Provisioning food given by visitors to alpha-male long-tailed macaques at recreation forest, all of them are halal

The long-tailed macaque (Macaca fascicularis Raffles, 1821) is a non-human primate (NHP) species with social status in its group. Macaca fascicularis living in groups and social castes. Alpha males lead their group. Alpha males will have greater access to food than individuals with lower social castes. The content of feed eaten by animals, of course, will affect health. Various biological processes occur, from the food eaten by animals to affect the health of human life. If the food eaten is toxic, it will be hazardous to the animal's metabolism for life. According to a Muslim perspective, how much better food can be eaten is included in Halal products. Including, in this case, food ingredients for feed, if it comes from ingredients that are included in the halal category, this will provide animal welfare. This study seeks to explain how visitors' feed types (provisioning food) to alpha-male Macaca fascicularis at Mbah Agung Karangbanar Recreation Forest, Banyumas, Central Java, Indonesia. This study used behavioral coding to measure the frequency and quantity of eating behavior for ten days based on visitor feeding. The remainder of the provisioning food found is recorded as data on the type of provisioning food. Based on the study results, the alpha-male was noted to eat provisioning food such as peanuts, bananas, sweet potatoes, snacks, and foods mixed with soy sauce given by visitors. All of them are halal because they eat visitors every time they come to a tourist location. Alpha-male was noted to have no interest in the carcasses found, so they did not eat them.

Developing Behavioral Coding to Understand Family Communication Breakdown in Dementia Care

Communication breakdown is a challenge for family caregivers of persons living with dementia. We adapted established theory and scales for computer-assisted behavioral coding to characterize caregiver communication for a secondary analysis. We developed verbal, nonverbal, and breakdown coding schemes and established reliability (κ > .85). Within the 221 family caregiving videos analyzed, 55% of exchanges were interactive, 30% were silence, 4% consisted of talking to self or others, and 8% included a breakdown. An average of 2.4 ( SD = 1.9) breakdowns occurred per observation and were successfully resolved 85% of the time, with 31% being resolved most successfully following only one flag and repair strategy. Caregivers were the primary speakers (67%); their communication preceded most breakdown (65%), and they primarily initiated the repairs after a breakdown (70%). Common repair strategies included clarifications (31%), asking questions (24%), and repeating information (24%). Associations between communication strategies and repair success will provide evidence for caregiver training.

Verbal Communication in Dementia Family Caregiving: Using the VNVIS-CG Scale for In-Home Video Observations

Communication is fundamental for dementia care and identifying communication behaviors is key to identifying strategies that facilitate or impede communication. To measure caregiver verbal communication, we adapted the Verbal and Nonverbal Interaction Scale for Caregivers (VNVIS-CG) for second-by-second behavioral coding of video observations. The VNVIS-CG was adapted for computer-assisted Noldus Observer coding of video interactions captured at home by family caregivers from the FamTechCare clinical trial. Operational definitions for verbal communication behaviors were developed and inter-rater reliability was excellent (Kappa = .86) using two independent coders. Videos (N=232) were coded featuring 51 dyads; caregivers were primarily female (80%) spouses (69%) of men (55%) diagnosed with moderate to severe dementia (64.7%). Mean caregiver age was 65 years. Silence occurred most frequently (44.9% of the time), followed by caregiver direction or instruction (22.6%), and the person with dementia (PWD) verbalizing (22.8%). Caregiver communication also included asking questions (14.2%), verbalizing understanding (7.9%), repeating information (2.1%), affirmations (1.0%), acknowledging emotions (0.3%), and ignoring (0.0%). Questions most commonly requested clarification, showed interest, or repetitive quizzing; few questions sought to engage PWD input (ex. offers choices, encourages emotional expression, or ask permission). Tone was overwhelmingly neutral rather than humorous, aggressive, or patronizing. The adapted behavioral coding scheme provides a reliable measure that characterizes dementia caregiver verbal communication behaviors for analysis of video observations. Ongoing research will identify strategies that facilitate communication as well as determine how strategies vary by dementia stage, diagnosis, and dyad characteristics.

Nonverbal Communication in Dementia Family Caregiving: Using the VNVIS-CG Scale for In-Home Video Observations

Communication is fundamental for dementia care and identifying communication behaviors is key to identifying strategies that facilitate or impede communication. To measure caregiver nonverbal communication, we adapted the Verbal and Nonverbal Interaction Scale for Caregivers (VNVIS-CG) for second-by-second behavioral coding of video observations. The VNVIS-CG was adapted for computer-assisted Noldus Observer coding of video interactions captured at home by family caregivers from the FamTechCare clinical trial. Operational definitions for nonverbal communication behaviors were developed and inter-rater reliability was excellent (Kappa = .88) using two independent coders. Videos N=232 were coded featuring 51 dyads; caregivers who were primarily female (80%) spouses (69%) of men (55%) diagnosed with moderate to severe dementia (64.7%). Mean caregiver age was 65 years. Emotional tone conveyed by caregivers was primarily respectful, occurring 68.1% of the time, followed by overly nurturing (9%), bossy, harsh, or antagonistic (6.2%), and silence occurred 16.7 % of the time. Caregiver gestures and positive postures (i.e., animated facial expressions, head nodding, or caregiver body movements) were the most commonly occurring overt behaviors (46.5%), followed by changing the environment to help the PWD (19.9%), and expressing laughter/joy (18.9%). The least common nonverbal behaviors were negative posture, aggression, compassion, and rejecting. The adapted behavioral coding scheme provides a reliable measure that characterizes dementia caregiver nonverbal communication behaviors for analysis of video observations. Ongoing research will identify strategies that facilitate communication as well as determine how strategies vary by dementia stage, diagnosis, and dyad characteristics.

Quantitative Analysis of Classroom Communication Environments for Learners With Deafblindness

Classroom environments were analyzed to better understand adult language modeling rates and whether teacher certification practices contributed to differences with learners with deafblindness (DB). Student characteristics were also examined in relation to communication rates. When there is a dual sensory loss, access to tactile and visual communication forms (i.e., multimodal) in addition to verbal communication is needed. Data were collected from 15 teacher–student dyads from four states through behavioral coding of videotaped language samples, teacher surveys, and the Communication Matrix assessment. Overall, teachers used verbal communication significantly more than additional classroom staff. Teachers in a state that required a severe/profound certification had significantly higher rates of overall communication, visual communication, and had students with higher communication levels.

Studying Children’s Eating at Home: Using Synchronous Videoconference Sessions to Adapt to COVID-19 and Beyond

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many facets of developmental research, including research that measures children’s eating behavior. Here, children’s food intake is often measured by weighing foods that children are offered before and after in-person testing sessions. Many studies also examine children’s food ratings (the extent to which they like or dislike a food), assessed via picture categorization tasks or hedonic scales. This paper reviews existing research on different methods for characterizing children’s eating behavior (with a focus on food intake, preferences, and concepts) and presents a feasibility study that examined whether children’s eating behaviors at home (including their food intake and ratings) can be measured via live video-chat sessions. The feasibility analyses revealed that an observational feeding paradigm at home yielded a majority (more than 70%) of video-chat recordings that had a sufficient view of the child and adequate sound and picture quality required for observational coding for the majority of the session’s duration. Such positioning would enable behavioral coding of child food intake, parent food talk, and meal characteristics. Moreover, children were able to answer questions to stories and express their preferences via researcher screen-share methods (which can assess children’s self-reported food preferences and beliefs) with low rates of exclusion across studies. The article ends with a discussion on the opportunities and challenges of using online platforms to conduct studies on children’s eating behaviors in their home environments during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Try smarter, not harder: Exploration and strategy diversity are related to infant persistence

Much research into persistence focuses on methods to increase trying without distinguishing whether persistence is rational. However, expectations of effort efficiency suggest that reducing effort in the face of repeated failure is logical. We performed archival behavioral coding to propose exploration as a rational means to extend persistence as new information is gained and the possibility of success is maintained. Infants were presented with an impossible task and exploratory behavior was classified. Infants decreased effort with increased experience failing, but persisted for longer when using several exploratory strategies and exploring for proportionally longer. These results confirm that infants are sensitive to the utility of their actions, and that exploration offers a means to persist even in the face of failure.

Capturing Behavior in Small Doses: A Review of Comparative Research in Evaluating Thin Slices for Behavioral Measurement

Thin slices are used across a wide array of research domains to observe, measure, and predict human behavior. This article reviews the thin-slice method as a measurement technique and summarizes current comparative thin-slice research regarding the reliability and validity of thin slices to represent behavior or social constructs. We outline decision factors in using thin-slice behavioral coding and detail three avenues of thin-slice comparative research: (1) assessing whether thin slices can adequately approximate the total of the recorded behavior or be interchangeable with each other (representativeness); (2) assessing how well thin slices can predict variables that are different from the behavior measured in the slice (predictive validity), and (3) assessing how interpersonal judgment accuracy can depend on the length of the slice (accuracy-length validity). The aim of the review is to provide information researchers may use when designing and evaluating thin-slice behavioral measurement.

Social Behavior as a Transdiagnostic Marker of Resilience

The recent shift from psychopathology to resilience and from diagnosis to functioning requires the construction of transdiagnostic markers of adaptation. This review describes a model of resilience that is based on the neurobiology of affiliation and the initial condition of mammals that mature in the context of the mother's body and social behavior. The model proposes three tenets of resilience—plasticity, sociality, and meaning—and argues that coordinated social behavior stands at the core sustaining resilience. Two lines in the maturation of coordinated social behavior are charted, across animal evolution and throughout human development, culminating in the mature human reciprocity of empathy, mutuality, and perspective-taking. Cumulative evidence across ages and clinical conditions and based on our behavioral coding system demonstrates that social reciprocity, defined by plasticity at the individual, dyadic, and group levels, denotes resilience, whereas the two poles of disengagement/avoidance and intrusion/rigidity characterize specific psychopathologies, each with a distinct behavioral signature. Attention to developmentally sensitive markers and to the dimension of meaning in human sociality may open new, behavior-based pathways to resilience. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, Volume 17 is May 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.