Background: Research has shown Australian group homes, and supported living options, fail to support people with intellectual disabilities (IDs) to develop social connections. This pilot study evaluates the effectiveness of a visiting dog walking program to facilitate encounters with other community members. Method: Sixteen adults with IDs were…

The most challenging youth have learned to be experts at outwitting helping professionals. Often with hurt kids, if interactions move beyond the stuff plainly spoken and capture the emotional nuance, the student will respond with an amplification of his emotional tone. Hurt, abandonment and rejection make this student adult wary and impact his…

A self-esteem maintenance model was tested using 52 friendship pairs. Undergraduates (N=52) participated in a word identification task described as an indirect measure of important skills (high relevance) or as a game of password (low relevance). Participants presented clues to both a friend and a stranger. As predicted by the model, subjects gave…

Assessed infants' attachment behaviors toward nonparental adults, including grandparents, other relatives, and family friends. Found that the extent of infants' attachment behavior to nonparental adults was related to infant-mother attachment behavior and to the nonparental adult's responsiveness in teaching and position in the mother's social…