONSES TO ADOLESCENTS WITH MENTAL RETARDATION

The effectiveness of a 5-s constant time-delay procedure to teach three chained food preparation behaviors to four moderately retarded adolescent students was evaluated within a multiple probe design across behaviors. Results indicate that the procedure was effective in teaching all four students to make a sandwich, boil a boil-in-bag item, and bake canned biscuits. The skills maintained with at least 85% accuracy over a 3-month period. Training generalized from the school to the home setting for the 2 subjects that completed generalization probe sessions. The percentage of errors across all skills and students was less than 9%.     

RELIABILITY AND FACTORIAL VALIDITY OF THE JUNIOR EYSENCK PERSONALITY QUESTIONNAIRE IN ZIMBABWE

Six-hundred and thirteen girls and 601 boys in Zimbabwe completed the Junior Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (JEPQ). The reliability of the Neuroticism (N) and Social Desirability (L) factors was acceptable but the Psychoticism (P) and Extraversion (E) factors possessed modest reliability. While the factorial validity of the P, N and L scales was acceptable, the factorial validity of the E scale was poor. L scores were significantly correlated with N and P scores among girls and boys. Whereas Zimbabwean girls reported higher P scores than did Canadian girls, Zimbabwean boys reported lower P scores than did Canadian boys. Zimbabwean girls and boys reported lower E and N and higher P scores than their Canadian counterparts. This study provides broad support for Eysenck's basic personality model, but it does not support the use of this version of the JEPQ, and especially the E scale, among Zimbabwean children.     

Preschoolers' use of eye contact while speaking: The influence of sex,age, and conversational partner

The influences of sex, age, and conversational, partner (mother vs. stranger) on eye contact during verbalizations were examined in a longitudinal study of 33 children at 2 and 4 years of age. A free-play sample was obtained of each child interacting with mother and with a male or female experimenter. The amount of eye contact in conjunction with verbalization was analyzed. Significant main effects were found for sex (females engaged in a higher percent of eye contact than males) and conversational partner (more eye contact while speaking exhibited to experimenter than to mother). There was an interaction between age and conversational partner, in that mother received more and experimenter relatively less percent of eye contact during verbalizations as children got older. Notably, there was no main effect for age. These results revealed sex differences at an age (2–2 1/2 years) and in a context (free-play setting) not previously studied, demonstrating the robustness of the effect. Further, age findings seem indicative of unique developmental trends for eye contact during verbalizations for the ages between 2 and 4 years.Mount Saint Vicent University     

Brain weights correlate with behavioral parameters in individual inbred mice housed in a common and enriched environment

Fifty 8-week-old Balb/c mice were individually identified and housed together in a large and enriched environment for 5 months. Maze and open field exploration, response to an aversive noise, swimming, and induced grooming tests were applied to each mouse in an initial search for possible relationships between brain morphology and spontaneous behavior in isogenic individuals living in a complex social and physical environment. The tasks generated 39 quantitative behavioral indices which include locomotion, rearing, still, and grooming bout frequencies, latencies, total, and mean bout durations. At the end of the tests, the 7-month-old mice were sacrificed and the fresh weights of their whole brain, cerebellum, brain stem, diencephalon, telencephalon, and prosencephalon were rapidly obtained. Behavioral data have wide variations and do not adjust to normal population distributions. Means of the same parameter differ between tests. A Spearman correlation matrix of all data yielded many significant correlations between indices of the same task which can be interpreted in terms of time budget and sequence probability. Significant correlations between indices of different tests suggest diverse emotionalities, exploratory strategies, and motor skills. The correlations between body and brain weights and among separate brain regions were not significant. There were several low but significant correlations between brain weights and behavioral indices. Such correlations, the resulting factors, and significant behavioral differences between mice with large and small brains suggest that mice displaying low motor activity in novel environments have larger brains and forebrain/hindbrain ratios than mice with high activity, and that animals with high scores of some specific behaviors have larger brain areas physiologically related to such behaviors.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Emotional experiences during engagement in intrinsically and extrinsically motivated tasks

Previous theories of intrinsic motivation have traditionally ignored the experiential or subjective aspects of engagement in intrinsically and extrinsically motivated tasks. Part of the reason for the lack of research in this area was our ignorance of which emotions to study. Data are presented here from two studies designed to produce the first systematic evidence of changes in basic emotional states during task engagement. Our findings suggest that intrinsic and extrinsic tasks can be differentiated according to the emotional changes subjects retrospectively report about their engagement with these tasks, and point the way to future research incorporating emotion as an important variable to consider.The first author was supported in part by a Minority Fellowship administered by the American Psychological Association under a Clinical Training Grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (5 T01 MH13833), and by a Regents Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley.     

Action sentences

I would like to thank Eddy Zemach, Jonathan Stavi, Julius Moravcsik and Dov Gabbay for some very good discussions on the logical form of action sentences. Also, I am indebted to an anonymous referee of Erkenntnis for some very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.