Rule-governed behavior is generally considered an integral component of complex verbal repertoires but has rarely been the subject of empirical research. In particular, little or no previous research has attempted to establish rule-governed behavior in individuals who do not already display the repertoire. This study consists of two experiments…

We assessed developmental stability and context generalizability of temperament in pigtailed macaques ("Macaca nemestrina") from the University of Washington Infant Primate Research Lab. A principal components analysis condensed 6 behavioral measures into 2 components, interpreted as reactivity and boldness. Changes in these measures over the 1st…

Machismo continues to be a defining aspect of Mexican American men that informs a wide array of psychological and behavioral dimensions. Although strides have been made in this area of research, understanding of the role of this construct in the lives of gay men remains incomplete. Our purpose in this study was to gain a deeper understanding of…

Two experiments explored learning, generalization, and the influence of semantics on orthographic processing in an artificial language. In Experiment 1, 16 adults learned to read 36 novel words written in novel characters. Posttraining, participants discriminated trained from untrained items and generalized to novel items, demonstrating extraction…

The purpose of this study was to determine if an intervention consisting of contingently imitating play, modeling expansions of play actions, and describing play actions increased the diversity of object play in young children with disabilities. The multicomponent intervention was introduced in a multiple-probe design across three young children…

Every article on stimulus equivalence or derived stimulus relations published in the "Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis" was evaluated in terms of characteristics that are relevant to the development of applied technologies: the type of participants, settings, procedure automated vs. tabletop), stimuli, and stimulus sensory modality; types of…

Improving employees' posture may decrease the risk of musculoskeletal disorders. The current paper is a systematic replication and extension of Sigurdsson and Austin (2008), who found that an intervention consisting of information, real-time feedback, and self-monitoring improved participant posture at mock workstations. In the current study,…

Drawing upon information about the Down syndrome behavioral phenotype and empirically based intervention strategies, we examined intervention addressing early communication impairments in young children with Down syndrome. Intervention involved multiple opportunities, shaping, prompting, and reinforcement to address both verbal imitation and…

Many individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulty recognizing emotions in themselves and others. Three children (all males) participated in the study. In a multi-element design children with ASD were trained to tact situation-based emotions (i.e., "happy", "sad", "angry", and "afraid") using novel video based scenarios. To…

Twelve empirical studies published since 1996 regarding the effects of gender on the supervisory relationship are reviewed. Each study was reviewed and critiqued in relation to its methodology, research design, critical findings, and limitations. The results of these studies indicate that (a) gender influences the openness and affiliation one…

Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) has received strong empirical support and is practiced widely as a treatment for borderline personality disorder (BPD) and BPD with comorbid substance use disorders (BPD-SUD). Therapeutic success in DBT requires that individuals generalize newly acquired skills to their natural environment. However, there have…

The Swedish mods of the 1960s frightened the parental generation like few other youth cultures. Was the concern justified--was the mod culture a hotbed of social maladjustment? Or would the mods come to live conventional lives to the same extent as their peers? We present analyses from a large longitudinal study allowing for a follow-up of…

Some students with intellectual disabilities require explicit instruction of language skills, including preposition use; however, little is known about effective ways to teach preposition use to this population. This study examined direct instruction (DI) to teach students to use and respond to prepositions. Results indicated that DI was an…

Examination of measurement invariance provides a powerful method to evaluate the hypothesis that the same set of psychological constructs underlies a set of test scores in different populations. If measurement invariance is observed, then the same psychological meaning can be ascribed to scores in both populations. In this study, the measurement…

We examine how extended engagement in argumentation with peers leads to enhanced metalevel understanding of argumentive discourse. Following such engagement, young adolescents demonstrated enhanced understanding of counterargument and use of evidence as objectives of skilled argumentation, relative to a nonparticipating comparison group. Among the…