Social skills training for juvenile delinquents

Twenty-seven incarcerated juvenile delinquents matched on the number of previous offenses, age, WISC-R IQ, and locus of control were assigned to a Social Skills. Discussion or Control group. Social skills training consisted of instruction, feedback, modeling, behavior rehearsal, social reinforcement and graduated homework assignments. All subjects were assessed before and after treatment on a variety of self-report, role-play and behavioral measures. Analyses of variance for difference scores indicated that the Social Skills group improved significantly more than the Discussion and Control groups, which did not differ. Appropriate interpersonal skills were learned, state anxiety was reduced, internal locus of control was increased, and significant shifts in adjustment to the institutional program were evidenced for the Social Skills group.     

Behavioral treatment of obsessive-compulsive neurosis

Three chronic and severe obsessive-compulsive neurotics were treated with behavioral intervention strategies and psychotropic medication. The effects of treatment were evaluated in three separate experiments with single case experimental designs. The results suggest that response prevention was effective in reducing ritualistic behavior while the effects of flooding and antidepressant medication added little to outcome. The results also suggest that strategies aimed only at reducing compulsive behavior per se are insufficient in eliminating other associated difficulties (e.g., depressive symptoms, interpersonal problems) and that a comprehensive approach to treatment is needed.     

Free recall by deaf and hearing children: semantic clustering and recall in trained and untrained groups.

Free recall tasks with semantically categorizable stimuli were given to 60 deaf and 60 hearing children, divided equally among Grades 3, 5, and 7 (ages 9, 11, and 13 years, respectively). Half the children were trained to use semantic categorization as a memory aid after the first study-test trial. All subjects were told category labels and sizes on the third recall trial. As hypothesized, older children showed more spontaneous semantic clustering and higher recall scores than younger children. Training increased clustering in all groups, while the provision of category information at retrieval increased clustering regardless of training condition. Contrary to expectations, deaf children used semantic clustering as much as hearing children. Deaf children's recall scores, however, were significantly lower than hearing children's. The specific contrasts observed between deaf and hearing children's performance suggest that deaf children's recall deficiencies probably reflect either inadequate knowledge of category membership or inflexibility in reclassifying individual items, rather than a general inability to recognize and use the categorical nature of a list as a mnemonic aid.     

Learning to program in LISP

We have gathered protocols of subjects in their first 30 hours of learning LISP. The processes by which subjects write LISP functions to meet problem specifications has been modeled in a simulation program called GRAPES (Goal Restricted Production System). The GRAPES system embodies the goal-restricted architecture for production systems as specified in the ACT* theory (Anderson, 1983). We compare our simulation to human protocols on a number of problems. GRAPES simulates the top-down, depth-first flow of control exhibited by subjects and produces code very similar to subject code. Special attention is given to modeling student solutions by analogy, how students learn from doing, and how failures of working memory affect the course of problem-solving. Of major concern is the process by which GRAPES compiles operators in solving one problem to facilitate the solution of later problems.     

A test of the X-linked genetic hypothesis for sex differences on Piaget's water-level task

Data from seven studies involving 849 high school and college students were used to test the recessive X-linked genetic model prediction that the square of the proportion of men who perform accurately on the water-level task is equal to the proportion of women who perform accurately. Goodness-of-fit tests showed that this prediction was confirmed for each sample. A model with a single estimate of gene frequency accounted for all the data when a classification error parameter was incorporated into the X-linked model. In both models the gene frequency parameter was about $\text{2}\text{3}$.