Skin temperature biofeedback in children and adults

Skin temperature biofeedback performance was studied in 38 children, ages 6 to 10, and 38 of their parents, across two sessions of audio biofeedback segments in which the participants alternately attempted hand-warming and hand-cooling. Skin temperature from each hand was monitored throughout, but only one hand at a time was in the feedback loop. The major finding was that children were superior to adults in controlling skin temperature in the presence of biofeedback (p < .001). Adults showed no skin temperature control. For children, temperature changes were greater for the hand in the feedback loop as compared to the contralateral hand (p < .001). Children were equally successful in increasing and decreasing skin temperature. The results are consistent with earlier studies and suggest that children have considerable potential for neuropsychological self-regulation.     

Alcohol problems and relapse: Can the clinic combat the community?

Despite over a decade of research and debate into the issue of relapse the majority of people in treatment for alcohol-related problems still relapse. In this paper the results of an innovative relapse prevention and management programme are reported. It was found that a cognitive-behavioural package of strategies reduced the likelihood of relapse. On average, clients receiving this experimental package took four times longer to return to any alcohol use and seven times longer to return to ‘heavy drinking’ than did a conventional treatment control group. However, notwithstanding these results, 60 per cent of the experimental group did return to harmful drinking. The authors question whether further refinement of these procedures is possible, and suggest that if relapse rates are to be further reduced then greater attention needs to be given by counsellors to clients' social environment.     

Young adults with intellectual and other developmental disabilities acquire vocational skills with video prompting

Students with intellectual and other developmental disabilities often require substantial support to acquire the skills needed to secure work experience and paid employment. Prior findings suggest that video prompting is likely to be an effective and feasible strategy for establishing such skills. To evaluate this possibility in a special education transition program, we examined the effectiveness of a video prompting procedure in teaching 8 young adults with developmental disabilities to perform job-related tasks (doing laundry, checking in to work, vacuuming, stripping bed). The intervention was effective with all participants. The skills maintained over 3 months, and the participants performed the tasks accurately in a new setting with different materials. Participants were reportedly satisfied with the intervention and deemed it easy to use.     

Betting on a brand: How can trust game experiments inform a brand trust research agenda?

For brands to succeed, they often need consumers to trust them. This has prompted marketing and consumer behaviour researchers to examine what makes certain brands more trusted and how brands can identify themselves as trustworthy. For over 25 years, experimental economists, behavioural scientists and others have examined interpersonal trust using an exercise — the trust game — where participants put money at risk based on how trustworthy they think other people are. This research has remained largely separate from work on brand trust, but this critical review aims to identify findings and concepts from trust game-based research that are relevant to brand trust, and starts to develop an integrated research agenda for the future. In particular, it looks at how brand trust is measured, how brand trust might (or might not) be distinguished from transactional risk, and the heuristics and biases behind brand trust judgements and how these relate to brands' attempts to signal their trustworthiness.     

When one-two-three beats two-one-three: Tracking the acquisition of the verbal number sequence

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review - Learning how to count is a crucial step in cognitive development, which progressively allows for more elaborate numerical processing. The existing body of...     

The effect of name category and discriminability on the search characteristics of colour sets

Within (and between) cultures, people tend to agree on which parts of colour space are easiest to name and what the names for these regions are. Therefore it is likely that the manipulation of ease of naming (nameability) of colours should change performance in tasks where categorisation by colour name is important. More specifically? highly 'nameable' colour sets should lead to better performance than metrically equivalent but less categorically distinct sets, when the task requires categorisation. This hypothesis was investigated by testing observers on a name-based task, the naming and subsequent identification by name of colour sets with up to sixteen members. These sets were designed to be easy to name (nameable), maximally discriminable, or matched discriminable. The first were derived from previously generated data, the second by a standard algorithm to space colours widely in colour space, and the latter by closely matching their metric characteristics to those of an easy-to-name colour set. This final condition was metrically (but not categorically) equivalent to the nameable set. It was found that sets designed to be nameable did indeed lead to superior performance as measured by response times, confidence ratings, and response accuracy. Perceptual colour similarity, measured by a AE metric, did not predict errors. Nameability may thus be a valid, manipulable, aspect of sets of colours, and one which is not otherwise duplicated in the metric characteristics of such sets.