Jack Michael offered a course on verbal behavior almost every year throughout his teaching career. Jack was also interested in the application of Skinner's work and in 1976 began to offer a graduate course at Western Michigan University titled Verbal Behavior Applications. Jack and his students pursued the application of Skinner's work on verbal…

The task of extending Skinner's (1957) interpretation of verbal behavior includes accounting for the moment-to-moment changes in stimulus control as one speaks. A consideration of the behavior of the reader reminds us of the continuous evocative effect of verbal stimuli on readers, listeners, and speakers. Collateral discriminative responses to…

Most long-term memories are forgotten. What happens, then, to the changes in neuronal gene expression that were initially required to encode and maintain the memory? Here we show that the decay of recall for long-term sensitization memory in "Aplysia" is accompanied both by a form of savings memory (easier relearning) and by persistent…

Traumatic experiences early in life can contribute to the development of mood and anxiety disorders that manifest during adolescence and young adulthood. In young rats exposed to acute fear or stress, alterations in neural development can lead to enduring behavioral abnormalities. Here, we used a modified extinction intervention…

Bidirectional naming (BiN) is the integration of speaker and listener responses, reinforced by social consequences. Unfortunately, these consequences often do not function as reinforcers for behavior in children with autism. Accordingly, the repertoire of BiN is also often limited in these children. Previous research has suggested that so-called…

People diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may need specific teaching to learn mands for information. Unfortunately, little research has been published on methods for teaching the mand "When?" to this population. The purpose of the current study was to replicate and extend previous research by teaching 3 children diagnosed with…

Most verbal behavior curricula for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) focus on teaching multiple mands during the early stages of training (e.g., picture exchange communication system; Bondy & Frost, 1994). However, few, if any, of those curricula train children with ASD to differentially mand only for reinforcers that are reasonable…

Pavlovian aversive conditioning is a fundamental form of learning helping organisms survive in their environment. Previous research has suggested that organisms are prepared to preferentially learn to fear stimuli that have posed threats to survival across evolution. Here, we examined whether enhanced Pavlovian aversive conditioning can occur to…

L-type voltage-gated calcium channels (LVGCCs) have been implicated in both the formation and the reduction of fear through Pavlovian fear conditioning and extinction. Despite the implication of LVGCCs in fear learning and extinction, studies of the individual LVGCC subtypes, Ca[subscript V]1.2 and Ca[subscript V] 1.3, using transgenic mice have…

The present research aims to develop a theory on teacher-student interaction in the first year of primary school period. The present research was designed in grounded theory research which is one of the qualitative research traditions. A total of 18 primary school children started the first year of primary school. Data were collected through…

Presentation of a previously trained Pavlovian conditioned stimulus while an organism is engaged in operant responding can moderate the rate of responding, a phenomenon known as Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer. Although it is well known that Pavlovian contingencies will generate conditioned behavior that is temporally organized with respect to…

In cocaine use disorder, relapse can be elicited by drug-associated cues despite long periods of abstinence. The persistence of drug-associated cues in eliciting drug seeking suggests enduring changes in structural and functional plasticity, which may be mediated by basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF, FGF2). Stimulant drug use increases bFGF…

Fear-relevant stimuli such as snakes and spiders are thought to capture attention due to evolutionary significance. Classical conditioning experiments indicate that these stimuli accelerate learning, while instructed extinction experiments suggest they may be less responsive to instructions. We manipulated stimulus type during instructed aversive…

Signaled active avoidance (SigAA) is the key experimental procedure for studying the acquisition of instrumental responses toward conditioned threat cues. Traditional analytic approaches (e.g., general linear model) often obfuscate important individual differences, although individual differences in learned responses characterize both animal and…

In the current investigation, we reviewed the literature on mand training for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in schools. Ninety-three studies met our inclusion criteria including 225 individual participants. Data were extracted related to participant demographics (e.g., age, disability, response form) and study…