A METHOD FOR INTEGRATING AN AUTISTIC CHILD INTO A NORMAL PUBLIC-SCHOOL CLASSROOM1

This study investigated the feasibility of using behavioral techniques to integrate an autistic child into a normal public-school class with one teacher and 20 to 30 normal children. The results showed: (1) that during treatment by a therapist in the classroom, the child's appropriate verbal and social behaviors increased, and autistic mannerisms decreased; and (2) training teachers in behavioral techniques was apparently sufficient to maintain the child's appropriate school behaviors throughout kindergarten and the first grade.     

ASSESSING AND TRAINING TEACHERS IN THE GENERAUZED USE OF BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION WITH AUTISTIC CHILDREN1

This study investigated the feasibility of developing reliable, valid criteria for measuring and training the skills necessary to teach autistic children. The behaviors of 11 teachers and 12 autistic children were recorded in a series of different teaching situations. Teacher-training was initiated at different times for different teachers. The results showed: (1) it was possible to assess empirically whether a teacher was correctly using defined behavior-modification techniques; (2) generally, for any given session, systematic improvement in the child's behavior did not occur unless the teacher working in that session had been trained to use the techniques to a high criterion; (3) all 11 teachers were rapidly trained to use these techniques; and (4) the teachers learned generalized skills effective with a variety of children and target behaviors.     

Predictors of burden in spouse caregivers of individuals with Alzheimer's disease

This study used the following model of distress: Distress = [Exposure to Stress + Vulnerability]/[Psychological and Social Resources]. The constructs in the model were operationalized as (a) distress in response to caregiver experiences (burden); (b) exposure to stress (care recipient functional impairment in activities of daily living [ADLs]); (c) vulnerability (caregiver health problems, anger, and anxiety); and (d) resources (coping, outlook on life, and social supports). Long-term burden (15-18 months after entry) was predicted by several baseline variables: burden, care recipient ADLs, vulnerability and resource variables, and specific interactions of burden, ADLs, vulnerability, and resource variables. The interactions showed that caregivers with high vulnerability and low resources had higher burden scores than caregivers with other combinations of these variables.     

Stopping Criteria in Sequential Choice

The essential decision in sequential choice is not which alternative to choose but when to stop acquiring additional information and commit to the leading alternative. Two studies investigate individuals’ stopping strategies. The key difference between the two studies is whether the experimenter or subjects controlled the order in which information was acquired. We hypothesize that subjects’ stopping criteria do not remain fixed, but are sensitive to acquisition costs and to the achieved progress during the choice. Across both studies 21 of 26 subjects exhibited significant adaptation. We also found an effort-reducing heuristic, stopping after all attributes in a predetermined set of core attributes had been acquired. As expected, use of this Core Attributes heuristic was greater when subjects controlled the order in which information was acquired. Both adaptation and the Core Attributes heuristic are compatible with the adaptive view of decision making and with the cost-benefit framework more generally.     

Violence against women: Mental health effects. Part II. Conceptualizations of posttraumatic stress

A broad range of psychological aftereffects have been noted among women who have experienced male-perpetrated violence. These symptoms vary considerably among individuals, across social contexts, and across different types of violent encounters (Coley & Beckett, 1988; Goodman, Koss, & Russo, 1992; Koss, 1988; Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980). Nevertheless, a remarkably consistent picture of the psychological sequelae of violence—particularly sexual and physical assault—emerges from the empirical and clinical literature (Koss, 1988). In this article, we use the posttraumatic stress disorder diagnosis—a frame that captures many of the disparate symptoms described by researchers—as a basis for exploring several conceptual models that have been developed to explain women's responses to violence.     

Attentional Bias for Threat: Evidence for Delayed Disengagement from Emotional Faces

The present paper reports three new experiments suggesting that the valence of a face cue can influence attentional effects in a cueing paradigm. Moreover, heightened trait anxiety resulted in increased attentional dwell-time on emotional facial stimuli, relative to neutral faces. Experiment 1 presented a cueing task, in which the cue was either an "angry", "happy", or "neutral" facial expression. Targets could appear either in the same location as the face (valid trials) or in a different location to the face (invalid trials). Participants did not show significant variations across the different cue types (angry, happy, neutral) in responding to a target on valid trials. However, the valence of the face did affect response times on invalid trials. Specifically, participants took longer to respond to a target when the face cue was "angry" or "happy" relative to neutral. In Experiment 2, the cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was increased and an overall inhibition of return (IOR) effect was found (i.e., slower responses on valid trials). However, the "angry" face cue eliminated the IOR effect for both high and low trait anxious groups. In Experiment 3, threat-related and jumbled facial stimuli reduced the magnitude of IOR for high, but not for low, trait-anxious participants.These results suggest that: (i) attentional bias in anxiety may reflect a difficulty in disengaging from threat-related and emotional stimuli, and (ii) threat-related and ambiguous cues can influence the magnitude of the IOR effect.     

Evidence for age-related equivalence in the directed forgetting paradigm

The directed forgetting paradigm involves, under particular experimental circumstances, inhibitory mechanisms, which operate to the successful forgetting of irrelevant words. The item-by-item cueing method (e.g., Basden & Basden, 1996) was used to investigate the directed forgetting effect in young and old adults. Processing of the experimental words was manipulated between subjects by asking participants to perform either a deep or a shallow orienting task on each word of the study list before the occurrence of the cue (to remember of to forget). Results indicated that the instruction to process deeply both to-be-remembered and to-be-forgotten words led to equivalent directed forgetting effects in young and old adults. These results are discussed with respect to the implications they have for the Inhibitory Deficit theory (e.g., Hasher & Zacks, 1988), which suggests that cognitive aging is mainly characterized by a reduction in the efficiency of inhibitory processes.     

Do threatening stimuli draw or hold visual attention in subclinical anxiety?

Biases in information processing undoubtedly play an important role in the maintenance of emotion and emotional disorders. In an attentional cueing paradigm, threat words and angry faces had no advantage over positive or neutral words (or faces) in attracting attention to their own location, even for people who were highly state-anxious. In contrast, the presence of threatening cues (words and faces) had a strong impact on the disengagement of attention. When a threat cue was presented and a target subsequently presented in another location, high state-anxious individuals took longer to detect the target relative to when either a positive or a neutral cue was presented. It is concluded that threat-related stimuli affect attentional dwell time and the disengage component of attention, leaving the question of whether threat stimuli affect the shift component of attention open to debate.     

Comparing mathematics interventions: Does initial level of fluency predict intervention effectiveness?

A paucity of research has directly compared empirically supported interventions to examine their effectiveness among students with different mathematics fluency skills. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of two empirically supported interventions and a control condition on the mathematics fluency of 98 second and third grade students. Specifically, effects of explicit timing and cover-copy-compare on subtraction fluency were examined each session, which occurred twice weekly for a total of six weeks. HLM was used to examine progress during the intervention sessions and determine the effect of initial fluency level on intervention effectiveness. Results suggested students' initial level of fluency impacted intervention effectiveness. That is, for students whose fluency levels fell within the frustrational range CCC and control conditions resulted in the best performance over time but for children whose fluency was in the instructional range explicit timing was the most effective treatment.     

Outcomes of work–life balance on job satisfaction,life satisfaction and mental health: A study across seven cultures

This study investigates the effects of work–life balance (WLB) on several individual outcomes across cultures. Using a sample of 1416 employees from seven distinct populations – Malaysian, Chinese, New Zealand Maori, New Zealand European, Spanish, French, and Italian – SEM analysis showed that WLB was positively related to job and life satisfaction and negatively related to anxiety and depression across the seven cultures. Individualism/collectivism and gender egalitarianism moderated these relationships. High levels of WLB were more positively associated with job and life satisfaction for individuals in individualistic cultures, compared with individuals in collectivistic cultures. High levels of WLB were more positively associated with job and life satisfaction and more negatively associated with anxiety for individuals in gender egalitarian cultures. Overall, we find strong support for WLB being beneficial for employees from various cultures and for culture as a moderator of these relationships.