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Biomedical subjects

M A McEvoy

Publications and source records attributed to M A McEvoy.

7 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Effects of cumulative prenatal substance exposure and environmental risks on children's developmental trajectories.

Examined the effects of cumulative prenatal substance exposure and cumulative environmental risk on the developmental trajectories of 278 infants, toddlers, and preschool children. Results indicated that both cumulative risk indexes were significantly correlated. Results also indicated that both indexes were related to decrements in developmental trajectories (intercept and slope) from 3 to 57 months of age. Both prenatal exposure and environmental risk added unique variance to the prediction of developmental level and rate of growth when entered after covariates (i.e., birth weight and sex). However, across a number of models with and without covariates, environmental risk accounted for more variance in developmental trajectories than did prenatal exposure. Implications are discussed.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1994

Effects of high-probability requests on the social interactions of young children with severe disabilities.

High-probability requests were used to increase social interactions in 3 young boys with severe disabilities who had been identified as severely socially withdrawn. A multiple baseline design across participants was used to evaluate the effects of high-probability request intervention on (a) social initiations, (b) social responses, (c) continued interactions, and (d) performance of high- and low-probability requests. The students were observed in a second setting to examine generalization effects across peers who did not participate in the training sequence and settings. The results demonstrated that the high-probability requests increased the students' responsiveness to low-probability requests to initiate social behavior. Increases were also found in (a) unprompted initiations and extended interactions to the training peers, (b) unprompted initiations and extended interactions to peers who were not involved in the training procedure, and (c) generalized unprompted initiations and interactions in a second nontraining setting. The students maintained increased levels of initiations and interactions after all prompts were removed from both the training and nontraining settings.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1993

Assessing and enhancing generalization and social validity of social-skills interventions with children and adolescents.

Generalization and social validity are necessary aspects of any applied behavior analytic endeavor. They are especially critical to social-skills training research and practice. Investigators have demonstrated the effectiveness of various learning theory-based interventions in teaching social skills to and increasing peer interactions of children with and without disabilities. However, development of a technology for reliably transferring these changes across different situations or ensuring their persistence over time has proven to be more problematic. From both a conceptual and empirical standpoint, this article reviews progress in and barriers to assessing and enhancing generality of social behavior change and its relationship to social validity. If progress is to be made, then it will be necessary to (a) distinguish between generalization and generality in developing and evaluating social-skills interventions; (b) expand the concept of social validity to give more emphasis to objective measurement of social skills, interventions, and outcomes; and (c) pursue a systematic analysis of generality- and durability-programming tactics.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1988

Promoting autistic children's peer interaction in an integrated early childhood setting using affection activities.

Group affection activities were used to increase the interaction of three autistic children with their nonhandicapped peers in an integrated early childhood setting. Peer interaction increased during free play when the affection activities were conducted, but not when similar activities without the affection component were used. This interaction included initiations by both the autistic and nonhandicapped children, with reciprocal interactions occurring more frequently with nonhandicapped peers who had participated in the affection activities.

Affect↗
PubMed1987

Increasing social interactions of severely handicapped autistic children.

A peer-initiation training procedure was implemented across multiple peer trainers to investigate social interactions between severely withdrawn autistic children and their nonhandicapped peers. For one subject, substantial increases in spontaneous interactions with training and nontraining peers occurred after the peer-initiation procedure was applied across two training exemplars. Spontaneous social interactions continued even after the training procedure was removed. Although experimental control was established with the second subject during training, spontaneous interactions during nontraining periods were primarily with training peers. The results contribute to an emerging data base on the social interactions of autistic and severely withdrawn handicapped children and on peer-initiation training procedures.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1984

Regular- and special-education teachers' judgments about mentally retarded children in an integrated setting.

A three-way design was used to determine whether teachers' judgments about mentally retarded children would be related to characteristics of the children, characteristics of the teacher, and/or characteristics of an integrated free-play setting. Independent variables were integration ratio, area of teacher's specialization, and target child. The dependent variable was teachers' judgments about handicapped children in an integrated setting. Subjects were 15 regular-education teachers and 15 special-education teachers who taught at the primary school level. Judgment ratings by regular-education teachers depended both on the characteristics of the target child and the integration ratio in the free-play activity. Special-education teachers' judgments also were influenced by characteristics of the child observed but not the integration ratio.

Attitude↗