Individuals with developmental disabilities (DD) are twice as likely to have obesity than non-disabled individuals. Replacing the consumption of sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs) with water has many health benefits, including weight reduction. In this study, a token reinforcement system was implemented to increase water consumption and decrease the…

In 2020 the Centers for Disease Control provided the public with recommendations to slow the spread of COVID-19 by wearing a mask in the community. In the current study, experimenters coached group home staff via telehealth to implement synchronous schedules of reinforcement to increase mask wearing for 5 adults with intellectual and developmental…

A primary goal of behavioral interventions is to reduce dangerous or inappropriate behavior and to generalize treatment effects across various settings. However, there is a lack of research evaluating generalization of treatment effects while individuals with functionally equivalent problem behavior interact with each other. For the current study,…

We compared multiple-stimulus without replacement (MSWO) and paired-stimulus (PS) procedures to assess stimulus preferences of adults with developmental disabilities. Stimulus preference rankings for six food items obtained by the two procedures were positively correlated for all participants (M = 0.72, range 0.41 to 1). However, four participants…

Rett syndrome (RTT) is associated with a range of serious neurodevelopmental consequences including severe communicative impairments. Currently, no evidence-based communication interventions exist for the population (Sigafoos et al., 2009). The purpose of the current study was to examine the effectiveness of functional assessment (FA) and…

Background: Fear of medical procedures in general and needles in particular can be a difficult clinical challenge to providing effective health care for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Methods: A changing criterion design was used to examine graduated exposure treatment for blood-injury-injection phobia in an adult…

In the following paper, two experiments are reported based on the relation between adult approvals as conditioned reinforcers and the number of vocal verbal operants, specifically tacts, mands, wh questions, sequelics, and conversational units emitted by children diagnosed with developmental disabilities. In Experiment I, following an experimental…

Stereotypical behavior maintained by automatic reinforcement often does not result in harm but may be undesirable in some situations. In the current investigation, participants were 2 individuals who engaged in nonharmful stereotypical responses shown in an analogue functional analysis to be insensitive to social contingencies. After bringing…

Stimulus over-selectivity occurs when only one of potentially many aspects of the environment comes to control behavior. In three experiments, adult participants with no developmental disabilities were trained and tested in a match to samples (MTS) paradigm. Participants in Experiment 1 were assigned to one of two conditions, which differed on…

Skin-picking is a type of self-injurious behavior involving the pulling, scratching, lancing, digging, or gouging of one's own body. It is associated with social impairment, and increased medical and mental health concerns. While there are several reports showing that skin-picking is common in individuals with developmental disabilities, knowledge…

We reviewed studies involving the treatment of elopement in individuals with developmental disabilities. Systematic searches of three electronic databases, journals, and reference lists identified 10 studies meeting the inclusion criteria. These studies were evaluated in terms of: (a) participants, (b) procedures used to assess elopement, (c)…

The purpose of the current study was to explore the use of overt and covert self-rules in the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of a chained task by adults with mild developmental disabilities. This research differed from previous research in that the experimenter did not deliver reinforcement for correct responses during training, and…

Problem behavior is a major barrier to successful community integration for people with developmental disabilities. Recently, there has been increased interest in identifying contextual factors involving setting events and discriminative stimuli that impact the display of problem behavior. The authors previously developed the "Contextual…

Two paradigms (rewards and verbal prompts, and timeout procedures), both making social consequences contingent upon the S's behavior and both requiring the S to practice the desired response, were used to reduce inappropriate language in a 33 year old resident of a center for the developmentally disabled. Data from the morning and afternoon…

A great deal is known about the effects of positive reinforcement on response acquisition; by contrast, much less research has been conducted on contingencies applied to errors. We examined the effects of response repetition as an error-correction procedure on the sight-word reading performance of 11 adults with developmental disabilities. Study 1…