Thoughts on how to regulate behaviours: an overview of the current debate

ABSTRACT

The article intends to present the debate on behaviour modification in the regulation studies literature, at a time of renewed interest among regulators for new ideas and strategies. As the financial crisis has led to the most public critique yet of the rational choice view of individuals that has informed regulation in the last few decades, other ideas that value realism more than simplicity and parsimony deserve some attention. Some of these – proposed by behavioural economics – have already raised considerable interest from regulators, especially in the UK and the USA, and have begun to impact various types of regulation. This article puts these various elements in perspective and as such provides tools to appraise and engage with past and future attempts to regulate social groups in health care and elsewhere.     

Home-School Communication in the Treatment of Childhood Behavior Problems

There is a shortage of intervention strategies for children with behavior disorders which incorporate both home and school influences. To address this need, a service delivery model was evaluated for public school children (Pre-K through G2) who were at risk for educational failure on account of behavior problems, family dysfunction, and poverty and social disadvantage. Interventions based on eco-behavioral principles were delivered by home-visitors in consultation with clinical child psychologists. A primary goal of all treatment plans was to enhance parent-teacher communication. Children in the experimental group (N = 34) showed overall improvement (as judged by parents) and decreases in targeted problems (as reported by teachers and parents), relative to control students (N = 15). The program decreased the number of children placed in special education. There was indication that better communication between home and school related to academic improvement. The protocol provides a possible behavioral consultation model of early intervention for behavior disorders and demonstrates how clinical services can be integrated with systems-wide dropout prevention efforts.     

New insights on eye blindness and hand sight: Temporal constraints of visuo-motor networks

Pioneer experiments on saccadic suppression have shown that this effect is not followed by motor disorientation: Conscious perception of a target displacement can be dissociated from correct manual target reaching. It has subsequently been demonstrated that movement corrections with the same latency and spatial characteristics can be produced in conditions allowing perceptual awareness of perturbation of a target as in condition inducing saccadic suppression. In addition to the qualitative dissociation between motor performance and conscious awareness, quantitative temporal dissociations in action can be observed by manipulating different features of the visual target. When the target of an ongoing simple action is perturbed, a temporal advantage is found for responses to perturbations of location relative to colour and shape. Furthermore, there seems to be a temporal advantage for automatic motor corrections made in response to a target displacement as compared to other responses (other ongoing movement adjustments, movement interruption, conditional motor response such as pressing a key, verbal response, delayed matching-to-sample tasks). Thus, this paper reviews evidence for the fact that the temporal characteristics of any given response to a stimulus are dependent both on the sensory processes and on the type of response generated. Accordingly, identification responses (such as verbal report) to a visual stimulus are much slower than motor corrections of an ongoing movement in response to a target location change because of different processing times of the stimulus features (“What” compared to “Where”) and of the response itself (“What” compared to “How”). The existence of two continua (What/Where and What/How) is proposed between these two extreme stimulus- response combinations. This model may be a useful framework to better understand visuo-motor transformations and the network of connections between visual and motor areas.     

Experiences of stereotyping among individuals employed in selected South African organisations

This study investigated the effects of stereotypes among individuals working in selected South African organisations. The participants were 336 employees within the following sectors: banking (n?=?40), higher education institutions (n?=?72), mining (n?=?63), municipalities (n?=?24), nursing (n?=?4), police services (n?=?20), schools (n?=?85), and the restaurant industry (n?=?28). Data were collected using open ended interviews, and thematically analysed. The findings indicated that stereotypes influence individuals on three different levels: cognitive, behavioural, and emotional levels. Predominantly, participants reported that they mostly react in a cognitive manner when confronted with stereotypes.     

Predictive Pointing Movements and Saccades Toward a Moving Target

The authors investigated whether and, if so, how velocity information is used to control predictive manual pointing movements and saccades. Participants (N = 6) intercepted an occluded moving target as if it were still visible. They kept their eyes fixated while the target moved. The target traveled over a fixed distance and changed its velocity on the way. The presentation time of the final velocity was varied. Both the eye and the hand overshot the slow target and undershot the fast target, particularly when the duration of the final velocity was short. Thus, responses were biased in the direction of the target's initial velocity. The error seemed to arise because participants did not take their latency into account when aiming at the target. Instead, they strategically aimed farther ahead when the target was fast. Amplitude was also more related to the position of velocity change than to final velocity duration. Both findings suggest that target velocity is not extrapolated but that individuals add an increment to the position of velocity change.     

Attending to what matters: Flexibility in adults’ and infants’ action perception

Action perception is selective in that observers attend to and encode certain dimensions of action over others. But how flexible is action perception in its selection of perceptual information? One possibility is that observers consistently attend to particular dimensions of action over others across different contexts. Another possibility, tested here, is that observers flexibly vary their attention to different dimensions of action based on the context in which action occurs. We investigated 9.5-month-old infants’ and adults’ ability to attend to drop height under varying contexts—aiming to drop an object into a narrow container versus a wide container. We predicted differential attention to increases in aiming height for the narrow container versus the wide container because an increase in aiming height has a differential effect on success (i.e., getting the object into the container) depending on the width of the container. Both adults and infants showed an asymmetry in their attention to aiming height as a function of context; in the wide container condition increases and decreases in aiming height were equally detectable, whereas in the narrow container condition observers more readily discriminated increases over decreases in aiming height. These results indicate that action perception is both selective and flexible according to context, aiding in action prediction and infants’ social–cognitive development more broadly.     

Behavioral Marital Therapy: An Outcome Evaluation of Conjoint,Group and One Spouse Treatment

Abstract

Behavioral Marital Therapy has focussed on the modification of marital behavior in conjoint and couples group settings. This study extends previously published outcome studies in that one treatment condition involved treating only one of the partners. Fifty-seven couples were consecutively assigned to one of the three treatment conditions. Outcome evaluations included an independent assessment, marital satisfaction, sexual adjustment and an assessment of target problems. The results revealed no significant differences between the three treatment conditions. However, couples in the conjoint treatment resolved their target problems more rapidly than the other two treatments. The implications of the result as well as issues of outcome prediction, cost-effectiveness and the viability of treating one spouse are discussed.     

Structural Evaluation of the Contemporary Psychological Models of Chronic Pain: Does Fear of Pain Work for All?

The aim of the present study was to test Turk and Okifuji's (2002) model of chronic pain and in particular the moderating role of self-efficacy. We assessed 207 consecutive chronic pain patients (53.1% female) on a range of relevant measures and tested the model using structured equation modelling. The model was supported. These results support Turk and Okifuji's model of chronic pain and suggest that it can account for the relationships between variables in chronic pain patients. In particular, the results support the central role of fear-based avoidance and self-efficacy in chronic pain. Future research should be aimed at testing the alternative contemporary models of chronic pain at different stages of the development and maintenance of chronic pain and over time.     

Disentangling the Impact of Resistance and Ambivalence on Therapy Outcomes in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Resistance and ambivalence about change are increasingly recognized as important determinants of treatment outcomes. Moreover, resistance and ambivalence are thought to be theoretically related in that clients who are more ambivalent about change are more likely to demonstrate resistance to the process and tasks of treatment. In the context of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for generalized anxiety disorder, the present study simultaneously examined early resistance and ambivalence using two observer-based coding systems in order to determine their inter-relationship and, importantly, to investigate their relative contributions to outcome. Resistance was also coded during mid-treatment in order to investigate possible mediation pathways. Early ambivalence (clients’ arguments against change or counter-change talk) was found to be no longer related to outcomes when early resistance was taken into account, suggesting that disharmony in the therapeutic relationship is more important to outcomes than ambivalence per se. Moreover, mid-treatment resistance partially mediated the relationship between early resistance and post-treatment worry severity. That is, higher early opposition to therapist direction is related to poorer outcomes, in part because it is associated with greater resistance during the working phase of CBT. The findings underscore the critical need for therapists to be sensitive to identifying resistance early and throughout treatment.