It has been argued that to increase societal impact behavioral researchers must do more to address problems of obvious practical importance. The basic science wing of behavior analysis has been described as especially detached from this goal, but is it really necessary that basic science demonstrate social relevance? If so, why hasn't this…

This authentic threat asserts impending fatal injury. Because of the dangerous nature of threats, investigators must immediately ask: Is the intent real? Is the threatener likely to act? With real lives at risk, using the linguistic information available to answer these questions quickly and accurately is of great importance. Yet, because most…

This article draws on the traditions of critical discourse analysis (N. Fairclough, 1995, 2001; M. Foucault, 1972, 1980; J. P. Gee, 1999) in critically examining the discursive formation of "recovery" from autism in applied behavioral analysis (ABA) discourse and its relationship to constructs of hope. Constituted principally in the work of O. I.…

This paper outlines a behavior-analysis approach to the field of narratology, the study of the narrative or story, with emphasis on nonfiction stories and the processes by which such stories distort the world they describe. Stories are described in terms of (a) a behavior-analysis adaptation of Todorov's (1977) analysis of the plots of stories in…

Considers the impact of commentary on television viewer's perception and appreciation of sports events. (MH)

Uses conversational analysis to investigate how people accomplish a specific enactment of their everyday lives. (MH)

Suggests and tests a model of value argument which is intended to determine the degree of audience adherence to particular value claims. Discusses the process for advance selection of the most effective evidence to support value claims. (MH)

Examines the functional relationship of source and message by testing the hypothesis that the impact of a message is a function of the strength of the message multiplied by the strength of the source. (MH)

Results of experiments (1) to assess the degree of agreement with which subjects identify paragraph boundaries in unindented prose passages, (2) to determine whether a significant proportion of the cues to paragraph structure are formal in nature, (3) to ascertain whether the identification of paragraphs in different kinds of prose differentially…

This paper considers two classes of conversational errors: production errors and interactional errors. It is proposed that error correction can be used to invoke alternatives to concepts of persons, situation and relationships. (CK)

This report describes a series of studies designed to construct and validate a set of text materials necessary to the pursuance of a long-term research project on information analysis and integration in semantically rich, naturalistic domains, primarily in the domain of the stock market. The methods and results of six separate experiments on…

Reports on a study designed to investigate the variables of greeting behavior. (MH)

Investigates the effects of disclosure as perceived by the recipient with specific attention given to the recipient's level of self-esteem. (MH)

Looks at a group of politically knowledgeable college students and assesses changes in perceptions to the messages of Ford and Carter during the course of the 1976 Presidential pre-election debates. Notes statistically significant differences between pre-debate, post-debate, and delayed post-debate ratings on sets of semantic differential-like…