Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Experimental Analysis of Behavior Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Western Washington University

2010

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Experimental Analysis of Behavior

The Relationship Between Parental Conflict And Family Interactions: The Role Of Emotional Security And Parenting Behaviors, Nichole Stettler Jan 2010

The Relationship Between Parental Conflict And Family Interactions: The Role Of Emotional Security And Parenting Behaviors, Nichole Stettler

WWU Graduate School Collection

Interparental conflict (IPC) is an inevitable part of family life which has been linked to child adjustment. Two theories have been proposed to explain this relationship. The emotional security hypothesis represents a direct path by which IPC affects children by threatening their sense of felt security in the interparental relationship. In contrast, the spillover hypothesis suggests that IPC affects children indirectly by influencing parenting practices. The current study extends previous research by examining both of these pathways in families with infants, as well as testing how IPC may contribute to family outcomes. Seventy-four two-parent families of 6- to 14- month-old …


Emotion Processing In High-Functioning Autistic Children: A Priming Task, Ashley E. Ruggles Jan 2010

Emotion Processing In High-Functioning Autistic Children: A Priming Task, Ashley E. Ruggles

WWU Graduate School Collection

Although high-functioning autistic individuals demonstrate normative intelligence, profound deficits in social processing exist. Understanding emotions in faces can be particularly difficult for autistic individuals. In the present research a priming task was used to uncover the speed and strength of association between emotional faces and emotional words. Autistic individuals are often capable of explicitly recognizing emotion in faces but still demonstrate difficulty interpreting emotional situations. In the current study, emotional words were primed by quickly presented matching or mismatching emotional faces. This may be more similar to naturalistic social interactions in which facial expressions change quickly. The aim was to …


Five-Choice Serial Reaction Time Task Performance Following Catecholamine Depletion Of Rat Medial Prefrontal Cortex: Implications For Attention Deficit In Schizophrenia, Rabia V. Magnusson Jan 2010

Five-Choice Serial Reaction Time Task Performance Following Catecholamine Depletion Of Rat Medial Prefrontal Cortex: Implications For Attention Deficit In Schizophrenia, Rabia V. Magnusson

WWU Graduate School Collection

The symptoms of schizophrenia are highly variable and include a variety of cognitive deficits, including attentional deficit. These cognitive deficits may involve dopamine (DA) underactivity in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) (Weinberger, Egan, Bertolino, Callicott, Mattay, Lipska, et al., 2001). The purpose of this thesis was to test the hypothesis that reduced DA in the PFC alters attention by examining the effects of reduced DA in the medial PFC (mPFC) of rats on a sustained attention task. Rats in the DA-lesioned group were administered 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) in the mPFC. Following 6-OHDA administration, rats in the DA-lesioned and shamlesioned group were trained …


Effects Of Parental Depressive Symptoms And Marital Discord On Parental Functioning And Parent-Infant Relationships, Clare R. White Jan 2010

Effects Of Parental Depressive Symptoms And Marital Discord On Parental Functioning And Parent-Infant Relationships, Clare R. White

WWU Graduate School Collection

Mothers' and fathers' depressive symptoms were examined as predictors of parentally reported parenting distress, infant difficulty, and dysfunctional parent-infant interactions within an actor-partner interdependence model approach (Cook & Kenny, 2005). Observed marital conflict styles were examined as mediators of associations. A community sample of 72 couples participated with their 6-14 month old infants. Path analyses using EQS (Bentler, 2005) revealed that mothers' and fathers' depressive symptoms were significantly associated with increased parenting distress. Mothers' and fathers' parenting distress was subsequently associated with increases in infant difficulty. Fathers' depressive symptoms predicted greater dysfunctional father-infant interactions, and additionally predicted greater dysfunctional mother-infant …