Defines behavioral medicine as multidisciplinary field that combines research methods from behavioral and biomedical sciences. Examines the role of behavior theory in behavioral medicine. Uses new advances in basic research on learning to illustrate that findings from behavioral science have implications for the field of contemporary behavioral…

Discusses behaviorism and the gradual shift to a theory of selectionism. Highlights include the development of behaviorism as a part of psychology, including Skinner's theories; varieties of behaviorism, including behavioral analysis; behaviorology in other disciplinary settings; effects of contingencies upon behavior; and the prospects for…

Self- and cross-citations in JABA and JEAB from 1993 through 2003 were examined. Yearly mean levels of self-citation for JABA and JEAB were 34.9% and 33.2%, respectively. Overall, 7.8% of JABA citations were JEAB articles, and 0.6% of JEAB citations were JABA articles. The former value, but not the latter, is substantially higher than the…

This short contribution is a comment on M. Moerbeek's exploration of consequences of ignoring a level of clustering in a multilevel model, which was published in the first issue of the 2004 volume of Multivariate Behavioral Research. After having recapitulated the framework and extended the results of Moerbeek's study, we formulate two critical…

Behavioral, neuropsychological, and brain imaging research points to a dedicated system for processing number that is shared across development and across species. This foundational Approximate Number System (ANS) operates over multiple modalities, forming representations of the number of objects, sounds, or events in a scene. This system is…

Incorporating elements from broadband theories of psychological adaptation to extreme adversity, including Summit's (1983) Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome, Finkelhor and Browne's (1986) Traumagenic Dynamics Model of sexual abuse, and Pyszczynski and colleagues' (1997) Terror Management Theory, this paper proposes a unified theoretical…

Two experiments examined how pigeons differentiate response patterns along the dimension of number. In Experiment 1, 5 pigeons received food after pecking the left key at least N times and then switching to the right key (Mechner's Fixed Consecutive Number schedule). Parameter N varied across conditions from 4 to 32. Results showed that run length…

Few studies have made use of B. F. Skinner's (1957) behavioral analysis of language and precise taxonomy of verbal behavior when describing the controlling variables for the mand relation. Consequently, the motivating operation (MO) has not typically been identified as an independent variable and the nature of a spontaneous mand has been…

The renewal of extinguished conditioned behaviour appears to reflect context-dependent learning. The present research used a conditioned suppression task with humans to examine whether instructions concerning the context could influence renewal. Pairings of a conditional stimulus (CS) and unconditional stimulus (US) were made in one context,…

Patients with corticobasal degeneration (CBD) have calculation impairments. This study examined whether impaired number knowledge depends on verbal mediation. We focused particularly on knowledge of very small numbers, where there is a precise relationship between a cardinality and its number concept, but little hypothesized role for verbal…

The most prominent theories of reading consider reading comprehension ability to be a direct consequence of lower-level reading skills. Recently however, research has shown that some children with poor comprehension ability perform normally on tests of lower-level skills (e.g., decoding). One promising line of behavioral research has found…

Keller's Personalized System of Instruction dominated the literature in the teaching of psychology and behavior analysis in the 1970s and 1980s. After this brief flourish of interest, PSI research trickled off to a nearly imperceptible stream in the 1990s. However, with the increasing availability and ease of use of computers and the internet,…

This paper provides an explanation for the nonspecificity of emotion inferences found in previous research [e.g., Language and Cognitive Processes, 19(5), 613-638, 2004]. We first demonstrate that behavioral components of emotions, as opposed to emotions per se, are better markers of readers' mental representations of the main character's…

Human adults generally find fast tempos more arousing than slow tempos, with tempo frequently manipulated in music to alter tension and emotion. We used a previously published method [McDermott, J., & Hauser, M. (2004). Are consonant intervals music to their ears? Spontaneous acoustic preferences in a nonhuman primate. Cognition, 94(2), B11-B21]…

Graphs are vital components for analyzing data in the experimental analysis of behavior using single subject research methods. This paper extends the previous literature on the construction of single subject graphs by providing instructions for using Microsoft[R] Power Point[TM] and Microsoft[R] PowerPoint for Mac[R], and describes improved…