Comparing the teaching interaction procedure to social stories for people with autism

This study compared social stories and the teaching interaction procedure to teach social skills to 6 children and adolescents with an autism spectrum disorder. Researchers taught 18 social skills with social stories and 18 social skills with the teaching interaction procedure within a parallel treatment design. The teaching interaction procedure resulted in mastery of all 18 skills across the 6 participants. Social stories, in the same amount of teaching sessions, resulted in mastery of 4 of the 18 social skills across the 6 participants. Participants also displayed more generalization of social skills taught with the teaching interaction procedure to known adults and peers.     

The balanced measure of psychological needs (BMPN) scale: An alternative domain general measure of need satisfaction

Psychological need constructs have received increased attention within self-determination theory research. Unfortunately, the most widely used need-satisfaction measure, the Basic Psychological Needs Scale (BPNS; Gagné in Motiv Emot 27:199?C223, 2003), has been found to be problematic (Johnston and Finney in Contemp Educ Psychol 35:280?C296, 2010). In the current study, we formally describe an alternate measure, the Balanced Measure of Psychological Needs (BMPN). We explore the factor structure of student responses to both the BPNS and the BMPN, followed by an empirical comparison of the BPNS to the BMPN as predictors of relevant outcomes. For both scales, we tested a model specifying three latent need factors (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) and two latent method factors (satisfaction and dissatisfaction). By specifying and comparing a series of nested confirmatory factor analytic models, we examine the theoretical structure of the need satisfaction variables and produce evidence for convergent and discriminant validity of the posited constructs. The results of our examination suggest that the three need variables should not be combined into one general need factor and may have separate satisfaction and dissatisfaction dimensions. Our model comparisons also suggest the BMPN may be an improved instrument for SDT researchers.     

Walking the talk: Value importance,value enactment,and well-being

Prior research on intrinsic versus extrinsic values has focused on the comparative importance subjects assign to the two types of values, showing that relative intrinsic versus extrinsic value orientation (RIEVO) predicts higher or increased well-being. In two studies, we show that rated action taken regarding the two types of values is just as essential to study. Support was found for four hypotheses: (1) there was a significant behavior/importance gap, such that participants “walked” (acted on values) less than they “talked” (endorsed those values); (2) this was especially true for intrinsic values, an interaction suggesting that the intrinsic ideals of personal growth, community, and connection often receive only lip service; (3) the “walk” (behavior ratings) measure of RIEVO subsumed the “talk” (importance ratings) RIEVO measure’s effects on well-being outcomes, suggesting that researchers interested in predicting well-being from values should perhaps focus on rated value enactment, not value importance; and (4) participants with higher meaning in life, lower search for meaning, more self-concordance at work, and greater chronological age evidenced more consistency between their talking and their walking.     

Service job lawyers are happier than money job lawyers,despite their lower income

Giving too much emphasis to extrinsic values and too little emphasis to intrinsic values is known to depress well-being. But is simply working in an extrinsic job also risky, even if that job delivers the money? We compared 1414 ‘Money’ (extrinsic) lawyers, 1145 ‘Service’ (intrinsic) lawyers, and 3415 ‘Other’ lawyers as to their income, values, well-being, and drinking behavior. Although service lawyers had much lower incomes, they also experienced more well-being and less negative affect compared to money lawyers, and drank less and less often. ANCOVAs showed that the intrinsic vs. extrinsic job-type effects were independent of rated intrinsic vs. extrinsic values, current income, years of work experience, and class rank at graduation, suggesting that the job-contexts themselves were operative. We discuss the difficult choice that pre-professional students face, between two versions of the American dream: one emphasizing wealth and status, and the other, service and personal development.     

Developing emotion abilities and regulation strategies in a sport organization: An action research intervention

ObjectivesThis study aimed to improve the practice of individuals operating in a sport organization by providing an intervention to develop emotion abilities and strategies.DesignA two-phase action research approach was adopted to facilitate the objective and to assess the intervention's effectiveness.MethodIn the first phase of the intervention, 25 individuals fulfilling a range of roles (i.e., board of directors, chief executive officer, heads of performance and development, staff, administrators, national coaches and team managers, club coaches, national talent academy athletes) attended educational workshops over a 6 month period. In the second phase, three pivotal operators (i.e., national managers) received one-to-one coaching for a further 3 months. Data were collected using a range of self-report and performance measures, participant daily diaries, a researcher's log, and social validation interviews.ResultsFollowing social validation procedures the findings suggest that both phases were effective at improving the practice of participants, with significant improvements in regulation strategy use, perceptions of relationship quality, and closeness. However, only participants receiving the extended one-to-one coaching showed improvement in emotional intelligence ability scores.ConclusionsThe findings indicate that short-term generic interventions to promote the use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies may be effective in sport organizations, but the purposive development of emotional intelligence may require more longitudinal and idiographic approaches.     

Addicts to artists: The ‘good enough mother’ in the substance abuse clinic

Psychodynamic psychotherapy has had a bad reputation in substance abuse circles. Despite widespread use of behavioral interventions, outcomes remain relatively poor. The emerging trend is to incorporate relational and other psychodynamic approaches into addiction treatment. The article describes use of Winnicott's concepts of the ‘good enough mother’ and ‘play space’ in an outpatient ‘art group’.     

Examining the Potential Exploitation of UNOS Policies

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) waiting list was designed as a just and equitable system through which the limited number of organs is allocated to the millions of Americans in need of a transplant. People have trusted the system because of the belief that everyone on the list has an equal opportunity to receive an organ and also that allocation is blind to matters of financial standing, celebrity or political power. Recent events have revealed that certain practices and policies have the potential to be exploited. The policies addressed in this paper enable those on the list with the proper resources to gain an advantage over other less fortunate members, creating a system that benefits not the individual most in medical need, but the one with the best resources. These policies are not only unethical but threaten the balance and success of the entire UNOS system. This paper proposes one possible solution, which seeks to balance the concepts of justice and utility.

     

Book reviews

>P. P. KIRSCHENMANN. Information and Reflection. D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1970. Pp. xv, 225. Indexed. $14.00.

HUBERT L. DREYFUS, What Computers Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Pp. xxxv, 259. Indexed.

DONALD M. MACKAY, Information, Mechanism and Meaning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1969. Pp. ix, 196. Indexed. $2.95 (paper).

YORICK ALEXANDER WILKS, Grammar, Meaning and the Machine Analysis of Language. London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Pp. 1–198. Indexed. $10.00.     

Constructing autobiographical events within a spatial or temporal context: a comparison of two targeted episodic induction techniques

ABSTRACT

Recalling and imagining autobiographical experiences involves constructing event representations within spatiotemporal contexts. We tested whether generating autobiographical events within a primarily spatial (where the event occurred) or temporal (the sequence of actions that occurred) context affected how the associated mental representation was constructed. We leveraged the well-validated episodic specificity induction (ESI) technique, known to influence the use of episodic processes on subsequent tasks, to develop variants that selectively enhance spatial or temporal processing. We tested the effects of these inductions on the details used to describe past and future autobiographical events. We first replicated the standard ESI effect, showing that ESI enhances generating episodic details, particularly those that are perception-based, when describing autobiographical events (Experiment 1). We then directly compared the effects of the spatial and temporal inductions (Experiment 2 and 3). When describing autobiographical events, spatial induction enhanced generating episodic details, specifically perception-based details, compared to the control or temporal inductions. A greater proportion of the episodic details generated after the temporal induction were gist-based than after the spatial induction, but this proportion did not differ from a control induction. Thus, using a spatial or temporal framework for autobiographical event generation alters the associated details that are accessed.     

Recollective performance advantages for implicit memory tasks

A commonly held assumption is that processes underlying explicit and implicit memory are distinct. Recent evidence, however, suggests that they may interact more than previously believed. Using the remember–know procedure the current study examines the relation between recollection, a process thought to be exclusive to explicit memory, and performance on two implicit memory tasks, lexical decision and word stem completion. We found that, for both implicit tasks, words that were recollected were associated with greater priming effects than were words given a subsequent familiarity rating or words that had been studied but were not recognised (misses). Broadly, our results suggest that non-voluntary processes underlying explicit memory also benefit priming, a measure of implicit memory. More specifically, given that this benefit was due to a particular aspect of explicit memory (recollection), these results are consistent with some strength models of memory and with Moscovitch's (2008) proposal that recollection is a two-stage process, one rapid and unconscious and the other more effortful and conscious.