Studied levels of principled moral reasoning of 145 teacher education students in comparison with 2 composite samples of students with other majors. Results corroborate earlier findings that teacher education students demonstrate significantly lower principled moral reasoning scores and suggest that levels of moral reasoning may affect ethical…

Presents empirical contributions to the scholarship on African American suicide, particularly among men. Discusses the secular trends in suicide completion and method-specific suicide patterns; the prevalence of ideation and attempts; suicide-related risk factors; evidence-based recommendations for suicide prevention; the need for more effective…

Examines children's ability to use their knowledge to guide their behavior in a dimensional change, color-shaped card sort. Subjects were asked to sort cards according to different guidelines. Four experiments were carried out which show a disassociation between knowledge and its use. Findings indicate that knowing rules is sometimes insufficient…

Studied whether substance use, transgressive behavior, and delinquency were related to the quality of peer relations for 508 12- to 18-year-olds. Findings show that substance use and transgressive behavior are positively related to the quantity and quality of peer relations. (SLD)

Although the concepts of greed and selfishness have often been used in discussions about human nature, there seems to be little attention to these characteristics in the disciplines of psychology and counseling. Considers characteristics of greed and selfishness as encountered in counseling from a multidisciplinary perspective and identifies…

Suggests that silence--avoidance or termination of talk in problematic and face-threatening situations-is used by hard-of-hearing people as a face-saving strategy in communication with hearing people. One hundred hearing-impaired people were asked to list situations in which they refrain from conversation due to embarrassment. (Author/JL)

Studied social strains contributing to suicidal behavior among adolescents by sex using the Add Health study of about 19,000 adolescents. Results support the presence of process differences and delineate the specific nature of these differences. Results also support models suggesting males are more status oriented and females are more relationally…

Behaviors that are appropriate, inappropriate, or a combination of both can be linked together in a behavior chain. When the contingencies for one response change (e.g., reinforcement is withheld for the last response in the chain; the last response is reinforced even if it occurs without the other responses in the chain) or the environmental…

A sequence of behaviors consisting of appropriate responses, inappropriate responses, or a combination of both can be linked together in a behavior chain. Several operant processes may disrupt behavior chains. For example, one or more members of the behavior chain may be affected when reinforcement is withheld for the last response in the chain…

Disagreements and conflicts in families with disruptive children often reflect rigid patterns of behavior that have become overlearned and automatized with repeated practice. These patterns are mindless: They are performed with little or no awareness and are highly resistant to change. This article introduces a new, mindfulness-based model of…

Do children have coexisting but contradictory beliefs about things like magic? Some patterns of behavior that seem to reflect contradictory beliefs may stem from children's recognition that their knowledge about events is incomplete and therefore things may occur without them understanding how. In addition, children may hold certain beliefs that…

Although reinforcement often leads to repetitive, even stereotyped responding, that is not a necessary outcome. When it depends on variations, reinforcement results in responding that is diverse, novel, indeed unpredictable, with distributions sometimes approaching those of a random process. This article reviews evidence for the powerful and…

Evidence about memory for order information comes from a number of different methodologies: human cognition, patient studies, neuroimaging studies, and animal lesion and behavioral studies. The present article discusses (a) evidence that order and item memory are separable; (b) proposed mechanisms for order memory (interitem associations, direct…

Awareness of optimal behaviour states of children with profound intellectual disability has been reported in the literature as a potentially useful tool for planning intervention within this population. Some arguments have been raised, however, which question the reliability and validity of previously published work on behaviour state analysis.…

This rejoinder discusses some common points raised in the commentaries of this special issue of JOBM, including (1) different definitions of positive and negative, (2) use of the terms reinforcement and establishing operation, and (3) concerns over the abandonment of behavior analysis for mentalistic research. In addition, a people-based approach…