Deposit contracts involve participants depositing their own money and earning it back contingent on behavior change. Deposit contracts are empirically supported treatments for promoting health behavior, but they have a history of poor uptake. We compared the effectiveness and acceptability of technology-based versus in-person deposit contracts for…

Interventions based on functional analyses may result in better treatment outcomes than those using arbitrary reinforcers. However, functional analyses may be impractical in some situations, or an immediate intervention may be necessary while a functional analysis is being conducted. In these situations, delivering the social reinforcers most…

In our everyday life, we often need to anticipate the potential occurrence of events and their consequences. In this context, the way we represent contingencies can determine our ability to adapt to the environment. However, it is not clear how agents encode and organize available knowledge about the future to react to possible states of the…

Contingency management is an incentive-based intervention strategy that has been demonstrated to be effective for inducing behavior change among a variety of populations and for a variety of behaviors. The current study examined whether contingency management techniques can help students change behaviors in an effort to raise their grade point…

Objective: Contingency management (CM) is efficacious in reducing drug use. Typically, reinforcers are provided on an individual basis to patients for submitting drug-negative samples. However, most treatment is provided in a group context, and poor attendance is a substantial concern. This study evaluated whether adding CM to group-based…

Contingency management (CM) treatments have been shown to be effective in reducing substance use. This manuscript illustrates how the experience sampling method (ESM) can depict behavior and behavior change and can be used to explore CM treatment mechanisms. ESM characterizes idiosyncratic patterns of behavior and offers the potential to determine…

Fifty-eight smokers received abstinence-contingent monetary payments for 1 (n = 15) or 14 (n = 43) days. Those who received contingent payments for 14 days also received 0, 1, or 8 experimenter-delivered cigarette puffs on 5 evenings. The relative reinforcing effects of smoking were assessed in a 3-hr session on the final study day, when…

Objective: To investigate single and combined effects of stimulant medication and contingencies on the performance of ADHD children with tasks involving different cognitive demands. Method: Children diagnosed with ADHD participated in a within-subjects design. At two separate sessions, children on either medication or placebo (administered in a…

Objective: This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of a contingency contracting program to eliminate nocturnal enuresis of three children ages 5 to 12. Methods: The program was implemented by the children's primary caregivers, two of whom were foster parents and the third a case worker in the foster care system. The program was a package…

Results showed that restraint, in comparison to no restraint, reduced the amount of body rocking. Also, restraint was judged to be generally more effective if it were applied when the S was bent over in the middle of the response sequence rather than administered while the S was sitting upright at the end of the response sequence. (Author)

Individual and group management programs have been reported to be effective methods of reducing off-task behaviors; however, few studies have empirically contrasted the two intervention programs. Utilizing a multi-element design, individual and group contingency systems were found to significantly reduce disruptive-unacceptable behaviors in a…

The paper presents guidelines for training staff to implement positive reductive procedures to decrease undesirable behaviors of their retarded students and clients. Considerations relevant to all reductive procedures are briefly discussed in the first portion of the paper, while guidelines indigenous to positive reductive procedures are discussed…

The Good Behavior Game, a classroom management procedure, was examined for its effects on the frequency of inappropriate verbalizations in grade four and six regular classes. Results indicated that the game reduced inappropriate responding in both classrooms and that the use of candy did not augment the effectiveness of the Good Behavior Game.…

Contingency management programs for modifying aggression in children are strong methods of short-term behavior change in treatment settings but are less than successful when transferred to other settings. Future research should compare cognitive with noncognitive behavioral programs and test the effectiveness of cognitive and noncognitive…

The study found no relationship between improved social behavior in a group of juveniles residing at a county shelter care facility and decreased frequency and duration of disruptions above 85 decibels. Subjects did reduce noise levels when stereo listening was made contingent on reduced noise. (Author/DB)