Rapidly growing research on parental mind-mindedness, a tendency to treat one's young child as a psychological agent and an individual with a mind, internal mental states, and emotions, has demonstrated significant links among parents' mind-mindedness, their parenting, and multiple aspects of children's development. This prospective longitudinal…

Supporting continued involvement of older adults in productive activities is beneficial to individuals and society-at-large. Meaningful measurement of quality engagement in such activities is therefore essential. This article describes revisions to and validation of the Productive Engagement Portfolio--Scenario (PEP-S8) Scales, employing Rasch…

The impact of facial emotion recognition (FER) deficits on facial emotion expression (FEE) during interaction with a novel computerized system was investigated in children with ASD (n = 20), in comparison to typically developing (TD) peers (n = 20). Although there was not clear evidence of impaired FEE, children with ASD showed more atypical FEE.…

Background: Research into teacher emotion has attracted increasing attention in the last two decades. The relevance of teacher emotion in education has been highlighted. However, evidence of how teacher emotions impact their teaching approaches is rather limited. Aims: This study investigated the relationship between two self-report instruments --…

The present study sought to investigate perceptions of stress and coping among public school principals. School principals are daily called upon to make decisions regarding a range of unscripted events. The position can be stressful, and stress is known to interfere with sound decision making. It was predicted that present samples of school…

Gesture plays an important role in early language development, as how parents respond to their children's gestures may help to facilitate language acquisition. Less is known about whether parental responses facilitate language learning later in childhood and whether responses vary depending on children's language ability. This study explored…

Effective feedback plays a great role in the teaching-learning process and learners' performance. This becomes possible when teachers have positive perception regarding feedback and practice it very well. Therefore, the purpose of the study was to assess primary schools teachers' perception and practice of feedback. To achieve this purpose,…

School psychologists are encouraged to establish family-school partnerships with culturally and linguistically diverse families across the spectrum of child development. Partnerships and collaborations have been described in prior literature as bidirectional, nonhierarchical relationships between families and schools, expanding on the more…

The present study evaluated the efficacy of a set of procedures for bringing tact extensions of abstract tactile properties under stimulus control. Two participants with disabilities who communicated via a picture-based communication system received reinforcement for tacts of tactile properties of four wet/dry and four hard/soft stimuli. Test…

Indiscriminate (i.e., carless, random, insufficient effort) responses, commonly believed to weaken effect sizes and produce Type II errors, can inflate effect sizes and potentially produce Type I errors where a supposedly significant result is actually artifactual. We demonstrate how indiscriminate responses can produce spuriously high…

Scores estimated from multidimensional item response theory (IRT) models are not necessarily comparable across dimensions. In this article, the concept of aligned dimensions is formalized in the context of Rasch models, and two methods are described--delta dimensional alignment (DDA) and logistic regression alignment (LRA)--to transform estimated…

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is more prevalent in males than females. Previous research indicates females camouflage ASD symptoms more than males, potentially contributing to the difference in prevalence. This study investigated sex/gender differences in behavioral phenotypes in 17 males and 11 females with ASD, as well camouflaging in ASD, in…

Emotional understanding plays an important role in the physical and mental health of children. To determine whether the development of emotional understanding is delayed in children with a cochlear implant (CI), 30 children with a CI and 30 matched children with typical hearing aged between 3 and 9 years old completed three tasks (facial…

Previous research has shown attentional biases in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) when processing distressing information. This study examined these attentional patterns as a function of the type of stimulus (scenes and faces) and the stimulus valence (happy, sad, threatening, neutral) using a within-subject design. A dot-probe was…

Instructive feedback (IF) is a procedure in which secondary targets are presented to a learner during instruction for primary skills. Previous research has demonstrated that students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may acquire at least a portion of skills presented via IF. Although it is a promising instructional methodology for learners with…