Describes a community treatment program cojointly administered by a New Mexico local school district, university, and mental health center. The program is designed to facilitate the adoption of personal and academic skills among profoundly behaviorally disordered adolescents. (Author/CM)

Presents the viewpoints of a prominent behavioral scientist concerning the role of the environment in the evolution of behavior. (CS)

A severely retarded, institutionalized, 12-year-old female received reinforcement on an adjusted DRO schedule (differential reinforcement for behavior other than self destruction) until a fairly stable response (no scratching or headbanging) was shown. (Author)

This article discusses basic learning processes utilized by children with profound intellectual disabilities, including classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and habituation. The article also explores how these learning processes may be used in assessing the capabilities and preferences of children with profound intellectual disabilities.…

Basic and applied research on variables that influence the extinction of operant behaviors is reviewed and applied to the treatment of behavior disorders. The potential value of a general technology for the use of behavioral extinction is discussed. The paper concludes that current research findings are not sufficient for the development of a…

A 14-year-old student with moderate retardation rode a stationary bicycle, while rotation of the bicycle wheel operated one of three consequence conditions (television, flashing lights, or vibrator sound). Vibrator sound was the most potent reinforcing consequence. The activity led to the development of exercise behavior with a minimum amount of…

To convince my students they are surrounded by social psychology, we attended a minor league hockey game. During the next class period I asked students to write a brief paragraph about their experiences. From those paragraphs I chose four reoccurring themes to analyze from a social psychological perspective. My introductory classes and I benefited…

Recent evidence indicates that certain forms of memory, upon recall, may return to a labile state requiring the synthesis of new proteins in order to preserve or reconsolidate the original memory trace. While the initial consolidation of "instrumental memories" has been shown to require de novo protein synthesis in the nucleus accumbens, it is not…

Designed for both parents and teachers, the handbook presents methods for educating the moderately and severely retarded child. Those methods include measuring progress, rewarding and punishing, ways of using rewards and punishers, ways of giving positive reinforcers and punishers, withholding reinforcers (extinction), letting the child reward…

Speaker immersion is a tactic that uses multiple establishing operations to increase speaker behavior for individuals with limited mand and tact repertoires. The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the effects of speaker immersion on the number of independent mands, tacts, and autoclitics emitted by young children with verbal delays. In the…

Many of the clinically disabling behaviors of elderly persons may be viewed as operants. Research bearing on the efficacy of operant techniques for programming individualized, group based, and ward-wide therapeutic intervention is reviewed. Suggests the operant view is useful for conceptualizing and treating many problem behaviors of elderly…

Described is the application of the Educateur Model to a facility providing residential, day treatment, and outpatient services to behaviorally disordered children and their families. (DB)

Three retarded children 3- to 11-years-old were trained, using prompting and reinforcement procedures, to respond correctly to three categories of prepositional requests (next to, under, and on top of). (Author)

Given research findings that women have a strong tendency to describe the ideal man as androgynous, perhaps social interaction with an androgynous male could be seen as a social reward, whereas interaction with a masculine male may be less rewarding or aversive for women. A study was conducted to determine the functional properties of androgyny as…

This paper: (1) briefly reviews the existing literature which supports that female adolescents possess significantly more negative attitudes toward middle school science than do males; (2) examines the process of gender socialization in the United States to establish the socio-cultural and social psychological framework within which an attitudinal…