The Effect of an Education Program for Mothers of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Jordan

There are few support services for parents of children with a disability in Jordan. The present exploratory study investigated whether the provision of an education program in Jordan for mothers of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder increased mothers’ understanding of their child’s behaviour, improved the mothers’ coping skills, and reduced their stress levels. Following the education program, the mothers reported a statistically significant reduction in stress levels, an increase in coping skills, and an improvement in mother-child interaction. Compared to fathers, mothers’ stress levels were significantly higher and their coping skills were significantly lower. The outcomes have valuable implications for interventions for families with a child with ASD living in Jordan or in other Arabic countries.     

Stability and synchronization criteria for fractional order competitive neural networks with time delays: An asymptotic expansion of Mittag Leffler function

Competitive neural networks(CNNs) has not been well developed in nonlinear fractional order dynamical system, which is developed first time in this paper. Then, by means of a proper Lyapunov functional, asymptotic expansion of Mittag-Leffler function properties, together with some Caputo derivative properties, the testable novel sufficient conditions are given to guarantee the existence, uniqueness of the equilibrium point as well as global asymptotic stability for a class of fractional order competitive neural networks (FOCNNs) are all derived in the form of matrix elements. Furthermore, the boundedness for the solution of FOCNN is presented by employing Cauchy–Schwartz inequality and Gronwall inequality. Besides, a linear feedback control and adaptive feedback control are designed to achieve the global asymptotic synchronization criterion for FOCNNs with time delay and these explored consequences are extended from some previous integer order CNNs output. At last, two numerical simulations are performed to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed theoretical results.