Resurgence is the recurrence of target behavior (e.g., challenging behavior) during a worsening of reinforcement conditions (e.g., increases in response effort, decreases in alternative reinforcement). Previous studies have examined the prevalence and magnitude of resurgence during functional communication training implemented with discriminative…

A competing stimulus assessment is used to identify stimuli that are associated with a low level of challenging behavior and a high level of engagement. These stimuli are often used as a treatment component for challenging behavior that is maintained by automatic reinforcement. One limitation of implementing competing stimulus assessments is that…

The present study evaluated treatment acceptability for behavioral interventions addressing challenging behaviors with Chinese caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorder. Factors influencing treatment acceptability (i.e., severity of challenging behavior and Chinese child-rearing values) were investigated. Caregivers of children aged…

Curiosity has long been extolled as a seed for employee creativity. This causality is plausible when considering curiosity as a stable trait. However, curiosity can also oscillate as a transitory state, thus complicating the causal sequence between such state curiosity and creativity. To clarify the causal ordering and achieve a refined…

There has been a growing interest in developing simulated learners to enhance learning and teaching experiences in educational environments. However, existing works have primarily focused on structured environments relying on meticulously crafted representations of tasks, thereby limiting the learner's ability to generalize skills across tasks. In…

Six experiments were conducted with graduate students to assess resurgence of compound (i.e., multi-step) academic responding under free operant procedures. Participants learned two different interobserver agreement (IOA) methods -- compound behaviors -- through instructional phases before beginning the experimental phases. Each experiment…

Functional communication training (FCT) is an evidence-based treatment for behavior targeted for reduction that often combines extinction for target responses and arranges functionally equivalent reinforcement for alternative behavior. Long-term effectiveness of FCT can become compromised when transitioning from clinic to nonclinic contexts or…

Behavior analysts typically assess and treat challenging behavior after it occurs regularly and at high severity. Although effective, this reactive approach is quite costly and resource intensive. A growing literature supports an alternative preventive approach; the first step involves conducting sensitivity tests to screen the topographies and…

In recent years, online learning methods have gradually been accepted by more and more people. A large number of online teaching courses and other resources (MOOCs) have also followed. To attract students' interest in learning, many scholars have built recommendation systems for MOOCs. However, students need a variety of different learning…

The manuscript describes an experimental investigation of a technique that might reduce memory conformity: the reinforced self-affirmation procedure (RSA). While previous studies have already demonstrated the RSA's effectiveness in reducing other memory distortions (e.g., the misinformation effect and interrogative suggestibility), this has not…

According to coercion theory (Patterson, 1982, 2016), children's aggression is developed and maintained through transactional processes between parents and their children that unfold over time. The theory provides a model of the behavioral contingencies that explain how parents and children mutually "train" each other to behave in ways…

We explored the possibility that in order for longer-form expressions of reinforcement learning ("win-calmness, loss-restlessness") to manifest across tasks, they must first develop because of micro-transactions within tasks. We found no evidence of "win-calmness" or "loss-restlessness" when wins could not be…

We replicated and extended Kanaman et al. (2022) by comparing outcomes of solitary (leisure items only), social (leisure items with social interaction), and combined (leisure items alone and leisure items with social interaction) stimulus preference assessments to determine the extent to which the inclusion of social interaction influenced the…

In synchronous-reinforcement schedules, the duration of behavior directly controls the duration of reinforcement on a moment-to-moment basis. We replicated and extended Diaz de Villegas et al. (2020) by comparing the effects of synchronous reinforcement with two accumulated-reinforcement schedules for increasing on-task behavior for seven…

Basic and retrospective translational research has shown that the magnitude of resurgence is determined by the size of the decrease in alternative reinforcement, with larger decreases producing more resurgence. However, this finding has not been evaluated prospectively with a clinical population. In Experiment 1, five participants experienced a…