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…

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…

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 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…

Due to its efficacy shown in early research with children, imagined contact has often been proposed as a school prejudice-reduction intervention. Nevertheless, some of the more recent studies have not been able to replicate the expected effects. This review presents the first systematic examination of the effect of imagined contact interventions…

Stimulus-response binding and retrieval (SRBR) is a fundamental mechanism driving behavior automatization. In five experiments, we investigated the modulatory role of affective consequences (AC) on SRBR effects to test whether binding/retrieval can explain instrumental learning (i.e., the "law of effect"). SRBR effects were assessed in a…

According to the School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS; 2022) three notable discipline problems reported by public schools including acts of disrespect toward teachers, verbal abuse towards teachers, and widespread disorder in classrooms has been consistently increasing over the last decade (U.S. Department of Education, 2022). Noncontingent…

This study used naturalistic audio-visual recordings from early care and education (ECE) settings to examine the associations between toddlers' (76 toddlers, 40 female, M[subscript age] = 32.94 months, SD = 4.92 months) multimodal emotion expressions and emotion-related vocalizations with contingent teacher interventions. Findings indicated a…

Teaching an infant manual signs is beneficial as it promotes early communication, improves socialization, and can functionally replace behaviors such as crying and whining. Improving early communication also may reduce the probability of an infant engaging in dangerous behavior, like unsafe climbing. The purpose of this study was to extend…