A review of play in nonhuman animals indicates that play increases with phylogenetic status, is important for mature social development in more advanced species, reflects intentional activity, and is essential for the development of tool-using strategies. (Author)

Teachers are advised to react constructively to class jokers by understanding that the student may be a gifted-talented person seeking attention or peer acceptance. (CL)

The regular classroom behaviors of learning disabled and average fourth- and fifth-grade males were observed. A multiple regression analysis revealed 11 behaviors, accounting for 71 percent of the variance. Only the teacher behaviors and the combination of child and teacher behaviors produced significant results. (Author/CL)

Literature on sensory deprivation is reviewed to provide a theoretical basis for treating the self-abusive mentally retarded. Treatment procedures and progress are presented in a case study. (Author)

Author claims that Piaget's account of the construction of reality needs modification and a shift in emphasis. (Author/MB)

Results of this study showed generally low correlations between the behavioral test and the self-report measures of specific fear. This finding is consistent with the proposal that fear is not organized in a unitary way but has several components. (Author)

Factor analyses of ratings received by 617 patients in a state hospital for the mentally retarded, concerning 26 problem behaviors, indicated that five factors describe the behaviors. (Author)

A key feature of autism is restricted repetitive behavior (RRB). Despite the significance of RRBs, little is known about their phenomenology, assessment, and treatment. The Repetitive Behavior Scale-Revised (RBS-R) is a recently-developed questionnaire that captures the breadth of RRB in autism. To validate the RBS-R in an independent sample, we…

The relations of children's (n=214 at Time 1; M age=6 years at Time 1) dispositional sympathy to adult-reported and behavioral measures of effortful control (EC) and impulsivity were examined in a longitudinal study including five assessments, each two years apart. Especially for boys, relatively high levels of EC and growth in EC were related to…

The effects of worry and rumination on affective states and mentation type were examined in an unselected undergraduate sample in Study 1 and in a sample of individuals with high trait worry and rumination, high rumination, and low worry/rumination in Study 2. Participants engaged in worry and rumination inductions, counterbalanced in order across…

This study employed a pre-intervention analysis to determine factors that contributed to safe ergonomic postures in a small pharmacy. The pharmacy was located on a university campus and employed both pharmacists and pharmacy technicians. Three of the eight pharmacy employees had experienced various repetitive motion injuries that resulted in a…

Although previous research indicates that certain types of attention (i.e., statements related to behavior, tickles) may be differentially reinforcing, only one or two forms of attention are typically provided contingent on problem behavior during the attention condition in experimental functional analyses. In the present investigation, various…

Decision-making is an important function that can be quantified using a two-choice prediction task. Individuals with Autistic Disorder (AD) often show highly restricted and repetitive behavior that may interfere with adaptive decision-making. We assessed whether AD adults showed repetitive behavior on the choice task that was unaffected by…

Imitation, vocabulary, pretend play, and socially insightful behavior were investigated in 5,206 same- and opposite-sex 2-year-old twin pairs in the United Kingdom. Individual differences in imitative ability were due to modest heritability (30%), while environmental factors shared between twins (42%) and unique to each twin (28%) also made…

Cognizant of certain recurring characteristics of emotional maladjustment, the author hypothesized (1) that no significant differences would be found between characteristics of emotional maladjustment related to reading disability and characteristics observed in a group of retarded readers and (2) that there would be no significant differences…