Humility,Forgiveness, and Emerging Adult Female Romantic Relationships

Among a sample of emerging adult females (N = 152) we empirically examined the role of humility and forgiveness in romantic relationships. We specifically tested a model linking perceived humility to relationship satisfaction with self‐forgiveness and partner‐forgiveness. Participants in a romantic relationship completed measures of self‐reported humility, self‐forgiveness, partner‐forgiveness, and relationship satisfaction. Serial mediation analyses were conducted using path analysis to test the following sequence, humility self‐forgiveness partner‐forgiveness relationship satisfaction. Findings indicate that humility was related to relationship satisfaction via a serially mediated path of self‐forgiveness and partner‐forgiveness, which was not reducible to impression management. We consider implications for research and clinical practice.     

Ecological Correlates of Child Maltreatment: Similarities and Differences Between Child Fatality and Nonfatality Cases

The rate of fatal child maltreatment is increasing, and differentiating between risk factors for fatal as opposed to nonfatal maltreatment is essential to developing prevention programs. This exploratory retrospective study utilizes case record analysis to examine four categories of correlates for child maltreatment: 1) parent/caregiver factors, 2) child factors, 3) environmental/situational factors, and 4) maltreatment incident factors. Thirty-eight fatality cases are compared to a matched group of nonfatality cases to determine which factors are related to fatality in a large Southwestern metropolitan area. The results provide a profile of characteristics that may place a child at higher risk of fatal maltreatment.     

Assessing the Effects of Observational Conditioning and Response-Contingent Pairing on the Vocalizations of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often display impairments in communication, such as limited echoic behavior, few vocal-verbal responses, and a lack of functional communication. One potential way to foster the acquisition of vocal responses in individuals with disabilities is by conditioning vocalizations as reinforcers. Conditioning procedures include stimulus–stimulus pairing, response-contingent pairing (RCP), operant discrimination training, and observational conditioning (OC). However, previous research has not evaluated whether OC can be used to condition vocalizations as reinforcers. The current study assessed whether two conditioning procedures, RCP and OC, were effective in conditioning vocalizations as a reinforcer and also evaluated their effect on the rate of vocalizations. Participants included three children with ASD, ages 5–10 years old. During the conditioning phase, rates of vocalizations during the RCP and OC conditions and a control condition were compared within an adapted alternating-treatments design. Reinforcer assessments were completed in a multielement design, pre- and postconditioning, to assess whether the target vocalizations acquired reinforcing properties. A conditioning effect and an increase in the rate of vocalizations were observed for two of the three participants; however, the conditioning effect was minor for one participant. Overall, the results of this study indicate both the RCP and OC procedures may be beneficial in increasing vocalizations for some children and could be incorporated into clinical programs and further explored in future research.     

Information and communications technology use in rural child welfare work

This study explores the impact of information and communications technology (ICT) use on rural child welfare practice using a technology-in-practice framework to derive the social structures that are instantiated by rural child welfare workers (CWWs) and to examine their agency as actors. ICT use was tracked, and interviews were conducted with rural CWWs who work with children and families to gain an understanding of and describe their day-to-day ICT use at the practice level. Findings demonstrate that CWWs enact social structures along four frames: bureaucratic structure, family centricity, ICT context and information–documentation culture. In terms of agency, CWWs not only are constrained by but also exert some influence on the social structures they enact through facilities (material resources), norms and interpretive schemes. These findings have implications for how ICT can be used to facilitate the CWW–client relationship and the need in rural areas for increased infrastructure to support CWWs.