Cumulates findings across existing empirical research on the effects of violent video games to estimate overall effect size and discern important trends and moderating variables. Suggests there is a smaller effect of violent video games on aggression than has been found with television violence on aggression. (SG)

This article reviews two instructional strategies, derived from applied behavior analysis, designed to develop meaningful social relations for children with autism. The literature on the implementation and effectiveness of teaching peers to be intervention agents and using group-oriented contingencies is reviewed. Emphasis is on the social…

Explores the moral sources that give multiculturalism the potency to move psychology to reassess itself, including its ability to show how psychology's tendency toward monocultural universalism has undermined its aims as a science of human behavior and a promoter of human welfare. Recommendations for confronting these issues are discussed. (GR)

Eight crows were taught to discriminate overlapping pairs of visual stimuli (A+ B-, B+ C-, C+ D-, and D+ E-). For 4 birds, the stimuli were colored cards with a circle of the same color on the reverse side whose diameter decreased from A to E (ordered feedback group). These circles were made available for comparison to potentially help the crows…

Recent experiments suggest that the effects of drugs of abuse on the discrimination of the passage of time may differ for experimenter-imposed and subject-produced events. The current experiment examined this suggestion by determining the effects of morphine on the discrimination of interresponse times (IRTs). Pigeons pecked a center key on a…

Attempts to examine the effects of variations in relative conditioned reinforcement rate on choice have been confounded by changes in rates of primary reinforcement or changes in the value of the conditioned reinforcer. To avoid these problems, this experiment used concurrent observing responses to examine sensitivity of choice to relative…

Learning and memory are central topics in behavioral neuroscience, and inbred mice strains are widely investigated. However, operant conditioning techniques are not as extensively used in this field as they should be, given the effectiveness of the methodology of the experimental analysis of behavior. In the present study, male C57Bl/6 mice,…

Although functional neuroimaging studies of human decision-making processes are increasingly common, most of the research in this area has relied on passive tasks that generate little individual variability. Relatively little attention has been paid to the ability of brain activity to predict overt behavior. Using functional magnetic resonance…

The notion that non-human animals are capable of episodic memory is highly controversial. Here, we review recent behavioral work from our laboratory showing that the fundamental features of episodic memory can be observed in rats and that, as in humans, this capacity relies on the hippocampus. We also discuss electrophysiological evidence, from…

Behavior analysts assume that private events like thinking and feeling have the same kinds of physical dimensions as other events in the world. They still claim, however, that private events can never be initiating causes of behavior. I point out that this position seems theoretically inconsistent, though exactly what qualifies as an initiating…

Classification "rules" in expert and everyday discourse are usually deficient by formal standards, lacking explicit decision procedures and precise terms. The authors argue that a central function of such weak rules is to focus on perceptual learning rather than to provide definitions. In 5 experiments, transfer following learning of family…

Behavior analysis in general and applied behavior analysis in particular requires a well developed, empirically supported, and useful approach to human language and cognition in order to fulfill its mission of providing a relatively adequate comprehensive account of complex human behavior. This article introduces a series of articles in which the…

A conceptual argument is presented for the relevance of behavior-analytic research on impulsive choice to issues of occupational safety and health. Impulsive choice is defined in terms of discounting, which is the tendency for the value of a commodity to decrease as a function of various parameters (e.g., having to wait or expend energy to receive…

Twenty peer-reviewed journal articles that described outcomes of interventions that took place in school settings and either focused on anger or included anger as a dependent variable were meta-analyzed. No differences in outcomes were found for group comparisons by school setting, special education status, entrance criteria, or treatment agents.…

Combined activation of dopamine D1- and NMDA-glutamate receptors in the nucleus accumbens has been strongly implicated in instrumental learning, the process in which an individual learns that a specific action has a wanted outcome. To assess dopaminergic activity, we presented rats with two sessions (30 trials each) of a one-lever appetitive…