Adolescent risky behaviors are often interpreted as products of self-control failures stemming from a developmental mismatch between reward processing and cognitive control systems. However, adolescents -- much like adults -- may also engage in risky behaviors because of conscious and deliberate (even if objectively poor) decisions. It is not easy…

The minimal control principle (Taatgen, 2007) predicts that people strive for problem-solving strategies that require as few internal control states as possible. In an experiment with the Abstract Decision Making task (ADM task; Joslyn & Hunt, 1998) the reward structure was manipulated to make either a low-control strategy or a high-strategy…

Individuals with autism often lack motivation to engage in sustained physical activity. Three adolescents with severe autism participated in a 16-week program and each regularly completed 30 min of cycling at the end of program. This study investigated the effect of a self-regulation instructional strategy on sustained cycling, which included…

Choices between an immediate reward and a delayed reward of higher value were presented to 66 children three, four, and five years of age who had been randomly assigned to short or long conditions of delay. Regardless of age, children did not choose the delayed reward. (Author/MP)

Study supported in part by U.S. Office of Education, OEG-2-7-070002-3005.

Two studies involving college students examined mechanisms responsible for observed self-reinforcement effects. Results seemed to support the view that self-reinforcement procedures work by setting a socially available standard against which performance can be evaluated. (CL)

This series of papers was presented in a symposium on behavior therapy. Each paper represents a separate study focusing on one aspect of behavior modification. The issue of reinforcement is prominant with regard to its type and source. Methods of self-reinforcement and older-peer modeling are studied. The suggestion that subjects who reinforce…

Smokers (N = 90) were assigned to 10 treatment conditions; another 20 smokers were included in a no-apply control group. The treatment effects of aversive conditioning were negligible, and in some instances they were surpassed by the effects of controls for nonspecific treatment factors and placebo effects. (Author)

Paper presented at Conference on New Approaches to Behavioral Research on Smoking sponsored by the American Cancer Society in Tucson, Arizona, on March 30 and 31, 1972. (DS)

Results supported the hypothesis that first graders whose self-verbalizations contained an instrument rationale (e.g., "If I wait, I'll get another cookie") would delay gratification longer than those whose self-verbalizations contained a moralistic rationale (e.g., "It is good to wait"). (MP)

The effects of two types of self-determined reinforcement contingencies on children's test performances were investigated and compared to each other and to externally determined contingencies. Suggested that self-management that includes self-determined contingencies of reinforcement procedures may provide useful techniques. (Author)

The study assessed whether 4 students (ages 9-13) with severe autistic disabilities could learn to use a self-management treatment package to reduce stereotypic behavior. Use of the procedures greatly reduced levels of stereotypic behavior. Improvement also occurred for extended periods of time in new settings without the presence of a treatment…

Dynamical, self-organizing models of sentence processing predict "digging-in" effects: The more committed the parser becomes to a wrong syntactic choice, the harder it is to reanalyze. Experiment 1 replicates previous grammaticality judgment studies (F. Ferreira & J. M. Henderson, 1991b, 1993), revealing a deleterious effect of lengthening the…

Following trials in which children self-administered prizes, subjects in the stringent-demand group performed significantly better, during both the incentive and the extinction conditions, on time at task, number of correct problems, and number of problems attempted, than did subjects in lenient-demand and control groups. (Author/CP)