The article takes as its starting point a new wave of researchers who use concepts such as "hybridity" and "multiplicity" in a bid to move the study of childhood beyond the strictures of what Lee and Motzkau call "bio-social dualism", whereby the division between the "natural child" of developmental psychology and the "social child" of…

In this article, the author explains why field experiments can improve what we teach and how we teach economics. Economists no longer operate as passive observers of economic phenomena. Instead, they participate actively in the research process by collecting data from field experiments to investigate the economics of everyday life. This change can…

I have written before about the importance of applied behavior analysis to basic researchers. That relationship is, however, reciprocal; it is also critical for practitioners to understand and even to participate in basic research. Although applied problems are rarely the same as those investigated in the laboratory, practitioners who understand…

The current article reports two experiments designed to examine the effects of creating competing approach and avoidance response functions for 2 stimuli that participate in the same derived stimulus relation. Experiment 1 involved establishing each of 2 distinct members (i.e., B1 and D1) of the same 1-node equivalence relation (A-B-C-D) as a…

The crux of Critchfield's (2011) article is that there have not been enough translational contributions, and as a result societal support for basic research in behavior analysis is waning. Critchfield suggests, therefore, that to remain viable as a research enterprise, more attention needs to be paid to the translational (read "immediate…

In this article we address the issue of applying operant psychology to derive plausible and useful interpretations of complex firm behavior in natural settings. The objective is to discuss an appropriate methodology based on case study design, developed specifically in Vella and Foxall (2011), to produce an operant interpretation of secondary…

In a 3-tiered, prevention-oriented framework, Tier II (secondary, targeted) interventions are designed for students whose problem behaviors have not responded to Tier I but are not severe enough to warrant an individualized Tier III intervention. Tier II interventions are implemented similarly across students receiving the intervention and can be…

It is now well-established that intrinsic variations in human neural and behavioral activity tend to exhibit scaling laws in their fluctuations and distributions. The meaning of these scaling laws is an ongoing matter of debate between isolable causes versus pervasive causes. A spiking neural network model is presented that self-tunes to critical…

This supplement of "Health Education & Behavior" showcases the current state of the field of systems science applications in health promotion and public health. Behind this work lies a steady stream of public dollars at the federal level. This perspective details nearly a decade of investment by the National Institutes of…

Patterns of conceptualization reflected in figurative language are motivated by embodied experience, and comparisons of emotion metaphors in English, Mandarin Chinese and other languages have shown widespread similarity in such metaphors cross-culturally (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999; King 1989; Yu 1996; Kovecses 2005). Nonetheless, we can also…

Presents a short biography of one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. The 2012 winner is Friederike Range for outstanding contributions to the understanding of the complex social minds of nonhuman animals. Through ingenious experimental approaches,…

Guided notes were employed in two undergraduate Psychology courses involving 71 students. The study design utilized an alternating treatments format to compare Traditional Lectures with Guided Notes lectures. In one of the two courses, tests were administered after each class lecture, whereas the same type of test was administered at the beginning…

The article first summarizes the assumptions of Luce (2004, 2008) for inherently binary (2-D) stimuli (e.g., the ears and eyes) that lead to a "p-additive," order-preserving psychophysical representation. Next, a somewhat parallel theory for unary (1-D) signals is developed for intensity attributes such as linear extent, vibration to finger, and…

Parallel experiments with rats and pigeons examined whether the size of a pre-trial ratio requirement would affect choices in a self-control situation. In different conditions, either 1 response or 40 responses were required before each trial. In the first half of each experiment, an adjusting-ratio schedule was used, in which subjects could…

For more than 10 years, the "Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions" has published, among other types of articles, behavioral intervention outcome studies related to positive behavior support. Operationally defining interventions is important to facilitating replication studies and adoption of intervention in applied settings. Furthermore,…