For much of his career, B. F. Skinner displayed the optimism that is often attributed to behaviorists. With time, however, he became less and less sanguine about the power of behavior science to solve the major problems facing humanity. Near the end of his life he concluded that a fair consideration of principles revealed by the scientific…

Success in any organization may depend on changing the behavior of stakeholders to meet new challenges. But humans have brains designed to register change as threat, and thus they often cling to old habits and mindsets. Recent breakthroughs in brain research provide a fresh alternative to both behavioral and humanistic approaches to organizational…

The gap between scientific knowledge and real world practice continues to be a major conundrum for the behavioral sciences. This paper briefly reviews the development of behavioral research and describes problems that have arisen in meeting the goal of improving behavioral interventions through science. Based on published literature and personal…

A model of memory retrieval is described. The model embodies four main claims: (a) temporal memory--traces of items are represented in memory partly in terms of their temporal distance from the present; (b) scale-similarity--similar mechanisms govern retrieval from memory over many different timescales; (c) local distinctiveness--performance on a…

References to ultimate reality commonly turn up in the behavioral literature as references to determinism. However, this determinism is often difficult to interpret. There are different kinds of determinisms as well as different kinds of ultimate realities for a behaviorist to consider. To clarify some of the issues involved, the views of ultimate…

A didactic discussion of a latent variable modeling approach is presented that addresses frequent empirical concerns of social, behavioral, and educational researchers involved in longitudinal studies. The method is suitable when the purpose is to analyze repeated measure data along several interrelated dimensions and to explain some of the…

Background: To achieve high participation rates and a representative sample, active parent consent procedures require a significant investment of study resources. The purpose of this article is to describe processes and outcomes of utilizing active parent consent procedures with sixth-grade students from urban, ethnically diverse, economically…

The authors' association goes back more than 40 years, when they were both starting doctoral studies in special education for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) at the University of Kansas. In this article, the authors provide a balanced (albeit biased) account of the good and the bad, including some of the many achievements…

The author focuses on the concept of experience, exploring its meaning, its interpretation, and how it facilitates learning. (CH)

Examined the 27 studies comprising the "Counseling Process and Outcomes" section of the 1982 "Journal of Counseling Psychology" (JCP) to identify underlying research themes. Results indicated that the social influence model was the primary representative model for the JCP's 1982 research into process and outcome. (BH)

A study designed to investigate the effects of permanent maternal separation in infant rhesus monkeys, 60, 90, and 120 days of age, and housed individually or in Paris. Monkeys separated at 90 days and housed individually showed the highest levels of disturbance. (DP)