The authors investigated the effects of experimentally induced mood states on the identification of contradictions in text passages and ratings of comprehension in 3 experiments. Mood impaired comprehension in college students across a variety of passages, as evidenced by a depressive impairment in contradiction identification and an increased number of false identifications among depressed participants. Additionally, depressed individuals were less accurate in their judgments of passage difficulty. These findings are consistent with the resource allocation model of mood effects, which attributes impaired comprehension to the activation of intrusive, irrelevant thoughts during reading of the passage. It is further argued that these results cannot be explained simply by a deficit in motivation of the depressed participants.

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Socially Assistive Robotics is a newly emerging area of robotics where robots are used to help a human through social interaction. This paper describes an ongoing project on the use of robotics as therapeutically or educationally useful tools for treating individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The robotic Lego NXT platform was used to develop an economical, practical and efficient means of helping teach social behavior to individuals with ASD in school/home environments. In addition, our approach to treatment is described as an educational intervention which is a combination of Socially Assistive Robotics, the DIR/Floortime intervention model and social script/stories.