Teaching self-control to reduce overt food stealing by children with autism and developmental disorders

Food stealing is often a serious behavioral problem among children with diagnoses of autism and other developmental disorders. Very few empirical studies concerning this behavioral challenge have been reported. We applied a correspondence training procedure to teach self-control as replacement behavior to four children with autism and developmental disorders who displayed food stealing in the community. A changing criterion design embedded within a nonconcurrent multiple-probe across participants design was used. The treatment succeeded for all four participants by increasing latency to eating highly preferred food to a predetermined criterion and reducing occurrences of food stealing to zero. Three participants generalized the replacement behavior to natural settings and maintained the behavior for 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, and 4 months. One participant without expressive language was taught successfully during treatment trials but failed to maintain and generalize the behavior. A functional relation between delaying food eating and Say-Do correspondence training was demonstrated.     

Brain bases of English morphological processing: A comparison between Chinese-English,Spanish-English bilingual,and English monolingual children

How do early bilingual experiences influence children's neural architecture for word processing? Dual language acquisition can yield common influences that may be shared across different bilingual groups, as well as language-specific influences stemming from a given language pairing. To investigate these effects, we examined bilingual English speakers of Chinese or Spanish, and English monolinguals, all raised in the US (N = 152, ages 5–10). Children completed an English morphological word processing task during fNIRS neuroimaging. The findings revealed both language-specific and shared bilingual effects. The language-specific effects were that Chinese and Spanish bilinguals showed principled differences in their neural organization for English lexical morphology. The common bilingual effects shared by the two groups were that in both bilingual groups, increased home language proficiency was associated with stronger left superior temporal gyrus (STG) activation when processing the English word structures that are most dissimilar from the home language. The findings inform theories of language and brain development during the key periods of neural reorganization for learning to read by illuminating experience-based plasticity in linguistically diverse learners.     

Maternal Depressive Symptoms Predict Girls’ but Not Boys’ Emotion Regulation: A Prospective Moment-to-Moment Observation Study

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - We aimed to further the understanding of maternal depressive symptoms on temporal dynamics of child emotion regulation by applying the process...     

句子结构与控制动词类型对题元角色指派的影响

扩展论元依存模型认为：语序固定语言的题元角色指派依赖论元的语序线索; 论元线索与动词论元表征不一致时, 题元角色再分析会产生额外的加工负荷。为检验该模型, 本研究采用眼动记录方法, 实验为2 (句子结构：居中、前置) × 2 (控制动词类型：主语控制、宾语控制)被试内设计。通过操纵句子结构, 考察汉语读者对语序线索的依赖性; 通过操纵控制动词类型, 考察汉语论元线索与动词论元表征的一致性对题元角色指派的影响。结果发现：(1)前置结构的句子在名词1、名词2和动词区域的阅读时间和回视次数多于居中结构的句子; (2)宾语控制动词条件在动词和动词后区域的第二遍阅读时间和总回视次数多于主语控制动词条件; (3)在居中结构中, 宾语控制动词条件在名词2和动词区域的阅读时间和回视次数多于主语控制动词条件; 在前置结构中, 宾语控制动词条件在动词后区域的阅读时间多于主语控制动词条件。结果支持扩展论元依存模型。     

大学生主观童年创伤症状对抑郁的影响:抗挫折能力和外向性的多重中介效应

本研究将"童年创伤"定义为"个体14岁以前所经历的,站在主体的角度主观感受到的创伤性事件"。采用问卷调查法对302名大学生进行调查,通过定量加定性的方式探索了童年创伤与抑郁之间的关系。相关分析表明：主观童年创伤症状、外向性、抗挫折能力、抑郁之间两两显著相关;结构方程模型表明：主观童年创伤症状通过外向性、抗挫折能力完全、多重中介作用间接预测抑郁。本研究结果在理论和实践层面对大学生抑郁问题的预防和干预工作提供重要的借鉴依据。     

Feminist Active Commitment and Sexual Harassment Perception among Chinese Women: The Moderating Roles of Targets’ Gender Stereotypicality and Type of Harassment

In recent years, sexual harassment has become more acknowledged in many developed countries. However, in East Asian culture, it is a sensitive and controversial topic upon which few scholars have focused. The current research aimed to explore whether the relationship between feminist identity and perception of sexual harassment was affected by target’s traditional or nontraditional gender stereotypicality and types of sexual harassment (unwanted sexual attention or gender harassment) among Chinese working women. The participants were 424 heterosexual women, aged 18 to 71 years-old (mdn?=?31), who completed surveys that assessed their feminist Active Commitment and perception of sexual harassment after reading a randomly assigned sexual harassment scenario. Women with higher scores on Active Commitment were more aware of both types of sexual harassment, and participants’ perception of unwanted sexual attention was significantly stronger than their perception of gender harassment. In addition, the types of targets and types of sexual harassment moderated the relationship between Active Commitment and the perception of sexual harassment. Our findings highlight the importance of feminist identity for the perception of sexual harassment and suggest that improving gender equality and feminist education is very important for enhancing the perception of sexual harassment.

     

Assertive Ads for Want or Should? It Depends on Consumers’ Power

Advertisements using assertive language are commonly seen in marketing communications, yet assertive language has often been shown to be ineffective in communication and even decrease compliance. Recent research began to examine factors that influence the effectiveness of assertive advertising messages, but little research has studied the potential moderating role of consumer‐related factors. The current research fills this gap by investigating the moderating role of consumers’ power. Across five studies, the authors find that for high‐power consumers, assertive ads are effective in promoting want products but ineffective in promoting should products. For low‐power consumers, however, assertive ads are effective in promoting should products but ineffective in promoting want products. Moreover, the authors show that this pattern of results is driven (mediated) by consumers’ perception of the fit between the advertising message and the advertised product. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.     

Both sides get the point: Hemispheric sensitivities to sentential constraint

Behavioral studies have consistently reported striking differences in the impact of sentence-level information on the processing of words presented in the right (RVF) versus the left (LVF) visual field, with context effects apparent only for RVF items. The consistent lack of such effects in the LVF has been taken to mean that right hemisphere language comprehension is largely insensitive to message-level meaning. We used the functional specificity afforded by event-related potential measures to assess this claim. Target words completing strongly and weakly constraining sentence contexts, in which constraint arose at the sentence level rather than from lexical associations, were presented laterally in the LVF or RVF. Increased constraint significantly reduced N400 amplitudes with presentation in both VFs, with no differences in the timing or amplitude of these effects. These results are inconsistent with the view that the VF asymmetries found in behavioral measures reflect differential hemispheric capacities at the level of semantic analysis and integration, although VF-based differences on earlier components (P2) suggest asymmetries in the impact of sentential context on perceptual aspects of word processing in the two hemispheres.     

Reasoning about Sensing Actions in Domains with Multi-Valued Fluents

In this paper, we discuss the weakness of current action languages for sensing actions with respect to modeling domains with multi-valued fluents. To address this problem, we propose a language with sensing actions and multi-valued fluents, called AM_K, provide a transition function based semantics for the language, and demonstrate its use through several examples from the literature. We then define the entailment relationship between action theories and queries in AM_K, denoted by ⊧AM_K, and discuss some properties about AM_K.