Purity or perversion? from taboo to fact: kindergarten teachers' reflections on age-normal sexuality.

Many educators and pedagogues around the world face challenging situations in their everyday work. Being caught off guard when children begin to explore their bodies and show curiosity about body parts and sexual issues is one of the most uncomfortable realities in the work of educating our children and can generate a series of worrying questions, such as, "Is this child* normal? Should I stop him/ her from masturbating? What should I tell him/her?. Although talking to children about body changes and sexual matters may seem strange or embarrassing, providing correct and age-appropriate information is one of the most important things kindergarten employees can do to ensure that children grow up protected, healthy and safe in their bodies. The current study is based on empirical evidence from focus group interviews with 18 kindergarten teachers from four different kindergartens. The aim is to provide a real overview regarding kindergarten employees' experiences when it comes to their work with sexual development in small children. The findings show that sexuality is still a taboo even in western societies, as it is usually linked to abuse or pathological behavior. Additionally, key information about lack of focus on these topics in pedagogical educational programs is provided. Furthermore, the informants highlight the importance of knowledge and resources for them to feel in control and in confidence to face these challenges. Future directions and tips are provided to improve the educational field and ensure a healthy and balanced development which is after all part of all children's rights.

The changing faces of autism: The fluctuating international diagnostic criteria and the resulting inclusion and exclusion-A Norwegian perspective.

The common understanding of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has gone through a number of permutations since the first description in 1943. Throughout these shifting understandings, there have been a number of behaviors and diagnostic criteria associated with the condition, many of which are missing in the most recent classifications. The rates of diagnoses of autism have increased greatly. However, there is no reason to think there has been any change in occurrence over the last 70 years, suggesting rather an increase in our knowledge and awareness. Autism has been the subject of several misapprehensions and misrepresentations throughout history. This might be due to heterogeneity of the cases. In addition, the diagnosing of autism spectrum disorders is mainly based on observation and behavioral interpretation, and thus dependent on subjective perceptions of the clinicians themselves. This current scoping review article intends to provide a view on the evolution of the concept of autism and the current stance within Norwegian scholarship, and how it is shaped by international discourses and cultural diversities Such changing concepts especially impacts people with the diagnosis, as it can affect their access to social services, as well as their self-identification as people with ASD.

Temporal focus and time spatialization across cultures.

The temporal focus hypothesis (TFH) proposes that whether the past or the future is conceptualized as being located in front depends on temporal focus: the balance of attention paid to the past (tradition) and the future (progress). How general is the TFH, and to what extent can cultures and subcultures be placed on a single line relating time spatialization and temporal focus in spite of stark differences in language, religion, history, and economic development? Data from 10 Western (sub)cultural groups (N = 1198,) were used to derive a linear model relating aggregated temporal focus and proportion of future-in-front responses. This model then successfully fitted 10 independently collected (sub)cultural groups in China and Vietnam (N = 899). Further analysis of the whole data set (N = 2,097) showed that the group-level relation arose at the individual level and allowed precise quantification of its influence. Finally, in an effort to apply the model to all relevant published data sets, we included recent data from Britain and South Africa: The former, but not the latter, fitted the model well. Temporal focus is a central factor that shapes how people around the world think of time in spatial terms.

Gaze and Motor Traces of Language Processing: Evidence from Autism Spectrum Disorders in Comparison to Typical Controls.

We investigated what strategies underlie figurative language processing in two groups of participants distinguished by the presence of a developmental deficit, highly-verbal participants with autism, and control participants without autism in two age ranges each. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are characterised by impaired social interaction and communication. Even at the high end of the spectrum, where structural language is adequate, difficulties in comprehending non-literal aspects of language are widely attested. The exact causes of these problems are, however, still open to debate. In an interactive sentence-picture matching task participants selected the most suitable image representation of a non-literal figurative expression that matched the target meaning, while their eye-movements and hand movements were being tracked. Our results suggest that individuals with ASD have different processing patterns than typically developing peers when interpreting figurative language, even when they provide the correct answers. Both children with and without autism, and participants with autism display greater uncertainty and competition between alternatives when providing the answer, often reflected in also considering the literal interpretation of the expression against its target figurative meaning. We provide evidence that expression transparency and decomposability play a central role in figurative language processing across all groups.

Is Beauty in the Hand of the Writer? Influences of Aesthetic Preferences through Script Directions, Cultural, and Neurological Factors: A Literature Review.

Human experience surrounding the appreciation of beauty is not static. Many factors such as script direction and cultural differences directly impact whether, how and why we consider images beautiful. In an earlier study, Pérez González showed that 19th-century Iranian and Spanish professional photographers manifest lateral biases linked to reading writing direction in their compositions. The present paper aims to provide a general review on this topic and intends to highlight the most relevant studies reporting preferences in the appreciation of beauty in individuals with different reading and writing directions and belonging to different cultural backgrounds.

Can you tell it by the prime? A study of metaphorical priming in high-functioning autism in comparison with matched controls.

BACKGROUND: Problems with pragmatic aspects of language are well attested in individuals on the autism spectrum. It remains unclear, however, whether figurative language skills improve with language status and whether problems in figurative language are no longer present in highly verbal individuals with autism. AIMS: To investigate whether highly verbal individuals with autism perform similarly as age-, intelligence- and verbal comprehension-matched controls on the processing of one of the most common types of figurative language, metaphors. The goal was to establish whether the participants with autism are primed similarly to controls by figurative expressions (metaphors) presented in different conditions. METHODS & PROCEDURES: The experiment was designed as a cross-modal lexical-decision task where metaphors served as primes for target words related to their figurative or literal meaning. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Our findings show that both ASD and control participants made very few errors in the experimental task. However, the participants with ASD presented with problems in performance on the task, reflected in significantly slower reaction times compared with the typically developing peer groups. The similar response speed observed between the younger typical control children and the adult ASD participants suggests that the mechanisms underlying metaphor processing (e.g., selection of metaphorical versus literal interpretation) are still developing in high-functioning autism, very much like in typical children. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: These results may suggest that metaphor processing requires more than adequate language competences. The findings are also suggestive of a delay in developing sensitivity to figurative language, rather than sheer inability. This suggests that a timely training programme can be implemented to improve figurative language abilities in ASD.

Reading and writing direction effects on the aesthetic appreciation of photographs.

Does reading and writing direction (RWD) influence the aesthetic appreciation of photography? Pérez González showed that nineteenth-century Iranian and Spanish professional photographers manifest lateral biases linked to RWD in their compositions. The present study aimed to test whether a population sample showed similar biases. Photographs with left-to-right (L-R) and right-to-left (R-L) directionality were selected from Pérez González's collections and presented in both original and mirror-reversed forms to Spanish (L-R readers) and Moroccan (R-L readers) participants. In Experiment 1, participants rated each picture for its aesthetic pleasingness. The results showed neither effects of lateral organization nor interactions with RWD. In Experiment 2, each picture and its mirror version were presented together and participants chose the one they liked better. Spaniards preferred rightward versions and Moroccans preferred leftward versions. RWD therefore affects aesthetic impressions of photography in our participants when people pay attention to the lateral spatial dimension of pictures. The observed directional aesthetic preferences were not sensitive to the sex of the model in the photographs, failing to support expectations from the hypotheses of emotionality and agency. Preferences were attributable to the interaction between general scanning strategies and scanning habits linked to RWD.

Can You Play with Fire and Not Hurt Yourself? A Comparative Study in Figurative Language Comprehension between Individuals with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Individuals with High functioning autism (HFA) are distinguished by relative preservation of linguistic and cognitive skills. However, problems with pragmatic language skills have been consistently reported across the autistic spectrum, even when structural language is intact. Our main goal was to investigate how highly verbal individuals with autism process figurative language and whether manipulation of the stimuli presentation modality had an impact on the processing. We were interested in the extent to which visual context, e.g., an image corresponding either to the literal meaning or the figurative meaning of the expression may facilitate responses to such expressions. Participants with HFA and their typically developing peers (matched on intelligence and language level) completed a cross-modal sentence-picture matching task for figurative expressions and their target figurative meaning represented in images. We expected that the individuals with autism would have difficulties in appreciating the non-literal nature of idioms and metaphors, despite intact structural language skills. Analyses of accuracy and reaction times showed clearly that the participants with autism performed at a lower level than their typically developing peers. Moreover, the modality in which the stimuli were presented was an important variable in task performance for the more transparent expressions. The individuals with autism displayed higher error rates and greater reaction latencies in the auditory modality compared to the visual stimulus presentation modality, implying more difficulty. Performance differed depending on type of expression. Participants had more difficulty understanding the culturally-based expressions, but not expressions grounded in human experience (biological idioms). This research highlights the importance of stimulus presentation modality and that this can lead to differences in figurative language comprehension between typically and atypically developing individuals. The current study also contributes to current debates on the role of structural language in figurative language comprehension in autism.

Figurative language processing in atypical populations: the ASD perspective.

This paper is intended to provide a critical overview of experimental and clinical research documenting problems in figurative language processing in atypical populations with a focus on the Autistic Spectrum. Research in the comprehension and processing of figurative language in autism invariably documents problems in this area. The greater paradox is that even at the higher end of the spectrum or in the cases of linguistically talented individuals with Asperger syndrome, where structural language competence is intact, problems with extended language persist. If we assume that figurative and extended uses of language essentially depend on the perception and processing of more concrete core concepts and phenomena, the commonly observed failure in atypical populations to understand figurative language remains a puzzle. Various accounts have been offered to explain this issue, ranging from linking potential failure directly to overall structural language competence (Norbury, 2005; Brock et al., 2008) to right-hemispheric involvement (Gold and Faust, 2010). We argue that the dissociation between structural language and figurative language competence in autism should be sought in more general cognitive mechanisms and traits in the autistic phenotype (e.g., in terms of weak central coherence, Vulchanova et al., 2012b), as well as failure at on-line semantic integration with increased complexity and diversity of the stimuli (Coulson and Van Petten, 2002). This perspective is even more compelling in light of similar problems in a number of conditions, including both acquired (e.g., Aphasia) and developmental disorders (Williams Syndrome). This dissociation argues against a simple continuity view of language interpretation.