Linked activity schedules were used to establish appropriate game play in children with autism during a game of hide-and-seek. All 6 participants demonstrated acquisition of appropriate play skills in the presence of the activity schedules and maintained responding during subsequent phases. When the schedules were removed, responding decreased to…

Joseph V. Brady (1922-2011) created behavior-analytic neuroscience and the analytic framework for understanding how the external and internal neurobiological environments and mechanisms interact. Brady's approach offered synthesis as well as analysis. He embraced Findley's approach to constructing multioperant behavioral repertoires that found…

In a 3-tiered, prevention-oriented framework, Tier II (secondary, targeted) interventions are designed for students whose problem behaviors have not responded to Tier I but are not severe enough to warrant an individualized Tier III intervention. Tier II interventions are implemented similarly across students receiving the intervention and can be…

A popular-press self-help manual is reviewed with an eye toward two issues. First, the popularity of such books documents the existence of considerable demand for technologies that address the everyday problems (in the present case, troublesome conversations) of nondisordered individuals. Second, many ideas invoked in popular-press books may be…

Objective: Depression is associated with poor social problem solving, and psychotherapies that focus on problem-solving skills are efficacious in treating depression. We examined the associations between treatment, social problem solving, and depression in a randomized clinical trial testing the efficacy of psychotherapy augmentation for…

Virtual worlds provide useful platforms for social behavioral research, but impose stringent limitations on the rules of engagement, responsiveness, and data collection, along with other resource restrictions. The major challenge from a computer science standpoint in developing group behavior applications for such environments is accommodating the…

Eighty-one 13- to 14-year-old boys at risk for delinquency (target boys) engaged in brief dyadic conversations with their peer friends. The target boys' verbal behavior was coded into two mutually exclusive content categories, rule-break talk and normative talk. Positive social responses from peer boys for each category of talk were also recorded,…

Comments on a article by Blass (January 2009) who pointed out his historical perspective on human welfare problems facing a democratic society. The author would like to add some information from the cognitive-developmental framework that seems most pertinent to these larger issues of obedience and disobedience. It is relevant to note that a number…

This article examines youth transitions and youth offending in tandem. It argues that the transition to adulthood is heavily implicated in the fact that most offending occurs in the youth phase. Drawing on a study of 20 male and 20 female persistent young offenders in Scotland, it explores young people's desire for integration with others in the…

The growing Hispanic population has come into increasing contact with the larger population of non-Hispanic Whites. It is important to understand the effects of this contact on prejudice. The effects of six kinds of contact were examined for their effects on prejudice between Hispanics (n = 156) and non-Hispanic Whites (n = 1,479) who were…

Bockenholt and van der Heijden's results regarding compliance with insurance regulations--that the enforcement activities of a regulatory agency were relatively unpredictive of compliance--are consistent with findings from other domains (e.g., tax adherence), where personal factors and informal social controls have been shown to play a more…

The results of these experiments strongly suggest that the occurrence of behavioral contagion depended on the relative advantage an initiator's action establishes over the other members of the group. (SD)

Analyses of self-disclosure behavior under multiple conditions of social isolation and confinement replicated earlier findings and generally confirmed hypotheses derived from social penetration theory. Major findings link self-disclosure to environmental parameters and interpersonal friction. In the Privacy without Stimulation condition, Ss…

A study of the frequency of looking both ways before crossing a street revealed that both males and females tend to look both ways more often when accompanied by juveniles than when alone, and that when males and females are together, males look both ways more often than do females. (Author/MA)