Previous research suggests that motivating operation (MO) manipulations may assist in assessing discriminated manding (Gutierrez et al., 2007). The current study partially replicated and extended previous research by varying access to concurrently available reinforcers with different preference values (i.e., MO manipulations). Manding did not…

The current study assessed the effects of fixed-time reinforcement schedules on problem behavior of students with emotional-behavioral disorders in a clinical day-treatment classroom setting. Three elementary-aged students with a variety of emotional and behavioral problems participated in the study. Initial functional assessments indicated that…

This study observed a classroom of 15 students (ages 3 to 11) with behavior disorders, using amount of teacher attention to generate hypotheses about problem behavior function which were then validated in individual functional assessments. For 14 of the students, accurate hypotheses were efficiently generated by noting how teachers distributed…

A urine alarm, typically used to treat nocturnal enuresis, was effectively used to treat diurnal enuresis in a 15-year-old female with depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and conduct disorder. The study indicated that the alarm eliminated wetting in both treatment phases and that continence was maintained at three-month and…

The effects of a presession exposure to attention on responding during subsequent assessment of attention as a reinforcer were evaluated across three behavioral assessments. In each experiment, the children responded differentially within the test condition according to the presence or absence of dense schedule of attention immediately prior to…

Descriptive and functional analysis of the bizarre speech of an adult with moderate mental retardation found that bizarre speech appeared to function as an attention-producing behavior. Two different yet functionally equivalent treatments (noncontingent scheduled attention and social language skill development) were found to be effective in…

Functional analysis of destructive behavior of a four-year-old boy with autism and oppositional defiant disorder was able to delineate the specific form of verbal attention that was responsible for behavioral maintenance. Treatment based on the analysis reduced the behavior to near-zero levels. (DB)