‘I don't want to be the mother of a paedophile’: the perspectives of mothers whose adolescent sons with learning disabilities sexually offend

The subject of sexual abuse is a major focus of professional and public concern. Sexual abuse of (and by) people with learning disabilities evokes even greater disquieting emotions, and makes severe demands on the social services, and the criminal justice system. The aims of the project were: 1) to determine whether group psychotherapy produced effective outcomes for adolescent boys with learning disabilities who exhibit sexually abusive behaviour, 2) to explore the perspectives of parents and other care-givers, and 3) to document the nature and extent of service support to families. This paper focuses solely on the mothers' perspectives. This was a three-year project with six boys (under 16) receiving group psychotherapy, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Clinical measures were used to track changes throughout the course of psychotherapy. Semi-structured interviews (taped and transcribed) were held (separately) with the boys, their parents, paid care-givers and the therapists. The mothers tried hard to make sense of, and come to terms with, what was happening to their sons and to themselves, they struggled to reconcile their own confused and often conflicting emotions, and to maintain their own sense of identity. They felt almost totally unsupported by the services, both in the past and present, and could see little hope for the future. There is an urgent need for development of effective and sympathetic services for the parents of boys with learning disabilities who have been abused, and who are now showing abusive behaviour.     

Adolescents with learning disabilities: Psychic structures that are not conducive to learning

In this paper, I attempt to make links between theoretical concepts derived from the work of Bion (in particular, the 'ego-destructive super-ego', and the function he termed '-K' in thinking disorders) and the nature of the transference relationship that became evident in my clinical work with some adolescents with learning disabilities. I use three clinical examples to illustrate these ideas and suggest that learning can be facilitated for this patient group by addressing difficulties which arise in the therapist's countertransference related to the theoretical concepts cited above.     

Evidence for Implicit Learning in Syntactic Comprehension

This study provides evidence for implicit learning in syntactic comprehension. By reanalyzing data from a syntactic priming experiment (Thothathiri & Snedeker, 2008), we find that the error signal associated with a syntactic prime influences comprehenders' subsequent syntactic expectations. This follows directly from error‐based implicit learning accounts of syntactic priming, but it is unexpected under accounts that consider syntactic priming a consequence of temporary increases in base‐level activation. More generally, the results raise questions about the principles underlying the maintenance of implicit statistical knowledge relevant to language processing, and about possible functional motivations for syntactic priming.     

Is It What You Do,or When You Do It? The Roles of Contingency and Similarity in Pro‐Social Effects of Imitation

Being imitated has a wide range of pro‐social effects, but it is not clear how these effects are mediated. Naturalistic studies of the effects of being imitated have not established whether pro‐social outcomes are due to the similarity and/or the contingency between the movements performed by the actor and those of the imitator. Similarity is often assumed to be the active ingredient, but we hypothesized that contingency might also be important, as it produces positive affect in infants and can be detected by phylogenetically ancient mechanisms of associative learning. We manipulated similarity and contingency between performed and observed actions in a computerized task. Similarity had no positive effects; however, contingency resulted in greater enjoyment of the task, reported closeness to others, and helping behavior. These results suggest that the pro‐social effects of being imitated may rely on associative mechanisms.     

Integration and Reuse in Cognitive Skill Acquisition

Previous accounts of cognitive skill acquisition have demonstrated how procedural knowledge can be obtained and transformed over time into skilled task performance. This article focuses on a complementary aspect of skill acquisition, namely the integration and reuse of previously known component skills. The article posits that, in addition to mechanisms that proceduralize knowledge into more efficient forms, skill acquisition requires tight integration of newly acquired knowledge and previously learned knowledge. Skill acquisition also benefits from reuse of existing knowledge across disparate task domains, relying on indexicals to reference and share necessary information across knowledge components. To demonstrate these ideas, the article proposes a computational model of skill acquisition from instructions focused on integration and reuse, and applies this model to account for behavior across seven task domains.     

Goal‐Proximity Decision‐Making

Reinforcement learning (RL) models of decision‐making cannot account for human decisions in the absence of prior reward or punishment. We propose a mechanism for choosing among available options based on goal‐option association strengths, where association strengths between objects represent previously experienced object proximity. The proposed mechanism, Goal‐Proximity Decision‐making (GPD), is implemented within the ACT‐R cognitive framework. GPD is found to be more efficient than RL in three maze‐navigation simulations. GPD advantages over RL seem to grow as task difficulty is increased. An experiment is presented where participants are asked to make choices in the absence of prior reward. GPD captures human performance in this experiment better than RL.     

龙生龙,凤生凤？领导创新性工作表现对下属创造力的影响

根据社会认知理论,探讨组织情景中领导者创新性工作表现对下属创造力的影响,将领导成员交换关系和威权型领导作为情景因素,来探索它们的交互效应对下属创造力的影响。本研究采用问卷法,选取领导-下属配对数据,通过两个子研究来验证假设。研究结果显示：(1)领导创新性工作表现与下属创造力存在积极的正相关关系,创新的内在动机在其中起着中介作用;(2)威权型领导能够有效地调节这种关系;(3)领导创新性工作表现、领导成员交换关系和威权型领导对下属创造力存在三重的交互作用。最后,文章讨论了研究的局限与启示,并指出未来可能的研究方向。     

Differential Development of Learning Strategies on a Pictorial Verbal Learning Test (PVLT) in Primary-School Children

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that developmental differences exist in the use of learning strategies in primary school children. Serial and subjective clustering in a multitrial Pictorial Verbal Learning Test (PVLT) were compared in 79 children aged 6–12. Correlation analyses indicated that serial clustering yielded better performance when information was presented on the initial trials of the test. Subjective clustering was superior when information was presented repeatedly, i.e., after three or more trials. Analyses of variance indicated that subjective clustering was used more often in older children with repeated presentations. On the other hand, there was no increase in the use of serial clustering with age and with repeated presentations. The findings imply that training in the use of proper strategies could have benefit for children who use an inefficient learning strategy and/or have a learning problem. In addition, they point to the importance of the factor “age” in relation to the way information is presented to children.     

Verbal learning and memory as measured by the Rey-Auditory Verbal Learning Test: ADHD with and without learning disabilities

The primary purpose of the present study is to examine the effects of attention deficits, learning disability, and the combined effects of both on the learning and memory processes, as measured by the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT). Thirty children (age range 12–17) diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 18 children (age range 11–17) diagnosed with learning disabilities (LD), and 64 children (age range 12–17) diagnosed with ADHD as well as with LD, and 28, 18, and 62 matched controls, respectively, participated in this study. It was found that the children diagnosed with ADHD did not differ in any of the verbal learning and memory measures derived from the Rey AVLT. The group with LD was impaired in the overall number of words recalled across the learning phase. Performance of the children diagnosed with ADHD +LD showed a similar impairment as the group with LD (i.e., overall amount of words learned) and, in addition, their retrieval efficiency was also impaired. In conclusion, this study indicates that verbal memory is preserved in children with ADHD if they have no LD and their intelligence is in the normal range or above. LD by itself leads to difficulties in acquisition, but the combination of ADHD+LD leads to additional impairment in retrieval processes.