A teacher describes her efforts to deal with an 11-year-old severely emotionally impaired girl in a classroom with other acting out, aggressive students. The girl's behavior problems included breaking, tearing, spitting, swearing, running, and sexual aggression. A positive reinforcedment system was found to be primarily responsible for success in…

This paper explains the brief stimulus preference procedure (SPA), which is designed to identify efficiently the effective reinforcers for children with autism and other developmental disabilities. SPA involves presenting the child with four items he/she generally responds well to plus one new item. After allowing the child to pick his preferred…

The basic research question which this study addressed was whether children could be taught to consider carefully their behavior and its consequences, thereby participating to a greater degree in non-TV activities which contribute to the achievement of goals. Among the more specific research questions were the following (1) Will varying the…

The paper provides an overview of a prelanguage program that was developed for a low functioning, 7 1/2-year-old congenitally deaf-blind child. It is explained that the program was based on principles and procedures as they related to operant behaviors, that reinforcement techniques were continually applied, and that a great deal of successive…

The effects of different schedules of noncontingent reward on subsequent learning in children were investigated. In the first phase of the experiment subjects performed a block-design matching task and received one of three schedules of noncontingent reward, i.e., continuous reward (Group CRF), random reward on 50% of the trials (Group 50R), or no…

Teacher reinforcement of indoor play equipment utilization was employed as a procedure to increase the peer social interaction of an asocial four-year-old female child. Touching peers, using peers' names, verbalizations, solitary or parallel manipulation, cooperative construction, and cooperative thematic play were dependent variables. Treatment…

This report is an attempt to analyze the aggression which occurs within extended dyadic interchanges of parent and child, husband and wife, or sibling and peers. An argument is made for a "performance" theory of children's noxious behaviors based on the assumption that most children, exposed to modeling and reinforcing contingencies through which…

Many politicians, policy makers, and citizens tend to ignore both the value of prevention and the voluminous research disproving the efficacy of punishment. This study offers a review of historical responses to school violence and discipline and offers some suggestions in these areas. After describing the American penchant for punitive correction,…

Typical learned helplessness research has involved the presentation of non-contingent, aversive events followed by measures of performance on subsequent tasks; recent investigations have focused on the effect of non-contingent rewards. To examine the effects of non-contingent rewards on children, two studies were conducted, in which children were…

Two types of adaptation can be conceptualized: the first dealing with the efforts of a child during the course of development to continuously improve the efficiency and economy of his or her intelligence, and the second dealing with responses to demands of the environment. This distinction is useful in conceptualizing the adaptive benefits of…

From the perspective of games theory, this article suggests some ways in which young parents can increase the positive effects of children on their marriage. The plea is less for planned parenthood than for planned "education" for parenthood. Commonsense advice is presented for dealing with such issues as: self-actualization, parenthood education,…

The high levels of juvenile crime in Australian society are reflected in the schools. This paper suggests a number of issues and concepts on juvenile misbehavior which should be of interest to educators. Due to rapid changes, there is less agreement on the foundational principles of culture. It is argued that educators need to help society…

P. M. Lewinsohn has theorized that depression is related to the amount of positive reinforcement that an individual receives. Lewinsohn has supported this model in adults by showing that depression is correlated with an increase in unpleasant activities and a decrease in pleasant activities. This study extended Lewinsohn's model by developing…