Sex and genes,part 2: A biopsychosocial approach to assess and treat challenging sexual behavior in persons with intellectual disabilities including fragile X syndrome and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome

Individuals with intellectual disabilities (IDs) – and specifically those with genetic disorders – are more prone to medical and psychological challenges that affect their sexual development, experiences, and fertility. In this review paper we first provide an overview of the biopsychosocial (BPS) model and then explain how the model can guide and improve the assessment and treatment of challenging sexual behaviors by persons with IDs. We discuss two genetic conditions – fragile X syndrome and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome – in case studies, showing how the BPS model can be used to assess and treat the sexual problems of individuals with various types of ID. We conclude with BPS-formulated treatment considerations in three key domains: biomedical treatment (e.g., medication side effects; stopping or changing medications), psychological treatment (e.g., providing psychological therapies), and socio-environmental interventions (e.g., providing socio-sexual education and staff training). Together, these treatment interventions can aid clinicians to prevent and/or treat problematic sexual behaviors of people with IDs.     

Ethnic-racial identity,relatedness, and school belonging for adolescent New Zealanders: does student gender make a difference?

Social Psychology of Education - Attitudes toward ethnic and racial identity have been linked to both wellbeing and maladaptive outcomes that affect belonging at school. Further, relatedness (or...     

Self‐Priming in Production: Evidence for a Hybrid Model of Syntactic Priming

Syntactic priming in language production is the increased likelihood of using a recently encountered syntactic structure. In this paper, we examine two theories of why speakers can be primed: error‐driven learning accounts (Bock, Dell, Chang, & Onishi, 2007; Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006) and activation‐based accounts (Pickering & Branigan, 1999; Reitter, Keller, & Moore, 2011). Both theories predict that speakers should be primed by the syntactic choices of others, but only activation‐based accounts predict that speakers should be able to prime themselves. Here we test whether speakers can be primed by their own productions in three behavioral experiments and find evidence of structural persistence following both comprehension and speakers’ own productions. We also find that comprehension‐based priming effects are larger for rarer syntactic structures than for more common ones, which is most consistent with error‐driven accounts. Because neither error‐driven accounts nor activation‐based accounts fully explain the data, we propose a hybrid model.     

Further Support for a Hierarchical Model of Affect: Reply to Green and Salovey

Green and Salovey agree with us that happiness and sadness are strongly bipolar, and that Positive and Negative Activation are not. However, Green and Salovey subscribe to the two-dimensional circumplex, a model we find wanting. Actually, the problems they discuss arise from the limitations of the circumplex rather than from issues fundamental to affective structure. And they do not consider the evidence, reported in our target article, that supports an alternative to the circumplex: a three-level hierarchical model. In this reply, we take a closer look at the empirical findings supporting this model, and we emphasize its heuristic promise.     

Children's judgments of body size and distortion

Body size estimates of 69 children aged 5–13 years were obtained using a TV video methodology. Tasks included an adjustment procedure where children manipulated the width of their body image on a TV, and a discrete task, where they judged the accuracy of their TV image which was presented as either normal or distorted, that is, too wide or too thin. On the continuous task, judgments were more accurate on ascending trials where children had to increase the width of the image. On the discrete task, a signal detection analysis revealed older children were better in detecting size distortion in their images and that the differences were due to differences in the biological sensory system and not due to a bias to report that they were too fat or too thin. However, there were response bias differences between genders. Females were more likely to report size distortion with increasing age while males were less likely.     

Visual marking and visual change

Five experiments investigated the types of changes that disrupt the preview effect--the benefit gained in difficult search tasks from presenting some distractors earlier in time. A shape change with or without an overall luminance change at the location of an old item was found to disrupt the preview effect, whereas an equivalent luminance change alone or an isoluminant color change was not disruptive. Results suggest that (a) relatively low-level visual changes may not be sufficient to abolish the benefit, (b) the benefit most likely occurs through inhibition applied to locations within a location master map, and (c) inhibition need not be applied to surface features of objects.