Intelligence involves risk-awareness and intellectual disability involves risk-unawareness: implications of a theory of common sense.

Survival in the everyday world (in both social and practical functioning) depends on one's ability to recognise and avoid going down the worst possible path, especially when doing so places one at risk of death, injury, or social disaster. Most people possess "common sense" (the ability to recognise obvious risk) but some people lack that ability and thus are at high risk of engaging in "foolish" (i.e.

Emergency contraception: preliminary report of a demonstration and evaluation project.

Kaiser Permanente Southern California and the Pacific Institute for Women's Health began a demonstration and evaluation project on emergency contraceptive pills (ECPs) in the summer of 1996 with the goal of evaluating the feasibility and acceptability of ECPs in a large health maintenance organization and developing institutional templates, provider training and patient education materials that could be used to replicate the project. The ECP program had six components: repackaging of oral contraceptives in an ECP "kit," development of provider education materials, development of patient education materials, in-service training, making ECPs kits available in convenient locations, and development of materials to support replication of the project inside and outside Kaiser Permanente. Although data are still being analyzed, preliminary results are promising.

Self-reinforcement in mildly mentally retarded adults: effects of motivational orientation and instructional demand.

The effects of external (environmental) and internal (cognitive) self-influences of self-regulatory behaviour were investigated in 60 mildly mentally retarded adults. External conditions were three demand conditions (stringent, variable, and lenient). The 'internal' variable was an individual differences one, motivational orientation: one-half of the subjects were relatively intrinsically motivated and the other half were relatively extrinsically motivated.

Work response of mildly mentally retarded adults to self- versus external regulation as a function of motivational orientation.

The Picture Motivation Scale was administered to 144 mildly mentally retarded adults from a community-based intermediate care facility. Those in the top and bottom quartiles on intrinsic motivation were classified as either relatively task intrinsically motivated or task extrinsically motivated and were assigned to behavior regulation conditions: self-regulated reinforcement, externally imposed reinforcement, or control. All subjects were given a work task consisting of placing washers into successive compartments of a container, with subjects in the external-reinforcement condition yoked to those in the self-regulation condition with respect to work goal and number of tokens received for their work.

Development of school-age children's stereotypic attitudes toward mentally retarded children.

The developmental changes in the structure of attitudes toward mentally retarded children in elementary-school-aged students were investigated. Four orthogonal factors characterized their responses: General Negative Evaluation, General Positive Evaluation, Likeability, and Unhappiness. For the most part, increased age was associated with a decrease in negative stereotypes and an increase in a specific stereotype.