Developmental psychologist Damon's (Damon, Menon, & Cotton Bronk, 2003) ongoing research program on youth purpose may have important practical implications for education. However, in the course of the development of this research, two fundamental conceptual questions have not yet been resolved satisfactorily: (a) How should "sense of purpose" be…

Eight pigeons responded in a concurrent-chains procedure in which terminal-link schedules changed pseudorandomly across sessions. Pairs of terminal-link delays either summed to 15 s or to 45 s. Across sessions, the location of the shorter terminal link changed according to a pseudorandom binary sequence. On some terminal links, food was withheld…

A greater understanding of implicit cognition can provide important information regarding the etiology and maintenance of psychological disorders. The current study sought to determine the utility of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) as a measure of implicit aversive bias toward spiders in two groups of known variation, high fear…

The article provides a brief review of theory and research on the roles of guilt, shame, and sympathy in predicting moral behaviors. Two models are presented and contrasted. The guilt-based model proposes that guilt and shame jointly predict prosocial and aggressive behaviors. In contrast, the sympathy-based model suggests that perspective taking…

Treatment integrity has cogent implications for intervention effectiveness. Understanding these implications is an important, but often neglected, undertaking in behavior analysis. This paper reviews current research on treatment integrity in applied behavior analysis. Specifically, we review research evaluating the relation between integrity…

The authors examined the contributions of economic status (ES) and citizenship status to health differences between European Americans, Latino Americans, and noncitizen Latinos. The investigation was framed using social identity and comparison theories. Southern California residents (N = 2,164) were randomly selected to complete a telephone…

The effects of 2 forms of response interruption and redirection (RIRD)--motor RIRD and vocal RIRD--were examined with 4 boys with autism to evaluate further the effects of this intervention and its potential underlying mechanisms. In Experiment 1, the effects of motor RIRD and vocal RIRD on vocal stereotypy and appropriate vocalizations were…

Scheel et al. offer an interesting analysis on the publication rate of counseling-related research articles in counseling psychology's two major journals. In this reaction to their work, the author considers various aspects of their results and contemplates possible explanations for the decline of counseling-related publications. The author…

Previous research has shown that rats can learn matching-to-sample relations with olfactory stimuli; however, the specific characteristics of this relational control are unclear. In Experiment 1, 6 rats were trained to either match or nonmatch to sample in a modified operant chamber using common household spices as olfactory stimuli. After…

In the present article we re-examine one of the most deeply entrenched assumptions in modern attitude research, namely, that implicit social cognition is a product of associations between mental representations. More precisely, we argue that the analysis of implicit social cognition in psychology is curtailed by the widespread adoption of the…

In his article, Critchfield ("Translational Contributions of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior," "The Behavior Analyst," v34, p3-17, 2011) summarizes a previous call (Mace & Critchfield, 2010) for basic scientists to reexamine the inspiration for their research and turn increasingly to translational approaches. Interestingly, rather than…

Sorting procedures are frequently adopted as an alternative to dissimilarity ratings to measure the dissimilarity of large sets of stimuli in a comparatively short time. However, systematic empirical research on the consequences of this experiment-design choice is lacking. We carried out a behavioral experiment to assess the extent to which…

Delay to delivery of a reinforcer can decrease responding for that reinforcer and increase responding for smaller reinforcers that are available concurrently and delivered without delay; acute administration of drugs can alter responding for large, delayed reinforcers, although the impact of chronic treatment on delay discounting is not well…

Despite consensus that development shapes every aspect of coping, studies of age differences in coping have proven difficult to integrate, primarily because they examine largely unselected age groups, and utilize overlapping coping categories. A developmental framework was used to organize 58 studies of coping involving over 250 age comparisons or…

In the Winter 2013 issue of "Independent School," Richard Barbieri considered some of the distressing news about humanity being discovered by various physical and social scientists. Barbieri asserts in this issue that there are countervailing views and discoveries about our minds and our mores, enough for us to hope for the frequent, if…