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PubMed2006

Joint attention and symbolic play in young children with autism: a randomized controlled intervention study.

BACKGROUND: Delays and deficits in joint attention and symbolic play constitute two important developmental problems in young children with autism. These areas of deficit have been well studied in autism but have rarely been the focus of treatment efforts (see Kasari, Freeman, & Paparella, 2001). In this study, we examine the efficacy of targeted interventions of joint attention and symbolic play. METHODS: Participants were 58 children with autism aged 3 and 4 years (46 boys). Children were randomized to a joint attention intervention, a symbolic play intervention, or control group. Interventions were conducted 30 minutes daily for 5-6 weeks. Both structured assessments of joint attention and play skills and mother-child interactions were collected pre and post intervention by independent assessors. RESULTS: Results indicate that both intervention groups improved significantly over the control group on certain behaviors. Children in the joint attention intervention initiated significantly more showing and responsiveness to joint attention on the structured joint attention assessment and more child-initiated joint attention in the mother-child interaction. The children in the play group showed more diverse types of symbolic play in interaction with their mothers and higher play levels on both the play assessment and in interaction with their mothers. CONCLUSIONS: This randomized controlled trial provides promising data on the specificity and generalizability of joint attention and play interventions for young children with autism. Future studies need to examine the long-term effects of these early interventions on children's development.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

The application of grounded theory and symbolic interactionism.

This paper describes the methodological and theoretical context and underpinnings of a study that examined community psychiatric nurses' work with family caregivers of older people with depression. The study used grounded theory research methods, with its theoretical foundations drawn from symbolic interactionism. The aims of the study were to describe and conceptualize the processes involved when community nurses work and interact with family caregivers and to develop an explanatory theory of these processes. This paper begins with an explanation of the rationale for using grounded theory as the method of choice, followed by a discussion of the theoretical underpinnings of the study, including a brief summary of the nature and origins of symbolic interactionism. Key premises of symbolic interactionism regarded as central to the study are outlined and an analytical overview of the grounded theory method is provided. The paper concludes with a commentary on some of the issues and debates in the use of grounded theory in nursing research. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a methodical and critical review of symbolic interactionism and grounded theory that can help readers, particularly those who are intending to use grounded theory, better understand the processes involved in applying this method to their research.

Caregivers↗
PubMed2005

The nonconscious influence of religious symbols in motivated performance situations.

Anthropological, sociological, and psychological theories suggest that religious symbols should influence motivational processes during performance of goal-relevant tasks. In two experiments, positive and negative religious (Christian) symbols were presented outside of participants' conscious awareness. These symbols influenced cardiovascular responses consistent with challenge and threat states during a subsequent speech task, particularly when the speech topic concerned participants' mortality, and only for Christian participants; similar images lacking Christian meaning were not influential. Results suggested that these effects were due to the learned meaning of the symbols and point to the importance of religion as a coping resource.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2007

A pilot study of the effects of a social-pragmatic intervention on the communication and symbolic play of children with autism.

The acquisition of social communication skills is a major challenge faced by children with autism. This pilot study investigated the effects of the Stronger Families Project, a social-pragmatic intervention, on the communication and symbolic abilities of 16 children aged 2-4 years with autism. Standardized measures of the child's communication and symbolic behaviour were conducted by independent observers at a university clinic pre and post-intervention, and parents were interviewed to determine the impact of variables such as maternal stress and competence on the child's social communication. Changes in some communication and symbolic behaviours occurred following the Stronger Families Project intervention according to parent report. However, improvements based on ratings by independent observers were not significant. Results are discussed in relation to the assessment of changes in the social communication and symbolic play of children with autism following intervention using clinical observation and parent report.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed2005

Symbolization and the good object.

Some patients struggle with the acceptance of, connection to, or identification with a good object who provides a containment-symbolization function. This is manifested as a standoff, a resistance, and a denial of the good object and, therefore, of the symbolization process that is part of healthy development. This is usually due to troubled family histories and a destructive projective identification process. The ego defensively blocks acknowledgment of any symbolizing capacity within the self and within the maternal object out of envy, fear of rejection, and dread of persecution. Destruction of symbolization and the experience of goodness within the self or in the object provides an artificial respite from the threat of annihilation, yet quickly brings on even greater levels of internal chaos and anxiety. Case material is used to illustrate these points.

Aggression↗
PubMedDate not supplied

[Birth center, symbols and assistance-related principles].

UNLABELLED: The first Birth Center of the Family Health Program has specific symbols. The purpose was the identification of symbols that permeate the ideas, beliefs, values, practices, and principles that guide the assistance given at the Birth Center. Ethnography was the research method; thematic oral history was the resource employed to interview obstetric nurses in the House. RESULTS: The House has the symbolic value of innovation in assisted deliveries. Humanized care to pregnant women is the principle that guide practices. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS: The symbols of the House and the care practices developed constitute a reference to the other birth centers being proposed in Brazil, and should be known by obstetrical nurses.

Birthing Centers↗
PubMed2000

Implications of the symbol figure representations: information from the direction and spatial location used by Japanese students.

Meanings of physical distance, spatial location, and direction of symbolic figure in the Doll Location Test were investigated with 283 normal college students in Japan. They were asked to indicate eight symbolic figures of hypothetical people such as reliable father, unreliable mother on a recording sheet. The physical dyadic distance from the self, spatial location, and direction of symbolic figures were analyzed. Positive persons were placed twice as close as a negative person. Analysis of direction showed that more than 90% of the positive people were represented in either the same direction as or facing self, whereas a negative person was represented either in the opposite or in an unrelated direction from the self. Spatial location of the symbolic figures did not yield evaluative values.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

Special symbols in early female oedipal development: fantasies of folds and spaces, protuberances and concavities.

The authors present three examples, from the observation of pre-latency girls, of the use of anatomic regions for symbolic purposes. In the two cases, the first interdigital fold became the locus for castration anxiety; and in the other, the laryngeal prominence and jugular notch served as the focus for symbolic displacement of psychosexual concerns. The employment of these particular symbols, to the best of the authors' knowledge, has not been reported previously in the literature. The authors conclude by calling for further investigation into the relationship between the processes involved in such symbol-formation and those that occur in neurosogenesis.

Anxiety, Castration↗
PubMed1991

Symbolic functioning in very young children: understanding of pictures and models.

Before one can understand or use any symbol, one must first realize that it is a symbol, that is, that it stands for or represents something other than itself. This article reports 4 studies investigating very young children's understanding of 2 different kinds of symbolic stimuli--scale models and pictures. The data replicate previous findings that 2.5-year-old children have great difficulty appreciating the relation between a scale model and the larger space it represents, but that they very readily appreciate the relation between a picture and its referent. This result is interpreted in terms of the dual orientation hypothesis. Models are difficult for young children because they require a dual representation--a child must think about a model both as an object itself and as a representation of something else. Because pictures are not salient as real objects, they do not require a dual representation. Several kinds of evidence supporting the dual orientation hypothesis are presented. An additional result was the occurrence of a transfer effect: Prior experience with a picture task led to better performance on a subsequent model task. This finding suggests that experience with a symbolic medium they understand can help young children figure out a different, unfamilar medium that they would otherwise not understand.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1988

Symbolic gesturing in normal infants.

2 studies are presented that document the spontaneous development by normal infants of nonverbal gestures to symbolically represent objects, needs, states, and qualities. These symbolic gestures are shown to be a typical rather than rare phenomenon of early development and to function in ways similar to early verbal symbols. Indeed, the case is made that these gestures and early words are both representative of common underlying mechanisms, in particular, the recognition that things have names. In the first study, mothers of 38 17-month-old infants were interviewed in regard to their infants' verbal and nonverbal development. The second study, designed to document with greater precision the findings of the interview study, is a longitudinal study of 16 infants who were followed from 11 to 24 months. Both studies provide evidence that symbolic gestures tend to develop in tandem with the child's early words, that girls tend to rely more heavily than boys on such gestures, that structured parent-child interactions are important to the development of these gestures, that the gestures tend to depict the function rather than the form of objects, and that the use of gestural labels is positively related to verbal vocabulary development. Implications of these findings for theories of language development and for speech pathology are discussed.

Child Development↗
PubMed1994

[Symbolic process in intellectual activities of so-called psychotic adolescents].

Based on his experience as psychopedagogue in a special education facility for adolescents with psychopathological disturbances, the author develops the idea that the learning difficulties cannot be reduced to intellectual deficits due to constitutional causes or traumatic experiences. The observation and analysis of the difficulties suggest that symbolization processes are deeply involved. This research is based on the assumption that symbolization processes of so-called psychotic adolescents can be assessed through various psychological techniques: the Borel-Maisonny language test, tests derived from those of Meljac on the knowledge and spontaneous use of numbers, and the EDEI (Differential scales of intellectual efficiency) by Perron-Borelli. Symbolization is defined in reference to theoretical approaches along three differentiated modes: the long option, the confused option and the short option. Different modalities of symbolization, the conceptual, the referential and the confused, are described and analyzed throughout the performances of the subjects, utilizing a differential and clinical method.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1977

[Structure of the use of symbols in schizophrenic language].

The structure of the use of symbols in schizophrenia is examined, based on a recorded text spoken by a 35-year-old schizophrenic teacher (female). At specific points in this text, symbolic usage can be determined. The structural analysis illustrates a schizophrenic alteration which exists in each case through the substitution of a secondary meaning for a primary one. This structure is present in all cases. (In addition, the text also contains a symbol stemming from folk tradition.) This structure is identical with the structure of linguistic alteration in schizophrenics as well as that of the structure of schizophrenic delusions. This present study concentrates on the formal analysis of the use of symbols and does not present a close analysis of the content.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Waiting to use a symbol: the effects of delay on children's use of models.

To use a symbol to solve a problem, children must achieve representational insight; they must realize that the symbol stands for its referent. Moreover, they must keep this relation in mind as they attempt to use the symbol. The present studies investigated the achievement and maintenance of representational insight. 3-year-olds were asked to use a scale model of a room to find a toy hidden in the room. In Study 1a, children first watched as a small toy was hidden in the model. They then waited either 20 sec, 2 min, or 5 min before attempting to find a similar, larger toy that was hidden in the corresponding place in the room. All children experienced all delay intervals; three groups experienced the delays in different orders. There was a dramatic effect of delay order. The children who experienced the 20-sec delay on their first trial generally performed well throughout the 6 trials, but the children who experienced a 5-min delay first almost always failed to find the toy in the room even on subsequent trials with shorter delays. Additional studies revealed that the negative effects of the initial long delay could be overcome by providing reminders of the model and its relevance (Studies 2 and 3) or giving children prior experience in using the model (Study 4). The results indicate that keeping a symbol-referent relation in mind can be difficult for 3.0-year-old children. This research is discussed in terms of the importance of maintaining representational insight.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Development of an expert system for haemodynamic monitoring: computerized symbolization of on-line monitoring data.

The development of intelligent alarm systems for intensive care benefits from the transformation of data from a quantitative to a qualitative mode. We constructed a computerized algorithm for the symbolization of on-line monitoring data of heart rate, systemic arterial, pulmonary arterial and central venous pressures, as well as central and peripheral temperatures. We tested the ability of the algorithm to symbolize the levels of the parameters and to detect significant long-term trends in ten adult patients admitted to the intensive care unit after cardiac surgery. The estimations of an experienced clinician were taken as the 'gold standard'. The symbolization of the levels of the monitored parameters was in agreement with the clinician in 99.4% of the estimations. The algorithm detected 93.0% of the trends correctly and also estimated their reliability. The clinician considered its estimations to be accurate in 96.2% of cases. On the other hand, the clinician considered unreliable 2.4% of all the trends detected and classified as reliable by the algorithm. The computerized algorithm for the symbolization of real-time monitoring data performed efficiently enough for its further use in expert systems for intelligent monitoring.

Algorithms↗
PubMed2006

Complexity analysis of stride interval time series by threshold dependent symbolic entropy.

The stride interval of human gait fluctuates in complex fashion. It reflects the rhythm of the locomotor system. The temporal fluctuations in the stride interval provide us a non-invasive technique to evaluate the effects of neurological impairments on gait and its changes with age and disease. In this paper, we have used threshold dependent symbolic entropy, which is based on symbolic nonlinear time series analysis to study complexity of gait of control and neurodegenerative disease subjects. Symbolic entropy characterizes quantitatively the complexity even in time series having relatively few data points. We have calculated normalized corrected Shannon entropy (NCSE) of symbolic sequences extracted from stride interval time series. This measure of complexity showed significant difference between control and neurodegenerative disease subjects for a certain range of thresholds. We have also investigated complexity of physiological signal and randomized noisy data. In the study, we have found that the complexity of physiological signal was higher than that of random signals at short threshold values.

Biological Clocks↗
PubMed2005

Society's symbolic order and political trials: toward sacrificing the self for the "Big Other".

The need to establish a borderline between legitimate and illegitimate political trial is one of the central societal discourses. In this paper the author claims that the issues are complex and that a political trial can remain legitimate as long as it is not dealing with a confrontation with the symbolic order on which the society (and the court itself) is founded and as long as the subject (or action) it is dealing with does not threaten the symbolic order's (or the "Big Other") existence. When the symbolic order's existence is in danger, the court is bound to participate in an act of "sacrifice" that is intended to protect the "order." The author uses Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the "Big Other" (and its development to ideological-political terms) in examining three categories of sacrifice. Through these categories the author claims that in extreme cases of confrontation with the existence of the symbolic order, the court cannot remain objective and it would be difficult to justify the trial as legitimate (especially in historical perspective).

Criminal Law↗
PubMed1993

Answering the connectionist challenge: a symbolic model of learning the past tenses of English verbs.

Supporters of eliminative connectionism have argued for a pattern association-based explanation of language learning and language processing. They deny that explicit rules and symbolic representations play any role in language processing and cognition in general. Their argument is based to a large extent on two artificial neural network (ANN) models that are claimed to be able to learn the past tenses of English verbs (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986, Parallel distributed processing, Vol. 2, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; MacWhinney & Leinbach, 1991, Cognition, 40, 121-157). In this article we critically review Rumelhart and McClelland's as well as MacWhinney and Leinbach's ANN models and conclude that they do not succeed in the assigned task of learning the past tenses of English verbs. In order to answer their challenge to the symbolic processing approach, we present our symbolic pattern associator (SPA)-a general-purpose pattern associator that can learn to associate arbitrary discrete patterns. We carried out several experiments with the SPA using the same set of verbs that was used in MacWhinney and Leinbach's simulation with more realistic training and testing procedures. The SPA outperformed the connectionist models by a wide margin in the accuracy of learning, and successful inductive generalizations to unseen verbs. Our SPA has very natural and psychologically realistic explanations to many psychological effects such as U-shaped learning curve, and is much closer to human subjects in predicting past tense of the pseudo-verbs. In contrast to ANNs, whose internal representations are entirely opaque, the SPA can represent the acquired knowledge in the form of production rules that allow for further higher-level processing and integration, resulting in linguistically realistic associative templates for irregular verbs and production rules for regular verbs. In the light of these findings, we conclude that eliminative connectionists' vision of cognition as simple pattern association and pattern recognition without symbolic representation is inadequate. Pattern association as such does not imply rule-less or cue-based models of language acquisition or of human learning in general.

Cognition↗
PubMed1985

Symbolic play and early communication development in hearing-impaired children.

This study investigated the relationship between symbolic play and language performance for young hearing-impaired children. Subjects included 20 hearing-impaired youngsters ranging in age from 38 months to 69 months. The children were placed in two ordinal communication groups. Placement in one of the communication levels was dependent upon information concerning the number of spontaneous expressive communication units the child produced. The experimental task consisted of three predetermined play themes in which the child previously displayed functional play. A nonconventional item was then included, and the play behaviors were observed for the occurrence of symbolic play under a spontaneous or modeled condition. The results indicate a significant difference in symbolic play between the two ordinal communication levels. Additionally, there was a strong positive relationship observed between the variables of symbolic play and early communication development.

Child, Preschool↗