Circumscribed interests (CI) are important and understudied symptoms that affect individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The present study sought to develop quantitative measures of the content, intensity and functional impairment of CI in 50 children with high-functioning ASD compared to an age-, IQ-, and gender-matched sample of 50…

The double-edged nature of modern technology, continuously balancing between risks and opportunities, manifests itself clearly in an emerging societal problem known as cyberbullying. To analyse the extent and nature of the issue in Belgium, 1318 adolescents were questioned explicitly about their involvement in cyberbullying, as well as implicitly…

One of the abiding problems in the study of American Indians is that it is plagued by stereotyping and romanticism. In the history of ideas in Europe and the United States, negative as well as positive stereotyping has been called "primitivism." Much of the author's work has been an attempt to get beyond primitivism in order to get to…

Studies show that for preschool-age children, social skills can have a profound effect on, and be a predictor of, future societal success and school achievement. Therefore, it is essential that young children develop appropriate social behaviors. To do this, preschoolers need support and guidance from the adults in their life: parents, family, and…

Although the protective role of social support is well established in the health literature, antecedents of perceived social support are not well understood. Research on family experiential factors during early adolescence, an important psychosocial developmental period in the life course, represents a promising line of inquiry. Using a sample of…

Educational discourse, like other fields, is not neutral. Through policy documents it has ideological functions of transmitting dominant cultures and serving certain sectional interest groups. In Zimbabwe 1998 was characterized by radical political discontent as witnessed by a rise in student activism and the formation of the main political…

The authors addressed the associations between childhood and adolescence victimization and partner violence in adulthood. Data were collected on 480 men voluntarily attending therapy with a semistructured interview that assessed (a) violent behavior, categorized as physical violence, physical controlling behavior, property violence,…

This article examines instruction at a school in California for expelled middle school students and illustrates the practices of its most and least effective teachers. Findings show that teachers' implementation of instructional practices, classroom management, and rapport building mutually reinforced each other to either facilitate or hinder…

The relations between adolescents' habitual usage of media violence and their tendency to engage in aggressive and prosocial behavior in a school setting were examined in a cross-sectional study with 1688 7th and 8th graders in Germany who completed measures of violent media exposure and normative acceptance of aggression. For each participant,…

Dyslexia does not cause criminal behaviour, but it may worsen aggressive behaviour tendencies. In this study, aggressive behaviour and risk of future violence were compared between forensic psychiatric patients with and without dyslexia. Dyslexia was assessed using the Swedish phonological processing battery "The Pigeon". The patients…

Research in legal decision making has demonstrated the tendency to blame the victim and exonerate the perpetrator of sexual assault. This study examined the hypothesis of a special leniency bias in rape cases by comparing them to cases of robbery. N = 288 participants received descriptions of rape and robbery of a female victim by a male…

In 2001, less than two years after the Columbine High School shootings, a plan to copycat the Columbine shooting in a junior high school was interrupted by police. This was one of the first documented cases of interrupted school violence and the school where this was to occur was traumatized both by the fact that students were planning violence…

Autism spectrum disorders are characterized in terms of behavioral deficits in areas of social behavior and language development. A failure to attend to the faces of others is the single best discriminator between 1-year-old children later diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and those with typical development. Attending to the face of…

This study used increased physical activity during recess to reduce stereotypy in preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Results indicate increasing physical activity can be used as an intervention to reduce automatically maintained stereotypy in preschoolers with ASD. The intervention had a lesser effect on a preschooler whose stereotypy was…

The GARS-2 (Gilliam 2006) is widely used for autism screening; however, the validity of its three conceptually-derived subscales has not been evaluated. In this study, exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory (CFA) factor analyses of data from matched subgroups of the standardization sample did not support the GARS-2 subscale structure. EFAs identified…