AN ANALYSIS OF SOME VARIABLES INFLUENCING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF REPRIMANDS

Although several studies have shown that social reprimands can function as punishers, no study reported to date has isolated any of the factors influencing reprimand efficacy. Three experiments were conducted to investigate several factors. Experiment 1 used an alternating treatments design and was conducted on two elementary school boys, one of whom was in a special education class. Results showed that verbal reprimands delivered with eye contact and firm grasp of the student's shoulders reduced disruptive behavior to a greater extent than did verbal reprimands delivered without eye contact and grasp. Both types of reprimand were more effective than a baseline condition during which disruptive behavior was ignored. Experiment 2 also used an alternating treatments design and was conducted on one elementary school boy. Results demonstrated that reprimands delivered from one meter away were considerably more effective than reprimands delivered from seven meters away. Experiment 3 used a reversal design and was conducted on two pairs of elementary school children, one a pair of boys and the other a pair of girls. Results demonstrated that reprimands delivered to just one member of the pair reduced the disruptive behavior of both members of the pair. Thus, the effects of reprimands “spilled” over to nonreprimanded students.     

An evaluation of the properties of attention as reinforcement for destructive and appropriate behavior

The analogue functional analysis described by Iwata, Dorsey, Slifer, Bauman, and Richman (1982/1994) identifies broad classes of variables (e.g., positive reinforcement) that maintain destructive behavior (Fisher, Ninness, Piazza, & Owen-DeSchryver, 1996). However, it is likely that some types of stimuli may be more effective reinforcers than others. In the current investigation, we identified 2 participants whose destructive behavior was maintained by attention. We used concurrent schedules of reinforcement to evaluate how different types of attention affected both destructive and appropriate behavior. We showed that for 1 participant praise was not an effective reinforcer when verbal reprimands were available; however, praise was an effective reinforcer when verbal reprimands were unavailable. For the 2nd participant, we identified a type of attention that effectively competed with verbal reprimands as reinforcement. We then used the information obtained from the assessments to develop effective treatments to reduce destructive behavior and increase an alternative communicative response.     

AN INVESTIGATION OF THE EFFECTS OF TOKEN REINFORCEMENT ON DIVERGENT VERBAL RESPONDING1

The effect of token reinforcement on three classes of divergent verbal responding to verbal stimulus items from three measures of the Wallach-Kogan Creativity test was examined. The subjects consisted of two “gifted”, two “average”, and two “learning disabled” children from a public-school setting. The design utilized both an intra-subject and inter-subject multiple-baseline design with a reversal design added. Tokens were dispensed contingent upon the number of appropriate verbal responses to each stimulus item, i.e., a continuous schedule of reinforcement was used—one token per appropriate response. Interobserver agreement on “appropiateness” was 993%. The tokens could be used to “purchase” items listed in a “menu” format (e.g., ball and jacks—100 tokens). Consistently large effects of token reinforcement were observed, without generalization of effect across the three classes of behaviors, or conditions. These results support the works of Goetz and Baer (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1973, 6 , 209–217), Goetz and Salmonson (Behavior Analysis and Education, G. Semb, (Ed.), University of Kansas, 1972, 53–61), and Maloney and Hopkins (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1973, 6 , 425–434). Implications lie in continued experimental analysis of behavior approach to the concept called “creativity”. Additionally, implications are made in classroom application of assessing and intervening in the area of divergent responding for children with deficits in those areas.     

DENTIST-IMPLEMENTED CONTINGENT ESCAPE FOR MANAGEMENT OF DISRUPTIVE CHILD BEHAVIOR

We evaluated the effectiveness of a dentist-implemented intervention in which brief escape from dental treatment was provided to manage disruptive child behavior during restorative dental treatment. Within a multiple baseline design across subjects, 4 children, aged 3 to 7 years, were provided temporary escape from dental treatment contingent upon brief periods of cooperative behavior. Disruptive behavior decreased when the appropriate escape contingency was used at least 80% of the time. The escape contingency required no more time than traditional management procedures (e.g., tell-show-do, reprimands and loud commands, restraint) to bring disruptive behavior under control. Independent ratings by two dentists provided social validation of the efficacy of the escape contingency.     

DIFFERENTIAL REINFORCEMENT OF OTHER BEHAVIOR AND NONCONTINGENT REINFORCEMENT AS CONTROL PROCEDURES DURING THE MODIFICATION OF A PRESCHOOLER'S COMPLIANCE1

Differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO) and noncontingent reinforcement were compared as control procedures during the modification of a 3-yr-old preschooler's compliance. The recorded reinforcer was teacher proximity (within 3 ft (0.9 m) of the subject for at least 5 sec) which was often accompanied by positive verbal comments that varied in content across experimental conditions. The verbal content during contingent reinforcement might have been: “Thank you for picking up the blocks”; during noncontingent reinforcement: “You're wearing a pretty dress”; and during DRO: “I don't blame you for not picking up because it isn't any fun”. Contingent reinforcement increased compliance in all manipulation conditions. Noncontingent reinforcement decreased compliance during two reversal conditions. However, the behavior was variable and did not decrease to the low levels reached during the two DRO reversals.     

EFFECTS OF VERBAL REPRIMANDS ON TARGETED AND UNTARGETED STEREOTYPY

Results of brief functional analyses indicated that motor and vocal stereotypy persisted in the absence of social consequences for five participants diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Subsequently, effects of a stimulus control procedure involving contingent reprimands for each participant's higher probability (targeted) stereotypy were evaluated. Results indicated that contingent verbal reprimands (i) decreased the targeted stereotypy for all five participants, (ii) decreased the untargeted stereotypy for two of five participants, and (iii) increased the untargeted stereotypy for one of five participants. Although response suppression was not achieved for any participant, three participants maintained low levels of the target stereotypy with one or two reprimands during 5‐min sessions. Furthermore, two of those participants maintained near‐zero levels of motor and vocal stereotypy during 10‐min sessions. These findings suggest that signaled verbal reprimands may be a practical intervention for reducing stereotypy in some children with ASD. Some limitations of the findings and areas of future research are briefly discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Promoting the development of verbal responses using instructive feedback

Shillingsburg, Frampton, Cleveland, and Cariveau (2018) taught listener and tact by feature, name–feature intraverbal, and feature–name intraverbal responses across sets and reported emergence of responses that were not directly trained for 6 individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current study was a systematic replication with the addition of instructive feedback (IF) with 2 children diagnosed with ASD. During trials for previously mastered listener by name responses (e.g., “Point to Tennessee” and child selects a picture of Tennessee), the experimenters provided related IF (e.g., “The capital of this state is Nashville”). After 3 sessions, we evaluated the effects of IF on related verbal responses (e.g., listener by feature, tact by feature, name–feature intraverbal, and feature–name intraverbal) across sets probes. We observed increased correct responses for related verbal responses; replicating Shillingsburg et al. Results suggest that the inclusion of IF may increase the efficiency of verbal behavior programming.     

Establishing stimulus control of vocal stereotypy displayed by young children with Autism

We examined the vocal stereotypy of three boys who were diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Results of functional analyses indicated that each participant's vocal stereotypy was maintained by non‐social consequences. For two participants, verbal reprimands were provided contingent on vocal stereotypy in the presence of a red card (RC). For the third participant, after verbal reprimands alone did not decrease vocal stereotypy, toys were withdrawn contingent on vocal stereotypy in the presence of the RC. For all three participants, vocal stereotypy was permitted without programmed consequences the presence of a green card (GC). The results showed that vocal stereotypy decreased in the presence of the RC for all three participants; however, vocal stereotypy came under inhibitory control of the RC for only one of the three participants. The potential utility of using punishment to develop stimulus control of automatically reinforced problem behavior in academic settings is briefly discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Comma N' cents in pricing: The effects of auditory representation encoding on price magnitude perceptions

Numbers and prices can be processed and encoded in three different forms: 1) visual [based on their written form in Arabic numerals (e.g., 72)], 2) verbal [based on spoken word-sounds (e.g., “seventy” and “two”), and 3) analog (based on judgments of relative “size” or amount (e.g., more than 70 but less than 80)]. In this paper, we demonstrate that including commas (e.g., $1599 vs. $1599) and cents (e.g., $1599.85 vs. $1599) in a price's Arabic written form (i.e., how it is perceived visually) can change how the price is encoded and represented verbally in a consumer's memory. In turn, the verbal encoding of a written price can influence assessments of the numerical magnitude of the price. These effects occur because consumers non-consciously perceive that there is a positive relationship between syllabic length and numerical magnitude. Three experiments are presented demonstrating this important effect.     

An experimental analysis of negative reinforcement contingencies for adult-delivered reprimands

Seven adults participated in simulated teaching sessions with an experimenter who role played as a student with developmental disabilities. The experimenter engaged in problem behavior and either (a) terminated problem behavior contingent on participant reprimands (negative reinforcement) or (b) did not terminate problem behavior contingent on reprimands (extinction). Results suggested that reprimands were sensitive to negative reinforcement in the form of the immediate cessation of problem behavior. These preliminary findings support role play as a potentially viable laboratory model for analyzing behaviors of typical adults.     

The cumulative record of research on “fear of success”

Based on the collected findings of over 100 studies assessing “fear of success,” the following questions were addressed: (a) Do females show more “fear of success” imagery than do males? (b) Do males respond to a cue depicting an achieving female with more “fear of success” imagery than do females? (c) Have the proportions of “fear of success” imagery elicited by men and women in response to verbal cues changed over the last decade? (d) What are the correlates of “fear of success”? (e) What is the relationship between “fear of success” imagery and performance in different kinds of situations (e.g., female achievement behavior in competition with men)? The answers seemed crudely to be (a) no, (b) no, (c) decreased, (d) few, and (e) unclear due to the many differences in the designs used.     

ON THE RELATION OF MANDS AND THE FUNCTION OF DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR

When standard analogue functional analysis procedures produce inconclusive results in children with conversational speech, the child's mands may help to identify the function of destructive behavior. In the current investigation, functional analyses conducted with 2 children who exhibited self-injury, aggression, and property destruction were undifferentiated across conditions. Based on informal observations and school and parental report, an analysis was conducted using mands to help determine the function of the destructive behavior. Using a multielement design, the therapist's compliance with the child's mands occurred either on a fixed-ratio (FR) 1 schedule or contingent on destructive behavior. Destructive behavior occurred at high and consistent levels when reinforcement of mands was contingent on destructive behavior and at near-zero levels when reinforcement of mands occurred on the FR 1 schedule. Based on these results, a second analysis was conducted in which compliance to mands occurred only when the child appropriately requested it (i.e., functional communication training plus extinction) and, for 1 child, compliance with mands was terminated contingent upon destructive behavior (i.e., functional communication training plus response cost). For both children, the rates of destructive behavior decreased markedly. The results suggest that assessing the child's mands may be useful in decreasing destructive behavior when a functional analysis is inconclusive.     

Effect of verbal messages with reminders to communicate driving situations to alter driver behavior in conditional driving automation

In conditionally automated driving, drivers are relieved of steering (hands-off), accelerating, and braking actions as well as of continuous monitoring of driving situations and the system operation status (eyes off). This enables continuously engagement in non-driving-related activities. Managing the allocation of a driver’s attention to the surrounding environment and automation status presents a major challenge in human–machine system design. In this study, we propose a verbal message with a reminder (monitoring request) to divert the driver’s attention from non-driving-related activities to peripheral monitoring under conditionally automated driving. When the system encounters events related to weather, traffic, and road geometry, it provides a verbal message pertaining to the road surroundings (e.g., “It is foggy outside”) to the driver. After three seconds, the system provides a reminder message (i.e., “Did you confirm it?”) to the driver. We explore two questions: (1) how does the message with the reminder affect the driver’s attention allocation, and (2) how does the message with the reminder affect the driver behavior in response to a request to intervene (RTI). With a driving simulator, we designed a repeated measures mixed design with a between-participant factor of “Driving condition” and within-participant factors of “Event type” and “Measurement time”. Three driving conditions were established as follows: no messages, messages without reminders, and messages with reminders. Twenty-seven drivers participated as participants in the driving simulator experiment. Results showed that the reminder message was effective in allocating the participants’ attention to the surrounding environment, and the participants took over the driving task after spending more time understanding the take-over situation in the condition of messages with reminders compared to those in the condition of no messages. We conclude that the proposed reminder message can direct drivers’ attention to the road surroundings during conditionally automated driving. In the future, we plan to design adaptive verbal monitoring requests to adjust the reminder message according to the situation.     

Toddlers' language-mediated visual search: They need not have the words for it

Eye movements made by listeners during language-mediated visual search reveal a strong link between visual processing and conceptual processing. For example, upon hearing the word for a missing referent with a characteristic colour (e.g., “strawberry”), listeners tend to fixate a colour-matched distractor (e.g., a red plane) more than a colour-mismatched distractor (e.g., a yellow plane). We ask whether these shifts in visual attention are mediated by the retrieval of lexically stored colour labels. Do children who do not yet possess verbal labels for the colour attribute that spoken and viewed objects have in common exhibit language-mediated eye movements like those made by older children and adults? That is, do toddlers look at a red plane when hearing “strawberry”? We observed that 24-month-olds lacking colour term knowledge nonetheless recognized the perceptual–conceptual commonality between named and seen objects. This indicates that language-mediated visual search need not depend on stored labels for concepts.     

Does teaching an omnibus mand preclude the development of specifying mands?

When problem behavior is controlled by a synthesized reinforcement contingency, a simple omnibus mand that yields access to all reinforcers simultaneously has been shown to effectively replace problem behavior. The question arises as to whether teaching an omnibus mand will preclude the acquisition of specifying mands for each of the combined reinforcers. In this study, after 3 students diagnosed with autism acquired an omnibus mand (“My way, please”) that yielded all identified reinforcers simultaneously, specifying mands (e.g., “All done,” “May I have my toys?” “Play with me”) were taught to yield each individual reinforcer (e.g., escape, tangibles, attention). Problem behavior was immediately eliminated for all children, and the omnibus mand was acquired quickly. Teaching an omnibus mand did not preclude acquisition of specifying mands for any learner and instead allowed for the acquisition of specifying mands once problem behavior had been effectively reduced.     

Establishing equivalence–equivalence analogical relations via tact and listener training

We investigated the role of verbal behavior on the emergence of analogy-type responding as measured via equivalence–equivalence relations. In Experiment 1, 8 college students learned to label arbitrary stimuli as, “vek,” “zog,” and “paf”, and in Experiment 2, 8 additional participants learned to select these stimuli when hearing their names in an auditory–visual matching-to-sample (MTS) task. Experimenters tested for the emergence of relational tacts (i.e., “same” and “different”) and equivalence–equivalence relations (analogy tests) via visual–visual MTS. Half of the participants were exposed to a think-aloud procedure. Even though they all passed analogy tests while tacting stimuli relationally, only participants exposed to tact training (Experiment 1) did so without the need for remediation. The results of these experiments confirm that individual discriminative and relational control of stimuli established through verbal behavior training is sufficient to produce equivalence–equivalence analogical responding, advancing the analysis of complex cognitive (problem-solving) phenomena.     

BEHAVIORAL MOMENTUM IN THE TREATMENT OF NONCOMPLIANCE

Behavioral momentum refers to the tendency for behavior to persist following a change in environmental conditions. The greater the rate of reinforcement, the greater the behavioral momentum. The intervention for noncompliance consisted of issuing a sequence of commands with which the subject was very likely to comply (i.e., high-probability commands) immediately prior to issuing a low-probability command. In each of five experiments, the high-probability command sequence resulted in a “momentum” of compliant responding that persisted when a low-probability request was issued. Results showed the antecedent high-probability command sequence increased compliance and decreased compliance latency and task duration. “Momentum-like” effects were shown to be distinct from experimenter attention and to depend on the contiguity between the high-probability command sequence and the low-probability command.