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iPrompts® is a software application for handheld devices that provides visual support to individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). Caregivers use the application to create and present visual schedules, visual countdown timers, and visual choices, to help individuals with ASDs stay organized, understand upcoming events, and identify preferences. The developer of the application, HandHold Adaptive, LLC, initially introduced iPrompts on the iPhone and iPod Touch in May of 2009. The research team from the Center of Excellence on Autism Spectrum Disorders at Southern Connecticut State University conducted a study of iPrompts in 2010, investigating its use by educators working with students with ASDs. Among other findings, educators indicated a desire to present visual supports on a larger, "tablet"-sized display screen, leading the developer to produce an iPad-specific product, iPrompts® XL. Described in this paper are the research effort of iPrompts and subsequent development effort of iPrompts XL. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

Objectives: Increasing evidence suggests that deficits in mindfulness (awareness, attentiveness, and acceptance of the present moment) play a role in a range of disorders involving behavioral dysregulation. This paper adds to that literature by describing a transdiagnostic psychotherapy (Mindfulness & Modification Therapy; MMT) developed to target behavioral dysregulation. Design: An open-treatment pilot-trial investigated the feasibility, acceptability, and pre-post effects of MMT targeting women (N = 14) court-referred for alcohol abuse/dependence and aggression. Results: Pre-post comparisons revealed significant decreases in alcohol use, drug use, and aggression. In addition, the retention rate was 93%. Conclusion: Preliminary evidence suggests that MMT is a feasible and acceptable treatment that decreases dysregulated behaviors such as substance use and aggression, while also potentially increasing retention. (c) 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol 67:117, 2011.

The current study investigated the impact of a German television program on changes in 4th-semester German students' reflections on cultural perceptions over the course of 1 semester. Sixty-nine students at the University of Texas at Austin watched 4 episodes of the popular German television program Lindenstrasse. After viewing, students were asked to reflect in written response papers on cultural features and patterns of behavior and on cultural differences and similarities. The study results suggest that students' perceptions of another culture can become more sophisticated when being exposed to authentic filmic material and asked to reflect in writing about observed plot features and cultural manifestations. The key to these results is a strategy for assessing not just students' recall of cultural content, but also their strategic competencies in negotiating cultural difference. Changes in students' cognitive styles were tracked by a scale that rewards students' strategic ability tomanage details of cultural knowledge and sociolinguistic content, including the following categories: (a) rhetorical organization; (b) content; (c) comparative point of view; and (d) interpretive substance. The article provides a model for the assessment of cultural competency (MACC), which can be adapted to assess students' engagement with the culture represented in various materials.

This study examined the knowledge base of 142 elementary-level educators for implementing response-to-intervention (RTI) models in reading. A questionnaire assessed participants' professional background for teaching reading, as well as their familiarity with specific assessments, research-based instructional models, and interventions potentially useful in RTI approaches. A multiple-choice knowledge survey patterned after a teacher licensure exam, including items situated in classroom contexts, assessed participants' knowledge about different components of reading, assessment, and RTI practices. Overall, participants obtained the highest scores on a knowledge survey subscale involving fluency/vocabulary/comprehension and the lowest on a subscale involving assessment/RTI practices, with a subscale involving phonemic awareness/phonics in the middle. Mean percentages correct on the subscales ranged from about 58-65% correct. However, participants who said they had prior code-focused professional development outperformed other participants on all survey subscales. General elementary certified teachers performed comparably to special education certified teachers on two out of three subscales, with both groups outperforming unlicensed participants; on the assessment/RTI subscale, only the special educators outperformed unlicensed participants. Most participants were familiar with basic features of RTI such as the three tiered model but were unfamiliar with the research-based instructional approaches and interventions named in the study questionnaire, although participants who had experienced code-focused PD were significantly more likely to be familiar with certain interventions. The study suggests that professional development will be important to enable many educators to implement RTI effectively in reading.

Home-based programs provide a growing number of mental health and case-management services to high-risk children, adolescents, and their families. The clinical service providers who work directly with these children and families have varying degrees of education and practice experience as well as a range of different supervisory needs. Because of the daily challenges service providers face, they require support from competent, available supervisors. The professionals who supervise them often assume that responsibility with limited, if any, training in providing supervision. New and experienced supervisors alike often find themselves in positions for which they are ill prepared, without suitable training or administrative support. This article describes a supervision seminar developed for supervisors who supervise the clinicians who provide home-based services. The seminar provides training, support, consultation, and other forms of assistance to help supervisors adapt their clinical skills for use in their supervisory roles.

Women's childbirth experiences are not widely researched in the social work literature. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to answer questions related to the child-birthing experience. One hundred and nineteen participants responded to a 26-item online questionnaire between April and June 2008, and their written narratives were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Themes regarding the spiritual dimensions of childbirth emerged from the data and support current research demonstrating the importance of spirituality in women's lives and the meaningful and transformative nature of childbirth experiences. Implications for addressing spirituality in practice when working with childbearing women are explored. Future research that explores how spirituality may function as a protective factor for women with difficult pregnancies, births, and transitions to parenting is recommended.

Jaspers’ views on communication and his approach to the question of listening, both underwent an evolution in which World War II and the first years thereafter played a crucial role. In this process, Jaspers journeyed from listening to the great minds of the past, through an inward dialogue with them, to one-sided lecturing while his audience was engaged in a straight-line listening, to an intimate dialogue with those he considered like-minded, to a multi-faceted dialogue, and finally to listening to his contemporaries and learning how to practice transactional listening-in-conversation in the process of a multi-layered communication he called a loving struggle. This evolution, paralleled by the transition of Japers’ philosophy from local-centered to world-centered makes his thinking attractive and useful today.

The present study examined how exposure to traumatic events impacts children with severe emotional disturbance who are being served in a school-based system of care. Multilevel growth curve models were used to examine the relationships between a child's history of traumatic events (physical abuse, sexual abuse, or domestic violence) and behavioral and emotional strengths, internalizing problem behaviors, or externalizing problem behaviors over 18 months. Results indicate that children receiving services (N = 134) exhibited increased emotional and behavioral strengths and decreased internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors from enrollment to 18 months follow-up. Children with a history of traumatic events improved more slowly than children without such a history on both strengths and internalizing problem behaviors, even after controlling for dosage of services received and other characteristics previously found to predict outcomes. Gender was also related to improvement in internalizing symptoms. Results highlight the continued need to assess the impact of exposure to traumatic events for children served in a system of care.

Child neglect is the most prevalent form of child maltreatment in the United States, and poses a serious public health concern. Children who survive such episodes go on to experience long-lasting psychological and behavioral problems, including higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and cognitive deficits. To date, most research into the causes of these life-long problems has focused on well-established targets such as stress responsive systems, including the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis. Using the maternal separation and early weaning model, we have attempted to provide comprehensive molecular profiling of a model of early-life neglect in an organism amenable to genomic manipulation: the mouse. In this article, we report new findings generated with this model using chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing, diffuse tensor magnetic resonance imaging, and behavioral analyses. We also review the validity of the maternal separation and early weaning model, which reflects behavioral deficits observed in neglected humans including hyperactivity, anxiety, and attentional deficits. Finally, we summarize the molecular characterization of these animals, including RNA profiling and label-free proteomics, which highlight protein translation and myelination as novel pathways of interest.

In the Monty Hall dilemma, an individual chooses between three options, only one of which will deliver a prize. After the initial choice, one of the nonchosen options is revealed as a losing option, and the individual can choose to stay with the original choice or switch to the other remaining option. Previous studies have found that most adults stay with their initial choice, although the chances of winning are 2/3 for switching and 1/3 for staying. Pigeons, college students, and preschool children were given many trials on this task to examine how their choices might change with experience. The college students began to switch on a majority of trials much sooner than the pigeons, contrary to the findings by Herbranson and Schroeder (2010) that pigeons perform better than people on this task. In all three groups, some individuals approximated the optimal strategy of switching on every trial, but most did not. Many of the preschoolers immediately showed a pattern of always switching or always staying and continued this pattern throughout the experiment. In a condition where the probability of winning was 90% after a switch, all college students and all but one pigeon learned to switch on nearly every trial. The results suggest that one main impediment to learning the optimal strategy in the Monty Hall task, even after repeated trials, is the difficulty in discriminating the different reinforcement probabilities for switching versus staying.

The lexical decision (LD) and naming (NAM) tasks are ubiquitous paradigms that employ printed word identification. They are major tools for investigating how factors like morphology, semantic information, lexical neighborhood and others affect identification. Although use of the tasks is widespread, there has been little research into how performance in LD or NAM relates to reading ability, a deficiency that limits the translation of research with these tasks to the understanding of individual differences in reading. The present research was designed to provide a link from LD and NAM to the specific variables that characterize reading ability (e.g., decoding, sight word recognition, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension) as well as to important reading-related abilities (phonological awareness and rapid naming). We studied 99 adults with a wide range of reading abilities. LD and NAM strongly predicted individual differences in word identification, less strongly predicted vocabulary size and did not predict comprehension. Fluency was predicted but with differences that depended on the way fluency was defined. Finally, although the tasks did not predict individual differences in rapid naming or phonological awareness, the failures nevertheless assisted in understanding the cognitive mechanisms behind these reading-related abilities. The results demonstrate that LD and NAM are important tools for the study of individual differences in reading.