Researches have showed that joke telling is a type of verbal behavior associated with the field of sociolinguistics (e.g., Al-Khatib, 1999). This study aims to report Taiwanese jokes and their sociological functions that people in Taiwan attempt to communicate in jokes. Besides, this study will report what the typical topics and characteristics…

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate derived manding skills in 2 adults with severe developmental disabilities and language deficits by contriving transitive conditioned establishing operations. Specifically, we evaluated whether a history of reinforced conditional discrimination learning would ultimately result in a derived mand…

This dissertation reviewed experimental studies centering on the Lovaas Method (LovM), reviewed experimental studies centering on Verbal Behavior Approach (VBA) and/or studies that focused on the primary verbal operants, and compared the effects of LovM and VBA on the development of tact repertoires of three 11 to 12-year-old students with…

Routine hand hygiene has been cited by the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a cost-effective and important hygiene measure in preventing the spread of infectious diseases. Several studies have explored children's hand hygiene habits, effects of scheduled hand hygiene, hand hygiene environmental…

The perceived inability of behaviorism to deal with complex human behavior has been a recurrent theme among its critics. Although ingenious and subtle, even Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957) is widely faulted on these grounds, in particular, for failing to explain linguistic generativity (Chomsky, 1959). In Relational Frame Theory: A…

Binge eating is a serious behavior problem exhibited by individuals diagnosed with binge eating disorder and bulimia nervosa. Binge eating is thought to be maintained by automatic negative reinforcement in the form of relief from negative emotional responding. Current treatments produce only moderate abstinence, perhaps because they do not attempt…

Descriptive and ecobehavioral analyses were used to explore the daily activity contexts in classroom settings reflecting two distinct models of early childhood education. Activity context, social configurations, teacher behavior, and child behavior were explored, with specific consideration given to peer verbal behavior as an indicator of social…

The report describes the characteristics and usage of a computer program, the Relatedness Coefficient Matrix Program (RCMAT), designed to summarize associative responses given to verbal stimuli by individual respondents and by groups of respondents. The computer program uses the response distributions for individuals, and the pooled response…

Internal verbal processes were assumed to play a central role in complex school learning tasks. The research reported was concerned with a certain class of internal verbal behavior. The implicit associative response (IAR) was conceptualized as an internal verbal response that may occur when an individual sees or hears a word. Results of four…

Given that the associative meaning of a word is defined as the set of associates evoked by that word and the relatedness between two words is dependent upon the degree of overlap of their respective associative meaning, this program computes the relatedness coefficient for two values of the weighting component. (Author/RC)

This study examined the effects of modeling versus instructions on the choices of 3 typically developing children and 3 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) whose academic responding showed insensitivity to reinforcement schedules. During baseline, students chose between successively presented pairs of mathematics problems…

Analogue assessments were conducted with a common contingency (escape from tasks) that varied only by three different instructions describing the contingency. In one condition, the contingency was described as "taking a break," in another condition it was described as "time-out," and no description of the contingency was provided in a third…

The authors investigated the units of selective attention within working memory. In Experiment 1, a group of participants kept 1 count and 1 location in working memory and updated them repeatedly in random order. Another group of participants were instructed to achieve the same goal by memorizing the verbal and spatial information in an…

The humor response has long been considered mysterious, and it is given relatively little attention in modern experimental psychology, in spite of the fact that numerous studies suggest that it has substantial benefits for mood and health. Existing theories of humor fail to account for some of the most basic humor phenomena. On most occasions when…