The delivery of food contingent on 10 s of consecutive toy engagement resulted in a decrease in engagement and a corresponding increase in other responses that had been previously reinforced with food. Similar effects were not observed when tokens exchangeable for the same food were delivered, suggesting that engagement was disrupted by the…

New Zealand men have poor health outcomes in a range of domains compared to women. They also report barriers (both personal and structural) in their information-seeking behaviors and processes to improve health and wellbeing. This paper reports a research project in progress that is investigating the information-seeking behaviors and processes of…

There have been many studies that focus on understanding various aspects of human sexuality and how it relates to college students. However, the current research focuses on heterosexual students, leaving a void in the research that focuses on gay male college students. Even more crucially, there is a void in research that focuses on the sexual…

Eighty-one 13- to 14-year-old boys at risk for delinquency (target boys) engaged in brief dyadic conversations with their peer friends. The target boys' verbal behavior was coded into two mutually exclusive content categories, rule-break talk and normative talk. Positive social responses from peer boys for each category of talk were also recorded,…

Increases in rates of punished behavior by the administration of drugs with anxiolytic effects (called antipunishment effects) are well established in animals but not humans. The present study examined antipunishment effects of ethanol in humans using a choice procedure. The behavior of 5 participants was placed under six concurrent…

Many problematic behavioral trends and issues involving men on college campuses have been well documented in the recently published discourse on college men and masculinities. Yet, empirical explanations as to why these trends and issues persist and what college educators can do to effectively address them are largely absent from this discourse.…

This study examined the use of a progressive delay procedure with and without a concurrent activity to teach self-control to children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Three participants were initially required to wait progressively longer periods of time for access to preferred edible reinforcers. After demonstrating this…

Previous research has suggested that the topography of instructions (general vs. specific) may influence the likelihood that young children comply with instructions. The purpose of the current study was to compare the rates of task completion of a young man diagnosed with Asperger syndrome when provided with general and specific instructions…

Leisure items are commonly used as reinforcers in behavior-analytic applications. However, a defining feature of autism is the occurrence of stereotypy, and individuals with autism often engage leisure items in a stereotyped manner. The opportunity for stereotyped interaction may be the only aspect of a contingent stimulus that makes it a…

Previous research has demonstrated that extinction in the form of re-presentation of expelled bites is an effective intervention for treating food expulsion. The current study compared the effectiveness of re-presenting expulsions with a spoon to re-presenting with a Nuk[R] brush for a 4-year-old boy with a feeding disorder. Fewer expulsions were…

Fjellstedt and Sulzer-Azaroff (1973) used differential reinforcement of short latencies to decrease a child's latency to comply with instructions. We replicated this contingency with a young man diagnosed with Asperger syndrome across two tasks (question answering and math problem solving). We added a differential reinforcement contingency to…

Cultural meanings (e.g. the green eyed monster) and research interests have traditionally focused on female jealousy. In contrast, this research focused on male jealousy. Two-hundred ninety-one undergraduates at a large southeastern university completed a confidential, anonymous forty-four-item questionnaire on jealousy. Men reacted differently…

In the present study, joint-control training was applied when teaching manded selection responses to children with autism. Four vocal children with autism participated in the first experiment, two males (ages seven and eight) and two females (ages seven and nine). The results showed that it was only after object-word naming was trained under joint…