Thesis (B.A. Hons. 1976) from the Department of Psychology, University of Adelaide.

No description available.

In general terms a mand is a requesting response. Typically, children learn basic mands (e.g., “I want drink”) before learning to mand for information. Across three experiments I taught children with autism to mand for information using the mands “What is it?,” “Where?,” and/or “Which?”. In Experiment 1, a modified multiple-baseline design across situations was used to evaluate a teaching procedure that consisted of contrived motivating operations, prompt fading and prompt delay, natural consequences, error correction, and a brief preference assessment for teaching “What is it?” The results demonstrated strong internal validity with each of the three participants, with each showing generalization to situations, activities, scripts, the natural environment, and over time. In Experiment 2, a modified multiple-baseline design across three participants was used to evaluate approximately the same teaching procedure for teaching “Where?” The results demonstrated strong internal validity with each of the three participants, with generalization by all three participants to novel situations, activities, location the natural environment, and over time. In Experiment 3, a modified multiple-baseline design across three participants was used to evaluate approximately the same teaching procedure for teaching “Which?” The results demonstrated strong internal validity with generalization by all three participants to novel situations, activities, scripts, the natural environment, and over time. These findings are discussed in terms of its contributions to applied behaviour analysis research on teaching mand to children with autism.

In general terms a mand is a requesting response. Typically, children learn basic mands (e.g., “I want drink”) before learning to mand for information. Across three experiments I taught children with autism to mand for information using the mands “What is it?,” “Where?,” and/or “Which?”. In Experiment 1, a modified multiple-baseline design across situations was used to evaluate a teaching procedure that consisted of contrived motivating operations, prompt fading and prompt delay, natural consequences, error correction, and a brief preference assessment for teaching “What is it?” The results demonstrated strong internal validity with each of the three participants, with each showing generalization to situations, activities, scripts, the natural environment, and over time. In Experiment 2, a modified multiple-baseline design across three participants was used to evaluate approximately the same teaching procedure for teaching “Where?” The results demonstrated strong internal validity with each of the three participants, with generalization by all three participants to novel situations, activities, location the natural environment, and over time. In Experiment 3, a modified multiple-baseline design across three participants was used to evaluate approximately the same teaching procedure for teaching “Which?” The results demonstrated strong internal validity with generalization by all three participants to novel situations, activities, scripts, the natural environment, and over time. These findings are discussed in terms of its contributions to applied behaviour analysis research on teaching mand to children with autism.

No description available.

This research aimed to explore whether the recognition of offenders with a concealed firearm by a human operator might be based on the recognition of affective (negative) state derived from non-verbal behaviour that is accessible from CCTV images. Since a firearm is concealed, it has been assumed that human observers would respond to subtle cues which individuals inherently produce whilst carrying a hidden firearm. These cues are believed to be reflected in the body language of those carrying firearms and might be apprehended by observers at a conscious or subconscious level. Another hypothesis is that the ability to recognize the carrier of concealed firearm in the CCTV footage might be affected by other factors, such as the skills in decoding an affective state of others and the viewpoint of observation of the surveillance targets. In order to give a theoretical and experimental basis for these hypotheses the first objective was to examine the extant literature to determine what is known about recognition of affect from non-verbal cues (e.g. facial expressions and body movement), and how it can be applied to the detection of human mal-intent. A second objective was to explore this subject in relation to the detection of concealed firearm carrying through performing a number of experimental studies. The studies employed experts, i.e. CCTV operators and mainly the lay people as participants. Also, various experimental techniques such as questionnaires and eye-tracking registration were used to investigate the topic. The results show that human observers seem to use visual indicators of affective state of surveillance targets to make a decision whether or not the individuals are carrying a concealed firearm. The most prominent cues were face, and upper body of surveillance targets, gait, posture and arm movements. The test of decoding ability did not show sufficient relationship with the ability to detect a concealed firearm bearer. The performance on the task might be view dependent. Further research into this topic will be needed to generate strategies that would support reliable detection of concealed firearm carrying through employing of related affective behavioural cues.

While research suggests that peer influence can lead to increases in undesirable behaviours of adolescents, there has been little focus on the specific mechanisms of influence. A relatively small literature examining social interactions between peers has found that the discussion of rule breaking topics by pairs of boys relates to how much problem behaviour the boys engage in. This research is limited by its reliance on a set of similar samples from a North American population base. This thesis explored the relationship between social interaction and behaviour with sample from New Zealand Aotearoa. Nine pairs of Year 10 boys were recruited primarily from two high schools. A half-hour conversation was video taped for each pair. These conversations were coded on the basis of the nature of the talk between pairs of participants following the coding system proposed by Poe, Dishion, Griesler and Andrews (1990). The coded behaviours were analysed and compared to measures of previous rule breaking behaviours. The duration of rule breaking talk was found to correlate with the level of previous rule breaking behaviour. It was not clear whether the amount of rule breaking talk was related to the amount of laughter following it. Possible explanations are discussed. While generalisations from these results are limited by an unexpectedly small sample size, they show similarity to the previous research findings. The findings, the difficulties in recruitment to the research and the implications of these for future research are discussed.

A showup identification is the presentation of a single suspect to an eyewitness. I used a simulated theft paradigm and subsequent showup identification to examine the effects of stolen property, suspects’ verbal behaviour, and target-presence on eyewitness identification performance. I used a 2 (suspect: innocent, guilty) X 2 (stolen property: present, hidden) X 3 (verbal behaviour: denial with explanation, denial, silence) between-subjects factorial design. Binary logistic regression analysis indicated that both the target and stolen property, independently, and significantly predicted the accuracy of identification decisions. Surprisingly, the presence of stolen property facilitated more accurate identification decisions from eyewitnesses. / UOIT

The idea which has initiated this research came firstly from being a mother of an autistic child and secondly, being an experienced Applied Behaviour Analysis/Applied Verbal Behaviour “ABA/AVB” therapist working with children with autism and related disorders. It has been the researcher ambition for some time to study the effects of implementing an ABA/AVB programme on children with autism, and to report on their performance. The previous and current research has shown the importance of an early intervention in teaching children with autism. However, finding an appropriate intervention for an individual with autism is still debated among parents and professionals. Previous research has highlighted the importance of an ABA programme using the Lovaas model programme in teaching children with autism. No wider research on the AVB model has been conducted. This has led the researcher to investigate this issue further. This research has taken place at “The Autistic Centre” in Beirut. This research is the author’s attempt to study the effects and the impacts of implementing an AVB programme on children with autism. Children’s performance on specific skills will be assessed, evaluated and reported by four parties: 1. The researcher. 2. The independent psychologists. 3. The teachers. 4. The parents. The research used a combination of quantitative and some qualitative methods. The AVB Intervention used for this study was based on multiple baseline design across behaviour, participants and settings. The different use of methods for this research has contributed to the methodology, by using different methods to collect data and involving many parties who can evaluate the children’s performance and report their progress from their own perspectives. The present study demonstrated the efficiency of the AVB programme with ten children with autism. Its effects have been clear on the emergence of speech, collateral gains in social communicative behaviours and decrease of problems behaviours and the decrease of parental level stress. This research also proposed several key suggestions based on the literature review and the research undertaken. It has also contributed to knowledge of the current research regarding the implementation of an AVB Programme as an educational provision and its effects on the child and the parents.

Social knowledge about food was investigated from a social contingency perspective (Guerin, 1994, 1998, 2004), a functional linguistic approach that considers language use having functions both to establish 'facts' in order to control listeners, and to maintain social relationships with words. In Study 1, whether people shared knowledge about food or not was examined. One hundred and fourteen New Zealand and 23 Japanese participants were asked to answer free format questionnaires asking the reasons they and others eat or do not eat particular food items. Those answers were categorised into 8 categories and 30 sub-categories of the knowledge about foods by qualitative content analysis. The results of a cluster analysis of those categories showed that participants used the categories homogeneously although there were some differences between New Zealand and Japanese participants, and that the participants selectively used different types of knowledge according to food items especially when explaining why people do or do not eat some foods. In Study 2, rhetorical features about foods were investigated: (1) numerical quantification rhetoric; (2) narrative use rhetoric; and (3) enumeration rhetoric. Factual statements from a corpus of 118 New Zealand TV commercials and 249 Japanese TV commercials were coded by the categories generated in Study 1. The results showed that the categories of factual statements were selectively used on TV commercials depending on the food types, and related closely to the results of Study 1. The rhetorical strategies appeared in commercials according to the categories of factual statements. When more than one factual statement was presented in a commercial, the relations of the factual statements were usually of a conjunctive form such as quotfact A however fact Bquot or quotfact A moreover fact Bquot, or else the factual statements were presented independently rather than the one statement logically warranting the other. These results suggest that those rhetoric uses and the arrangements of the factual statements were selectively used according to the effectiveness against counter arguments using shared knowledge. Study 3 and Study 4 analysed the functions of shared knowledge about food for maintaining social relationships through investigating the cases in which knowledge about foods presented as the form of 'collaborative talk', which occurs when one speaker completes the preceding saying by another speaker. In Study 3, the collaborative talk as sentence completions of knowledge about food was qualitatively analysed from conversations of 30 to 45 minutes produced by four groups consisting of four or five Japanese participants who were friends. From a social contingency view, the analysis focused on the following conversational properties: (1) who the listener was; (2) the degree of sharing of the information between the speakers; (3) the degree of sharing of the information between the 2nd speaker and the listener; and (4) the disagreement between the 2nd speaker and the listener. The results of Study 3 suggested some possible functions of sentence completions of knowledge about food: (1) the function when the first speaker is the listener may be enhancement of the relationship between the first and the second speakers through showing the second speaker's attention and understanding to the first speaker's utterance, because those sentence completions were often followed by the affirmation or negation by the first speaker; (2) when a third person is the listener, and the first and the second speaker refuted the third person using sentence completion, the function seems to be just establishing 'facts'; and (3) in the cases of 'assisted explaining' (Lerner Takagi, 1999) , the function may be not only establishing 'facts' but also enhancement the relationship between the listener and the speakers, because the constructed 'facts' may work as a kind of conversational 'gift'. In Study 4, five Japanese groups consisting of four participants who were friends were asked to talk about four topics about foods that all participants either agreed or disagreed ('All agree' condition) and four food topics for which there was disagreement about it between participants ('Some agree' condition). When the listeners could not be identified, and the second speakers did not used the utterance-final element such as 'yo ne' that is regarded as having a function of showing agreement between the speakers, the participants used sentence completions more frequently in 'All agree' conditions. The results suggested that the function of this type of sentence completion is not merely establishing 'facts' but also enhancing the relationship between the speakers through showing agreement about the relevant things to the topic. In conclusion, the results of the present studies suggest some possible social contingencies involved both when people get knowledge about food and when they use it.