"In the late 1950's, Jack Michael, a bright but irritating young psychology instructor, moved from the Universities of Kansas to Houston to Arizona State. Along the way he befriended two nontraditional students, protected them through their Ph.D. programs, and turned them loose on the world: Teodoro Ayllon…and Montrose Wolf…" (Risley,…

It has often been suggested that nonexperts find the communication of behavior analysts to be viscerally off-putting. We argue that this concern should be the focus of systematic research rather than mere discussion, and describe five studies that illustrate how publicly available lists of word-emotion ratings can be used to estimate the responses…

The purpose of the current paper is to describe the impact of applied behaviour analysis on language treatment for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) diagnoses. Specifically, this paper will describe Skinner's theory of verbal behaviour and its contributions to evidence-based treatments for communication deficits among individuals with…

Skinner discussed the topic of motivation in every chapter of the book "Verbal Behavior" (1957), usually with his preferred terminology of ''deprivation, satiation, and aversive stimulation.'' In the current paper, direct quotations are used to systematically take the reader through 30 separate points made by Skinner…

Results of a survey sent to members of the editorial boards of five behavior-analytic journals in 1990 indicated that there was no consensus among respondents with respect to whether delayed events can function as reinforcers (Schlinger, Blakely, Fillhard, & Poling, 1991). Since that time, several studies with nonhuman animals have demonstrated…

The author argues that the field of behavior intervention has two subject matters that are distinct in several ways. Each is derived from, and contributes to, the foundation science and epistemology associated with behavior selection. The differences that the author wants to describe occurred to him as he sought to identify which of two Spanish…

This study was designed to answer two major questions: (1) whether or not operant conditioning procedures supplemented by treatments drawn from other areas of experimental psychology could produce changes in counselor interviewing behavior, and (2) how much change resulted from response specific reinforcement and how much from other factors. Three…