Thomas Keenan

A Self-Regulation Model of the Sexual Offense Process

Models of the offense chain or relapse process provide a description of the cognitive, behavioral, motivational, and contextual factors associated with a sexual offense. In a sense these micromodels represent the touchstone of more general theories of sexual offending and serve to identify possible clinical phenomena that subsequent theory sets out to explain. In this paper we present a self-regulatory model of the offense process that we suggest can integrate existing theoretical work in the area. We first briefly comment on and critique a number of influential models of the sexual offense chain, then review the literature on the self-regulation of behavior. Following this we formulate a self-regulatory model of the offense process based on the idea that there are three core offense pathways: underregulation, misregulation, and intact regulation. We then briefly discuss the models theoretical and clinical implications.

Working memory and children's developing understanding of mind

Abstract Recent work on the mechanisms underlying childrens developing theories of mind have identified information-processing capacity as a factor that contributes to childrens developing understanding of false belief (Davis & Pratt, 1995). One hundred children 3 to 5 years of age were given a set of false belief tasks and a measure of working memory. A major goal of the study was to replicate the findings of Davis and Pratt using a wider set of false belief tasks and a different measure of working memory. The present study tested the hypothesis that working memory would predict childrens performance on the false belief tasks. A hierarchical regression analysis showed that, when the effects of age were controlled for, working memory accounted for 7.4% of the variance in childrens false belief scores. The findings support those of Davis and Pratt, and extend them through the use of another measure of working memory. It is concluded that, while the findings indicate a role for working memory in the dev...

Psychosocial adjustment and physical health of children living with maternal chronic pain

Aim:  There is limited research examining the functioning of children living with parental chronic pain and illness. The aim of this study was to examine the psychosocial adjustment and physical health of children living with a mother experiencing chronic pain.

Do young children use echoic information in their comprehension of sarcastic speech? A test of echoic mention theory

This study sets out to provide a test of echoic mention theory, which predicts that irony and sarcasm are most easily comprehended by a listener when the speaker explicitly ‘echoes’ a previous utterance or some shared norm rather than when the speaker only implicitly alludes to the same information. Children aged 6-10 years were given stories containing either a sarcastic comment that explicitly echoed an earlier remark, a sarcastic comment that only implicitly alluded to an earlier remark, or a literal comment from a speaker. Half of the children heard the stories presented with a sarcastic intonation and half heard the stories presented with an uninflected intonation. The results of the study showed that when vocal intonation was absent, children comprehended explicit stories better than implicit stories. The findings suggest that echoic mention theory is a useful theory for describing childrens developing comprehension of sarcastic speech, but is only one of many factors that play a role in the comprehension process.

Parents with chronic pain: are children equally affected by fathers as mothers in pain? A pilot study

This study compared the psychological and physical functioning of 12 children in each of three groups: mothers with chronic pain, fathers with chronic pain and a control, pain-free parents. Parents completed a number of questionnaires including the RAND-36 Health Status Inventory, a child health scale and the Child Behavior Checklist. Children completed the Revised Child Manifest Anxiety Scale and a scale measuring pain and sickness behaviour. Children of mothers with chronic pain reported the most physical and psychological problems, followed by children of fathers with chronic pain and children from the control group. Pain reports between children and parents with chronic pain were significantly correlated, suggesting support for a familial pain model. Social learning may explain the concordance between parent and child health in families experiencing parental chronic pain.

Negative affect predicts performance on an object permanence task

Recent research has demonstrated a strong connection between an infant’s ability to regulate their affective states and their attentional processes. In particular, negative affect can disrupt attention to the environment. In the object permanence literature, attention has been implicated as a factor in performance on the A-not-B task, yet factors that may disrupt attention, such as negative affect, have been largely ignored as a possible factor which predicts correct search. In the present study, we examined the effects of negative affect and attention on correct search performance for a sample of 36 9-month-old infants in a two location A-not-B task with a 5-second delay between hiding and search. Infants’ levels of negative affect and attention to the task were coded on the third A trial of the A-not-B task. It was predicted that infants who searched incorrectly on the B trial would show high levels of negative affect and low levels of attention whereas infants who searched correctly would show the opposite pattern and furthermore, that negative affect would mediate the association between attention and search performance. The results of the study supported the hypotheses and are taken as indicating the importance of emotioncognition interactions in the development of cognitive competence.

Children’s performance on a false-belief task is impaired by activation of an evolutionarily-canalized response system

We examine whether childrens performance on a false-belief task is impaired by task content that activates an early-developing, prepotent motivational system: predator-avoidance. In two studies (N = 46 and N = 37), children aged 3-4 years completed variants of a false-belief task that involved predator-avoidance, playmate-avoidance, prey-seeking, and playmate-seeking, respectively. The proportion of correct answers on the playmate-avoidance task (Study 1: 52%; Study 2: 51%) was significantly greater than the proportion of correct answers on the analogous predator-avoidance task (Study 1: 28%; Study 2: 22%). This difference was not an artifact of children generally performing better on playmate stories than on predator-prey stories. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that activation of the predator-avoidance system generates prepotent response patterns that pre-empt full consideration of the mental states of the prey characters in false-belief stories.

How do children behave when they distribute rewards from task participation

Childrens distributional justice was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, pairs of children played a game in which they guessed which card the experimenter would turn up next. We investigated the effect of age (5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds), gender, country (Indonesia or New Zealand), and instructional set on how the children distributed the sweets at the conclusion of the game. Children usually distributed equally, but five-year-olds often distributed according to neither equity nor equality. All the 7- and 9-year-olds applied the same distribution principle over two rounds of the game. In Experiment 2, many of the same children made an allocation preference in response to a hypothetical scenario. Older children, in particular, often showed differences between their allocation in this experiment and their behaviour in Experiment 1. Overall, Damons (1975) account of childrens ideas of distributional justice held up well as a description of the childrens actual behaviour in our experiments.