Creating new social identities in children through critical multicultural media: the case of Little Bill

Multicultural education emerged from the political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s and advocated the inclusion of women and ethnic and racial groups in school curricula and children's media. Recently multiculturalism has evolved to include a critical perspective by focusing on stigmatized social identities such as race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and disability. Little Bill, a children's animated television series, is an example of applied critical multiculturalism. In this chapter, we present a case study of one episode, "A Ramp for Monty," to illustrate the merits of this approach, which may increase the number of social identities children relate to and increase the degree of understanding they may bring to the differences inherent in social identities.     

Period basin of entrainment for unintentional visual coordination

Researchers have demonstrated that a person's rhythmic movements can become unintentionally entrained to another person's rhythmic movements or an environmental event. There are indications, however, that in both cases the likelihood of entrainment depends on the difference between the uncoupled periods of the two rhythms. The authors examined the range of period differences over which unintentional visual coordination might occur in 16 participants (Experiment 1) and 15 participants (Experiment 2). Cross-spectral coherence analysis and the distribution of continuous relative phase revealed that visual entrainment decreased as the difference between participants' preferred period and the experimenter-determined period of the environmental stimulus increased. The present findings extend the dynamical systems perspective on person-environment coupling and highlight the significance of period difference to the emergence of unintentional coordination.     

You Can Lead An Ape To A Tool But...: A Review Of Povinelli’s Folk Physics For Apes: The Chimpanzee’s Theory Of How The World Works.

We reviewed Daniel Povinelli's book, Folk physics for apes: The chimpanzee's theory of how the world works. After a summary of the book's contents, we analyzed two sets of experiments on chimpanzees' folk psychology: one that explored whether chimpanzees understand that others see (i.e., that apes have internal visual experiences) and another that examined whether chimpanzees can distinguish intended from unintended actions. The conceptual scaffolding on which these studies were conceived was sufficiently faulty that their outcomes were virtually assured a priori. We then analyzed two sets of experiments on chimpanzees' folk physics, reinforcing our view that conceptual confusion guaranteed that certain key predictions about the outcome of these studies could not be supported. A unifying reason for this conceptual confusion is that the author devalues understanding that results from programmatic conditioning. We closed the review by relating Povinelli's findings and conclusions to behavior analysis and by explaining why behavior analysts should read this book     

Rules and Self-Rules: Effects of Variation Upon Behavioral Sensitivity to Change

The Psychological Record - Four experiments compared the effects of self-rules and rules, and varied and specific schedules of reinforcement. Participants were first exposed to either several...     

Interpretive sets, expectancy, fantasy proneness, and dissociation as predictors of hypnotic response.

College students with no prior experience of hypnosis were assessed for fantasy proneness and dissociation. In a totally separate context, they were subsequently tested for their interpretations of hypnotic suggestions, hypnotic response expectancies, and hypnotizability. Contrary to Spanos and Gorassini's (1984) hypothesis, strategic enactment of suggested responses was rarely reported, and its endorsement was not correlated with hypnotic responsiveness. Suggestibility was significantly predicted by fantasy proneness and response expectancy, but not by dissociation. A path analysis suggested that the relation between fantasy proneness and hypnotizability was partially mediated by expectancy.     

Sign- versus goal-tracking: effects of conditioned-stimulus-to-unconditioned-stimulus distance.

Three pigeons were exposed sequentially across experimental phases to five different distances between the conditioned stimulus and the site of the unconditioned stimulus in a sign-/goal-tracking procedure. A computer-controlled tracking system provided a continuous record of the bird's position by continuously monitoring the location of the bird's head in three-dimensional space. It was found that birds sign-tracked (i.e., approached the conditioned stimulus) when the conditioned stimulus was closest to the site of the unconditioned stimulus, goal-tracked (i.e., approached the site of the unconditioned stimulus in the presence of the conditioned stimulus) when the conditioned stimulus was farthest from the site of the unconditioned stimulus, and engaged in both sign- and goal-tracking (or something intermediate) at intermediate conditioned-stimulus-to-unconditioned-stimulus distances. When both sign- and goal-tracking occurred, the former tended to occur in the first half and the latter in the second half of the interval in which the conditioned stimulus was present. The results suggest (a) whether sign- or goal-tracking (or both) occurs is a function of the distance of the conditioned stimulus from the site of the unconditioned stimulus, (b) the fact that pigeons but not rats have been found to sign-track consistently throughout the duration of the conditioned stimulus may be due to quantitatively rather than qualitatively different effects of conditioned-stimulus-to-unconditioned-stimulus distance across species (i.e., a "short" conditioned-stimulus-to-unconditioned-stimulus distance for a pigeon may be a "long" one for a rat), and (c) sign- and goal-tracking may be competing behavioral tendencies that can (e.g., at intermediate conditioned-stimulus-to-unconditioned-stimulus distances) cancel each other out. The findings lend support to theories that specify an interaction between phylogenetic and reinforcement variables in determining whether sign- or goal-tracking will occur in any given experimental preparation.     

Is exposure a necessary condition for fear-reduction?

In most of the effective techniques for reducing fear, exposure to the fear-provoking stimulus is a prominent feature. It is argued that in many circumstances, engaged exposure to the fear stimuli is a sufficient condition for fear-reduction, but there is no good reason for supposing that such exposure is a necessary condition for fear-reduction. Seven examples of fear-reduction apparently taking place in the absence of exposure are used to illustrate the argument. Some theoretical and practical consequences of the argument are introduced.