Individual variability in response to behavioral weight loss programs remains an unresolved and perplexing issue for health psychologists. Determining in advance who will succeed or fail at losing weight would be useful in devising programs that produce a more homogeneous and dramatic response to treatment. In order to examine which responses to…

Health psychologists continue to have difficulty identifying prognostic indicators of weight loss success. Psychological, social, and demographic factors have been examined, but correlations with weight loss are disappointing. Actual behaviors or quantifications of specific actions and historical measures were examined for their validity in…

The study sought to identify some of the variables controlling the severely aggressive behavior of two severely retarded children (ages 9 and 14). Experiments conducted under various conditions showed that, while aggressive behaviors sometimes serve as an escape function, the behaviors can be terminated through reduction of the causative situation…

It is argued that challenging behavior can be better understood if a correlational analysis (looking for correlations between behavior occurrence and other variables) is used in addition to functional analysis. A case example is provided of a man whose aggressive outbursts were negatively correlated with trips out of his unit. (Contains…