The findings could help researchers to discover new ways to treat emotional disorders that feature suboptimal or maladaptive practices as well as the more serious varieties of pathologically impaired decision-making, such as depression, schizophrenia, and borderline personality disorder.
Indeed, purely superstitious remedies, or even maladaptive practices, spread more readily than efficacious treatments under specified circumstances.
This will mitigate against the spread of arbitrary of maladaptive practices, since observers would no longer be copying at random, but according to the efficacy of the trait.
We show that the treatments that spread are not necessarily those that are most efficacious at curing the ailment, and explain how 'superstitious treatments' with little efficacy and even maladaptive practices can spread under broad conditions.
Delinquent peers are also more likely to promote maladaptive practices and adolescents who affiliate with such peers may be influenced or pressured into behaving similarly [ 10].
"That does clearly indicate a maladaptive pattern of behavior," she said.
Thus, the amount of food children eat, both observed and assessed by questionnaire, seems related to more maladaptive parenting practices in mothers.
His research is focused on the development of adaptive and maladaptive parenting practices and family processes across ontogeny and over generations.
The current study was designed to evaluate: (a) whether an 8-week psychoeducational intervention can reduce maladaptive weight-management practices in women (University females, N = 24) with sub-clinical levels of eating pathology; and (b) whether its implementation reduces the risk of developing more severe eating pathology across time.
But it created a maladaptive behavior pattern.
These findings have important implications for extinction-based interventions for reducing maladaptive reward-seeking in practice.
