In this Methods Showcase Article, we outline a workflow for running behavioral experiments online, with a focus on experiments that rely on presentation of complex stimuli and measurement of reaction times, which includes many psycholinguistic experiments. The workflow that we describe here relies on three tools: OpenSesame/OSWeb (open source)…

In science in general and in the context of single-case experimental designs, replication of the effects of the intervention within and/or across participants or experiments is crucial for establishing causality and for assessing the generality of the intervention effect. Specific developments and proposals for assessing whether an effect has been…

Signaled active avoidance (SigAA) is the key experimental procedure for studying the acquisition of instrumental responses toward conditioned threat cues. Traditional analytic approaches (e.g., general linear model) often obfuscate important individual differences, although individual differences in learned responses characterize both animal and…

Reproducibility crises have arisen in psychology and other behavioral sciences, spurring efforts to ensure research findings are credible and replicable. Although reforms are occurring at professional levels in terms of new publication parameters and open science initiatives, the credibility and reproducibility of undergraduate research deserves…

Integral to most undergraduate psychology degree programs are research methods courses. Students learn about theory, study design and hypothesis testing, and gain knowledge that is assessed by laboratory reports. We describe a problem-based learning approach with an emphasis on acquisition of study design skills. Working in small groups, students…

According to the National Institutes of Health, "Translational research includes …the process of applying discoveries generated during research in the laboratory, and in preclinical studies, to the development of trials and studies in humans… [and] research aimed at enhancing the adoption of best practices in the community. Following this…

Crowdsourcing is a process in which a firm parcels out work to a "crowd" and offers payment for anyone within the crowd who completes the task determined by that firm. A growing number of behavioral scientists have begun using the Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to facilitate their research and practice, but there is apparently not one academic…

Functional analytic psychotherapy (FAP) provides a behavioral analysis of the psychotherapy relationship that directly applies basic research findings to outpatient psychotherapy settings. Specifically, FAP suggests that a therapist's in vivo (i.e., in-session) contingent responding to targeted client behaviors, particularly positive reinforcement…

In the present article we re-examine one of the most deeply entrenched assumptions in modern attitude research, namely, that implicit social cognition is a product of associations between mental representations. More precisely, we argue that the analysis of implicit social cognition in psychology is curtailed by the widespread adoption of the…

Presents a short biography of one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. The 2012 winner is Bethany Ann Teachman for transformative, translational research integrating social cognition, life-span, and perceptual approaches to investigating clinical…

Behavior analysis has exploited conceptual tools whose experimental validity has been amply demonstrated, but their relevance to large-scale and fine-grained behavioral phenomena remains uncertain, because the experimental analysis of these domains faces formidable obstacles of measurement and control. In this essay I suggest that, at least at the…

Published just over a half century ago, "Schedules of Reinforcement" (SOR) (Ferster & Skinner, 1957) marked the seminal empirical contribution of the book's second author and ushered in an era of research on behavior-environment relationships. This article traces the origins of both the methods and the data presented in SOR, and its legacy within…

Legitimate knowledge claims about causation have been a central concern among evaluators and applied researchers for several decades and often have been the subject of heated debates. In recent years these debates have resurfaced with a renewed intensity, due in part to the priority currently being given to randomized experiments by many funders…

On July 26, 2011, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) with the purpose of soliciting comments on how current regulations for protecting research participants could be modernized and revised. The rationale for revising the regulations was as follows: this ANPRM seeks comment on…

Within the subfields of political psychology and the study of gender, the introduction of new data collection efforts, methodologies, and theoretical approaches are transforming our understandings of these two fields and the places at which they intersect. In this article we present an overview of the research that was presented at a National…