The purpose of this paper is to affirm the role of preceding stimuli in teaching in a manner consistent with operant psychology and to speculate upon causes for neglect by modern operant psychologists if not by teachers. (Author)

Initial experiment demonstrated operant acquisition of an instrumental hand-pulling response in 4-8-month-old infants; the effect achieved with contingent, noncontingent, delayed reinforcement, and the suppression, recovery, and facilitation effects of noncontingent stimulation are discussed. (Author)

Operant and imitative techniques were used in programing generalization of verbal behavior in a child. (Author)

Clarifies behavior change objectives of marital partners, suggesting a four step treatment approach culminating in an exchange of positive responses on a reciprocal basis. Summarizes treatment of four couples complaining of low rate conversational and sexual behavior, stressing use of a token system as prosthesis facilitating transition to…

Over the course of eight months of almost continuous contact, relatively normal speaking patterns were generated. At a one year follow up, the subject's speech was indistinguishable from that of her classmates. (Author)

A discrete trials, operant tracking and a descending series procedure for the determination of hearing levels with three profoundly retarded young adults previously diagnosed as untestable proved quite workable and may provide for improved hearing testing with "difficult to test" individuals. (Author)

Discusses using rat olympics in helping psychology students to overcome their reluctance to condition rats. Working in groups, students enter rats in a number of behaviors (events) which can be shaped using operant conditioning methods and which rats can perform with varying degrees of proficiency. (Author/KC)

Argues that learning is an invariant process best understood from a dialectical perspective which demands that learning be viewed as an interaction between the organism and the environment. This view is contrasted with traditional operant approaches and with a Piagetian approach. (Author/DB)

Operant conditioning techniques were used to teach a visually impaired deaf girl (six years old) to emit eye contact within a classroom for deaf-blind children. (Author/CL)

Explains how a teaching method such as allowing students to raise gerbils at home can encourage students to gain experience with the fundamental techniques of operant conditioning which are otherwise generally unavailable to students in large introductory psychology courses. (DB)

Criticism of the study relating effects of therapist warmth to desensitization include: the use of surrogate, student subjects; nonstandard desensitization procedures; and no control group. Morris and Suckerman respond that the first two criticisms rely on selective reading of the literature and the third is irrelevant. (NG)

A total of 12 elementary school children participated in a study on the effect of percentage in variable amounts of reinforcement under several variable interval schedules. (MS)