Risk factors for addictive disorders: a discriminant analysis on 374 addicted and 513 nonpsychiatric participants

Many common risk factors have been described in addictive disorders. Little is known about factors' respective contributions to discrimination of addicted and nonaddicted participants. Two large samples were compared including 513 nonpsychiatric participants and 374 addicted participants meeting the DSM-IV criteria for eating disorders, alcohol, or substance dependence. Twenty-six risk factors were assessed by interview or self-rating scales. A discriminant analysis determined the respective weight of each risk factor. One discriminant function emerged and characterized a depressive dimension. The results suggest that the different risk factors described in addiction could be related to a depressive dimension.     

Caregiver involvement in applied behavior-analytic research: A scoping review and discussion

We conducted a scoping review to characterize the role of caregiver involvement in behavior-analytic research. We reviewed eight behavioral-learning journals from 2011–2022 for works that included children or caregivers as participants and characterized caregiver involvement as passive (implications for caregivers, input, social validity) and active (implementation, caregiver behavior, training, caregiver-collected data). The review identified 228 studies, and almost all (96.1%; n = 219) involved caregivers in some capacity; 94.3% (n = 215) had passive involvement (26.8% had only passive involvement; n = 61), 69.3% (n = 158) had active involvement (1.8% had only active involvement; n = 4), and 3.9% (n = 9) had neither passive nor active involvement. Involvement generally increased over publication years. The most common types of involvement were implications for caregivers, implementation, and input; caregiver-collected data were rare. We propose considerations when engaging caregivers in research and suggest new avenues of inquiry related to caregivers' treatment objectives and social validity, treatment implementers, and caregiver-collected data.     

Stripes within words affect reading

In a series of eight studies it is shown that the first peak in the horizontal autocorrelation of the image of a word (which captures the similarity in shape between the neighbouring strokes of letters) determines (i) the appearance of the words as striped; (ii) the speed with which the words are read, both aloud and silently; and (iii) the speed with which a paragraph of text can be searched. By subtly distorting the horizontal dimension of text, and thereby reducing the first peak in the horizontal autocorrelation, it is shown that the speed of word recognition can be increased. The increase in speed is greater in poor readers.     

The role of spatial location in remembering and forgetting peripheral words.

This study examined whether spatial location mediates intentional forgetting of peripherally presented words. Using an item-method directed forgetting paradigm, words were presented in peripheral locations at study. A recognition test presented all words at either the same or a different location relative to study. Results showed that while recognition of Remember words was unaffected by test location, when Forget words were presented in the same location at test as at study, recognition accuracy was significantly greater than when presented in a different location. Experiment 2 showed that the speed to localize a previously studied word was faster when it was presented in the same rather than a different study-test location but that the magnitude of this spatial priming was unaffected by memory instruction. We suggest that the location of peripherally presented words is represented in memory and can aid the retrieval of poorly encoded words.     

华人社会中的宗教与环保初探

面对环境问题,宗教领袖选择对宗教经典进行重新诠释,认为宗教在处理这些议题上扮演了重要的角色.本文则越过宗教教义,直接考察华人社会宗教团体的环保参与,并得出一些初步的认识:第一、宗教与环保没有直接的因果关系,但宗教可以成为环保运动的同路人,并对处理环境危机做出贡献.许多宗教参与环保并非源自其教义,而是因为世俗的环保运动如火如荼.第二,有组织的宗教(如台湾的佛教)比那些没有组织的宗教(如儒教)在进行资源动员保护环境方面更有效率.第三,强调自利与个人主义的民间宗教更多地推动地方上的环境保护,而强调利他和集体主义取向的宗教团体则更具心系苍生、环保天下的气质.     

A systematic examination of different parameters of presession exposure to tangible stimuli that maintain problem behavior

We examined the effects of three different presession conditions on tangibly maintained problem behavior for 2 students with autism, using individual-participant multielement designs. First, an analogue functional analysis demonstrated that problem behavior was maintained by access to tangible items. Next, topographies of item rejection were identified. Finally, students were exposed to (a) brief access, (b) no access, and (c) satiation to the tangible items prior to tangible sessions. The results demonstrated high levels of problem behavior following the brief-access and no-access presession conditions and low levels of problem behavior following the satiation condition. The findings are discussed in the context of how satiation might best be defined for these sorts of evaluations.     

Toddlers can adaptively change how they categorize: same objects,same session,two different categorical distinctions

Two experiments demonstrate that 14‐ to 18‐month‐old toddlers can adaptively change how they categorize a set of objects within a single session, and that this ability is related to vocabulary size. In both experiments, toddlers were presented with a sequential touching task with objects that could be categorized either according to some perceptually salient dimension corresponding to a taxonomic distinction (e.g. animals vs. vehicles) or to some less obvious dimension (e.g. rigid vs. deformable). In each experiment, children with larger productive vocabularies responded to both dimensions, showing evidence of sensitivity to each way of categorizing the items. Children with smaller productive vocabularies attended only to the taxonomically related categorical grouping. These experiments confirm that toddlers can adaptively shift the basis of their categorization and highlight the dynamic interaction between the child and the current task in early categorization.     

G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social,behavioral, and biomedical sciences

G*Power (Erdfelder, Faul, & Buchner, 1996) was designed as a general stand-alone power analysis program for statistical tests commonly used in social and behavioral research. G*Power 3 is a major extension of, and improvement over, the previous versions. It runs on widely used computer platforms (i.e., Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X 10.4) and covers many different statistical tests of thet, F, and χ₂ test families. In addition, it includes power analyses forz tests and some exact tests. G*Power 3 provides improved effect size calculators and graphic options, supports both distribution-based and design-based input modes, and offers all types of power analyses in which users might be interested. Like its predecessors, G*Power 3 is free.