Four rats' choices between two levers were differentially reinforced using a runs-test algorithm. On each trial, a runs-test score was calculated based on the last 20 choices. In Experiment 1, the onset of stimulus lights cued when the runs score was smaller than criterion. Following cuing, the correct choice was occasionally reinforced with food,…

Translational research inspired by behavioral momentum theory in the area of developmental disabilities has shown effects in individuals over a range of functioning levels. In the current study, behavioral momentum was assessed in 6 children diagnosed with autism and severe intellectual disability. In a repeated measures design, participants were…

Terror management theory (TMT) highlights the motivational impact of thoughts of death in various aspects of everyday life. Since its inception in 1986, research on TMT has undergone a slight but significant shift from an almost exclusive focus on the manipulation of thoughts of death to a marked increase in studies that measure the accessibility…

Psychology texts often cite the work of Marian and Keller Breland and their business, Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE), to demonstrate operant conditioning and the "misbehavior of organisms" from an evolutionary perspective. Now available on the Internet at the official IQ Zoo website (http://www3.uca.edu/iqzoo/), the artifacts of ABE's work, in…

Ordinal variables are common in many empirical investigations in the social and behavioral sciences. Researchers often apply the maximum likelihood method to fit structural equation models to ordinal data. This assumes that the observed measures have normal distributions, which is not the case when the variables are ordinal. A better approach is…

The professional field of Disability Services in Higher Education and the academic discipline of Disability Studies share a perspective on disability that considers disability as a socially constructed phenomenon. Despite this common underpinning, there has been little effort or inquiry into the ways that disability services and Disability Studies…

Amid the novel terms and original analyses in Skinner's "Verbal Behavior", the importance of his discussion of multiple control is easily missed, but multiple control of verbal responses is the rule rather than the exception. In this paper we summarize and illustrate Skinner's analysis of multiple control and introduce the terms "convergent…

Objective: Depression is associated with poor social problem solving, and psychotherapies that focus on problem-solving skills are efficacious in treating depression. We examined the associations between treatment, social problem solving, and depression in a randomized clinical trial testing the efficacy of psychotherapy augmentation for…

We investigated changes in midlife parents' intergenerational ambivalence toward a focal child and its influence on their psychological well-being over 14 years, as the focal child moved from adolescence into young adulthood. We estimated growth curve models using three waves of data from the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 1,510…

At one time, "JEAB" editorial policy was perceived by some to consist mainly of dogmatically enforcing a Skinnerian interpretation of all findings reported in the journal. Partly in response to that undeserved reputation, the journal explicitly defined itself as the place to publish research on the behavior of individual organisms, and not as a…

Throughout its history, laboratory research in the experimental analysis of behavior has been successful in elucidating and clarifying basic learning principles and processes in both humans and nonhumans. In parallel, applied behavior analysis has shown how fundamental behavior-analytic principles and procedures can be employed to promote…

Many drugs of abuse produce changes in impulsive choice, that is, choice for a smaller-sooner reinforcer over a larger-later reinforcer. Because the alternatives differ in both delay and amount, it is not clear whether these drug effects are due to the differences in reinforcer delay or amount. To isolate the effects of delay, we used a titrating…

The control exerted by a stimulus associated with an extinction component (S-) on observing responses was determined as a function of its temporal relation with the onset of the reinforcement component (S+). Lever pressing by rats was reinforced on a mixed random-interval extinction schedule. Each press on a second lever produced stimuli…

Concurrent schedules were used to establish 6 hens' preferences for three foods. The resulting biases suggested wheat was preferred over honey-puffed and puffed wheat, and puffed wheat was the least preferred food. The hens then responded under fixed-ratio schedules for each food in 40-min (excluding reinforcer time) sessions, with the response…

According to the composite-stimulus control model (Weiss, 1969, 1972b), an individual discriminative stimulus (S[superscript D]) is composed of that S[superscript D]'s on-state plus the off-states of all other relevant S[superscript D]s. The present experiment investigated the reversibility of composite-stimulus control. Separate groups of rats…