An attempt is made to determine whether a behaviorally-oriented conditioning approach, "covert sensitization," is more effective in the treatment of alcoholism than the commonly used problem-solving approach, and whether female counselors employing covert sensitization were more successful than males. Thirty-two subjects selected on…

The influence of spatial features of the counseling environment on conditioning of self-reference statements was examined in two studies conducted at disparate geographical locations. The variable of room size was found to be the most significant variable in both studies. Smaller rooms tended to inhibit the conditioning process. (Author)

This case study demonstrates the value of conceptualizing functional somatic disorders as operants. The subject, an adolescent girl, diagnosed as having a "hysterical neurosis," manifested the symptoms of incessant coughing and mutism. The cough and mutism were treated by extinction and shaping, respectively. Positive results were obtained.…

The Babkin reflex is a reaction to the simultaneous pressing of the palms of the hands of the infant. (Authors)

A review of Behavioral Sociology: The Experimental Analysis of Social Process (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) compiled by Robert L. Burgess and Don Bushell, Jr. (DB)

A conditioned taste aversion experiment examined the role of the retention-interval context (between conditioning and test stages) on the modulation of long-delay latent inhibition (LI). A super-LI effect was obtained only when the animals spent the retention interval in a context that was different from that of preexposure, conditioning, and…

Conditional discrimination is inherent in the intraverbal relation when one verbal stimulus alters the evocative effect of another verbal stimulus and they collectively evoke an intraverbal response. Rarely in research on conditional discriminations have both conditional and discriminative stimuli been vocal verbal and rarely have the responses…

Extinction, a form of learning that has the ability to reshape learned behavior based on new experiences, has been heavily studied utilizing fear learning paradigms. Mechanisms underlying extinction of positive-valence associations, such as drug self-administration and place preference, are poorly understood yet may have important relevance to…

Following pre-training with everyday objects, 8 children aged from 2 to 4 years learned to produce one manual sign (fists placed one above the other, in front of body) to one stimulus and an alternative manual sign (shoulders touched with ipsilateral hands) to the other stimulus, with each of three pairs of different arbitrary wooden shapes (Set…

Participants were trained in a series of interrelated conditional discriminations that aimed to establish four 4-member equivalence classes (i.e., A1-B1-C1-D1, A2-B2-C2-D2, A3-B3-C3-D3, A4-B4-C4-D4). During this training, the four A stimuli (i.e., A1, A2, A3, and A4) were compounded with pictures containing positive or negative evaluative…

The aim of this study was to examine parameters affecting age differences in eyeblink classical conditioning in a large sample of young and middle-aged rabbits. A total of 122 rabbits of mean ages of 4 or 26 mo were tested at inter-stimulus intervals (ISIs) of 600 or 750 msec in the delay or trace paradigms. Paradigm affected both age groups…

Pavlovian fear conditioning is a robust and enduring form of emotional learning that provides an ideal model system for studying contextual regulation of memory retrieval. After extinction the expression of fear conditional responses (CRs) is context-specific: A conditional stimulus (CS) elicits greater conditional responding outside compared with…

This study tested the effects of post-session wheel running on within-session changes in operant responding. Lever-pressing by six rats was reinforced by a food pellet under a continuous reinforcement (CRF) schedule in 30-min sessions. Two different flavored food pellets were used as reinforcers. In the wheel conditions, 30-min operant-sessions…