Understanding how learning changes during human development has been one of the long-standing objectives of developmental science. Recently, advances in computational biology have demonstrated that humans display a bias when learning to navigate novel environments through rewards and punishments: they learn more from outcomes that confirm their…

Optimal integration of positive and negative outcomes during learning varies depending on an environment's reward statistics. The present study investigated the extent to which children, adolescents, and adults (N = 142 8-25 year-olds, 55% female, 42% White, 31% Asian, 17% mixed race, and 8% Black; data collected in 2021) adapt their weighting of…

This study focuses on the relationship between reinforcement sensitivity and aggression according to the combination of forms and functions of aggression (i.e. proactive overt, proactive relational, reactive overt and reactive relational), and on the moderating role of gender in this relationship. The survey included 656 adolescents (55.33% male)…

Objective: Mobile health apps hold potential to support and reinforce positive health behaviours, especially among young people with chronic diseases like asthma that require continual self-management. We aimed to gain feedback from adolescents with asthma on two existing asthma self-management apps to guide the development of an evidence- and…

We evaluated the effects of using prompts and reinforcement procedures to increase the social interaction of two children with autism (ASD). This study took place during the context of a hockey practice. Two adolescent participants were evaluated using an ABAB single subject reversal design. Baseline data were collected prior to and after the…

Previous studies have examined the maturation of learning and memory abilities during early stages of development. By comparison, much less is known about the ontogeny of learning and memory during later stages of development, including adolescence. In Experiment 1, we tested the ability of adolescent and adult rats to learn a Pavlovian negative…

Developmental neuroscience models suggest that changes in responsiveness to incentives contribute to increases in adolescent risk behavior, including substance use. Trajectories of sensitivity to reward (SR) and sensitivity to punishment (SP) were examined and tested as predictors of escalation of early substance use in a community sample of…

Behavioral inhibition is a temperament characterized in infancy and early childhood by a tendency to withdraw from novel or unfamiliar stimuli. Children exhibiting this disposition, relative to children with other dispositions, are more socially reticent, less likely to initiate interaction with peers, and more likely to develop anxiety over time.…

The study examined the contribution of reinforcement sensitivity to childhood personality at three levels of the hierarchical structure, mid-level traits, the Big Five and two higher-order factors, and the moderating role of sex and age in a sample of 3-18-year-olds. The canonical correlation analyses indicated that reinforcement sensitivity and…

The high-school problem is nothing new. In one of his early writings, James S. Coleman, the brilliant sociologist who later wrote the famous report on the equality of opportunity for education (the "Coleman Report") and the first study of public and private schools, identified the essential high-school problem: "our adolescents today are cut off,…

The article describes the Behavior Management Level System (BMLS), a model program for emotionally disturbed adolescents combining a token economy approach with a hierarchial system of levels which provides an objective standard for graduation from the system. Points are accumulated as immediate reinforcers and traded for tangible or social…

The study was designed to examine and clarify systematically the reinforcement parameters that underlie 96 adolescent male delinquents' responses to verbal and token reward and/or punishment. (Author)

The reasons for clinical failures of classroom token economies are divided into three groups: (1) Problems associated with the token program itself, (2) Problems associated with the teacher, and (3) Problems associated with the specific population on which the classroom token economy is used. Each of these problem areas is discussed. (Author)

This pamphlet briefly reports on an experimental program designed to help the underachieving student whose academic and behavioral problems keep him in trouble with school officials. The project is based on the following premises: (1) children who learn basic academic skills and appropriate behaviors will be less vulnerable to future problems; (2)…