The deceleration of inappropriate comments by a natural consequence

The characters of this study were two boys in a class for pupils with learning disabilities. The subject was a nine-year-old boy who emitted certain inappropriate comments in class. The manager throughout this study was a peer of the subject.Following a period of initial assessment, which revealed that the inappropriate verbalizations occurred about twice each day, the peer-manager, contingent on each inappropriate remark, moved away from the subject to another desk. Furthermore, before he moved, he explained to the subject why he was displeased. The peer-manager, after a period of time, returned to his original location contingent on appropriate verbalizations of the subject.This technique proved effective in that the subject rarely responded inappropriately throughout the remainder of the school term. Further, it was reported that follow-up observations taken the next year, when the pupil was in a different class, revealed that the inappropriate verbalizations had not reoccurred.     

Visual kin recognition in nonhuman primates: (Pan troglodytes and Macaca mulatta): inbreeding avoidance or male distinctiveness?

Faces provide important information about identity, age, and even kinship. A previous study in chimpanzees reported greater similarity between the faces of mothers and sons compared with mothers and daughters, or unrelated individuals. This was interpreted as an inbreeding avoidance mechanism where females, the dispersing gender, should avoid mating with any male that resembles their mother. Alternatively, male faces may be more distinctive than female faces, biasing attention toward males. To test these hypotheses, chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys matched conspecifics' faces of unfamiliar mothers and fathers with their sons and daughters. Results showed no evidence of male distinctiveness, rather a cross-gender effect was found: chimpanzees were better matching moms with sons and fathers with daughters. Rhesus monkeys, however, showed an overwhelming bias toward male-distinctiveness. They were faster to learn male faces, performed better on father-offspring and parent-son trials, and were best matching fathers with sons. This suggests that for the rhesus monkey, inbreeding avoidance involves something other than facial phenotypic matching but that among chimpanzees, the visual recognition of facial similarities may play an important role.     

Belief Systems and the Analytic Work

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -