Using Ss high or low on a social desirability scale, a verbal conditioning attempt was made to alter the relative frequency of self referent statements that were either positive or negative. (Author)

Mand functions for two stimuli (A1 and A2) were trained for 3 children with autism and were then incorporated into two related conditional discriminations (A1-B1/A2 -B2 and B1-C1/B2-C2). Tests were conducted to probe for a derived transfer of mand response functions from Al and A2 to C1 and C2, respectively. When 1 participant failed to…

Joint attention, a synchronizing of the attention of two or more persons, has been an increasing focus of research in cognitive developmental psychology. Research in this area has progressed mainly outside of behavior analysis, and behavior-analytic research and theory has tended to ignore the work on joint attention. It is argued here, on the one…

The present paper comments on and extends the citation analysis of verbal operant publications based on Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" (1957) by Dymond, O'Hora, Whelan, and O'Donovan (2006). Variations in population parameters were evaluated for only those studies that Dymond et al. categorized as empirical. Preliminary results indicate that the…

The conceptual basis for many effective language-training programs are based on Skinner's (1957) analysis of verbal behavior. Skinner described several elementary verbal operants including mands, tacts, intraverbals, and echoics. According to Skinner, responses that are the same topography may actually be functionally independent. Previous…

This article presents a detailed counseling strategy based on the principles of verbal operant conditioning. It argues that such a strategy should be effective for working with vocational rehabilitation clients whose main complaint is that they are unable to make vocational decisions. (Author)

Some 96 fourth-grade boys participated in a study investigating the influence of personality and stimulus characteristics on perceptions of the meanings of verbal evaluations, and the functioning of differentially perceived evaluations as reinforcers in a learning task. Personality variables measured were anxiety, locus of control, need for…

A major concern of this report was to compare the effect of three verbal reinforcement combinations (VRCs) on the rate at which children learn a simultaneous two-choice discrimination problem. The experiments were designed to test the following: (1) whether relative effectiveness of the VRCs was dependent upon task complexity or subject age; (2)…

An institutionalized, retarded, adult male's response to verbal commands was increased through the use of positive control of a discriminative stimulus. Operant conditioning was noted as a possible means of enabling retarded individuals to acquire behaviors fundamental to a self-help repetoire. (Editor)

The purpose of the current investigation was to quantify the quality of various verbal items on a college population that was voluntarily involved in remedial training in the basic academic skills. (Author)

An experimental conditioning treatment was conducted with two stuttering preschool children. (Author)