The study examined effects of aversive taste treatment of thumb sucking on untreated habitual hair pulling by two young males (ages 2 and 5). Concomitant with successful treatment of thumb sucking, hair pulling was also eliminated. Results suggest an efficient method for changing behaviors that are difficult to treat directly. (Author/JW)

This review assesses current behavioral approaches for controlling aggression in children and develops hypotheses regarding the motivation for aggression in these children in order to formulate guidelines for further research. (RH)

This manual takes school practitioners step by step through conducting functional behavioral assessments and using them to plan effective interventions. The authors present a cogent rationale for the use of functional behavioral assessment (FBA), clearly explaining its advantages over traditional approaches to dealing with problem behavior. Basic…

This article reports a project in which students in a college level adjustment course were taught to apply a model of behavior change in order to gain greater control over their own behavior. Pilot data suggest that students found the experience worthwhile, that many of them learned to make substantial changes in their behavior. (Author)

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…

In response to Horner and others (EC 232 976), this paper notes earlier recommendation of procedural safeguards to protect client rights and encouragement of positive procedures to increase adaptive skills but questions whether a positive but slow intervention is more ethically valid than more quickly effective "aversive" interventions…

Functional analyses were conducted with four individuals with profound mental retardation whose self-injurious behavior (SIB) had relapsed after successful treatment (also based on functional analysis). For three subjects, this second analysis revealed that SIB had acquired new or additional functions. Results suggest reasons other than program…

This paper first reviews four classes of habit disorders in children: motor and vocal tics, nervous habits, stuttering, and Tourette's disorder. It then describes the habit reversal procedure and reviews the literature on its use and variations to treat each of the four classes of habit disorders. Emphasis is on simplified versions of the original…

This article reviews the negative behavior-analytic commentary on Drash and Tudor's behavior-analytic analysis of the etiology of autistic repertoires and values. This article also asks that, in our effort to scrub it clean, we not drown Drash and Tudor's beautiful, but fragile, new-born, behavior-analytic baby in hyper-methodological,…

Over the past 15 years, positive behavior support (PBS) gained rapid momentum as it moved from research on the function of challenging behaviors in individuals situated in restrictive settings, to understanding the function of challenging behavior of individuals in natural settings, to initial legislation of positive behavior interventions and…

Studies that have compared forward, backward, and total task chaining procedures are reviewed along the dimensions of independent variables, dependent variables, subject variables, apparatus variables, design, and method of analysis. In general, results of studies are mixed. Potential explanations of differences are offered. (Author/CL)

The present set of papers show that leaders in the field of organizational behavior management are grappling with issues of human language and cognition. That is a good and necessary step for the field, but the solutions proposed are worrisome: adopting principles from non-behavioral psychology, adopting principles from introspection that have not…

The study examined the effects of conducting observations as part of a broader assessment of families participating in behavior family intervention (BFI). It was designed to investigate whether the observations improve intervention outcomes. Families were randomly assigned to different levels of BFI or a waitlist control condition and subsequently…

Two experiments examined how pigeons differentiate response patterns along the dimension of number. In Experiment 1, 5 pigeons received food after pecking the left key at least N times and then switching to the right key (Mechner's Fixed Consecutive Number schedule). Parameter N varied across conditions from 4 to 32. Results showed that run length…

This study investigated the effectiveness of implementing Differential Reinforcement of Other behavior (DRO) at the classwide level to decrease the disruptive behavior of seven typically developing preschool-aged children in a child care setting. After baseline data were collected, a whole interval DRO reinforcement schedule using edible rewards…