Explaining the adult careers of dyslexic boys: Variations in critical skills for high-level jobs

Several hundred boys who were diagnosed as dyslexic (specifically reading disabled) in adolescence and who attended a private college preparatory school for dyslexics were followed up in adulthood. The occupations of these men, who were above average in both intelligence and socioeconomic background, were compared to those of both a control group and the general white male population. As hypothesized, the dyslexic men had higher level jobs than the average man but they were much less likely than the controls to become professionals. They rarely entered jobs such as physician, lawyer, or college teacher which require higher degrees; instead most became managers or salesmen. The occupational differences between the dyslexic and control men were related to, but not completely accounted for, by their large differences in educational attainment. Data on the competencies rated as critical to good job performance in different occupations were consistent with the hypothesis that dyslexic men would establish themselves in relatively high-level jobs emphasizing nonacademic rather than academic on-the-job skills. Nondisabled professionals rated getting information through reading among the most critical of the skills required on their jobs. In contrast, managers and salesmen rated reading as less important than nonacademic competencies such as taking initiative and responsibility or being persuasive. The results illustrate the value of knowing more about the particular competencies required in different jobs in order to help members of special groups, particularly those such as dyslexies who have specific and enduring handicaps but who are otherwise intellectually normal.     

A rapid method of eliminating stuttering by a regulated breathing approach

The Habit Reversal Procedure for eliminating nervous habits was applied to the problem of stuttering. In the new procedure the speaker interrupted his speech at moments of actual or anticipated stuttering and at natural pause points, and resumed speaking immediately after breathing deeply during the pause. In addition to this regularized pausing and breathing, the program included other factors such as formulation of one's thoughts prior to speaking, identification of stutter-prone situations, identification of mannerisms associated with stuttering, speaking for short durations when tense or nervous, daily breathing exercises, relaxation procedures for anxiety, immediate display of improved speaking, and enlisting family support for progress. Fourteen stutterers were given training in the program during a single counseling session of about two hours duration. The next day, the average number of stuttering episodes decreased by 94 per cent, by 97 per cent at the end of one month, and by 99 per cent during the extended follow-up. Each of the clients was improved by at least 93 per cent. The new procedure appears to be more rapid and effective than alternative procedures.     

Dry-bed training: rapid elimination of childhood enuresis

Enuresis has been treated with moderate effectiveness by the urine-alarm method which requires many weeks of training. The present procedure used a urine-alarm apparatus but added such features as training in inhibiting urination, positive reinforcement for correct urinations, training in rapid awakening, increased fluid intake, increased social motivation to be nonenuretic, self-correction of accidents, and practice in toileting. After one all-night training session, the 24 enuretic children averaged only two bedwettings before achieving fourteen consecutive dry nights and had no major relapses. Little or no reduction in bedwetting occurred within the first two weeks for matched-control enuretics who were given the standard urine-alarm training. The results of a control-procedure showed that the new procedure did not involve Pavlovian conditioning. The new method appears to be a more rapid, effective and different type of treatment for enuresis.     

Treatment of bisexual pedophilia by a biofeedback-assisted self-control procedure

A bisexual pedophile was treated for 88 days using a biofeedback procedure which displayed his erection response to sexually deviant stimuli on a closed-circuit television monitor. Told to develop a strategy of self-control using the biofeedback, his response to young boys and girls was treated sequentially in a multiple baseline design. His concurrent response to boys, girls and adult males was evaluated in separate generalization sessions. The treatment was successful in suppressing deviant response while maintaining nondeviant response in strength. Debriefing of the client following treatment revealed that he had used a self-developed technique of covert sensitization to suppress deviant response and had used the biofeedback to confirm and validate this self-control strategy.     

Cognitive changes associated with social skills training

Changes in locus of control and self-esteem during social skills training and at 6 month follow-up were investigated. Forty-four adolescent, male offenders were randomly assigned to a social skills training, attention-placebo, or no-treatment control procedure. The results showed that pre- to post-training increases in self-esteem were produced for both the social skills training and attention-placebo control groups, but not for the no-treatment control group. These increases did not continue during the follow-up phase; the social skills training group, which showed the greatest improvement during training, displayed a decrease in self- esteem during follow-up.The locus of control measures showed a statistically significant shift towards internality for the social skills training group during training, which was not found for the attention-placebo and no-treatment controls. During the follow-up phase, all three groups showed a statistically significant shift towards externality, suggesting a tendency for boys to view their behaviour and consequences as being under the control of chance factors or powerful others, during institutionalization. This effect was partly reversed during training for the social skills training group, but the effect was not long lasting. It seems therefore that social skills training is effective in producing an increase in self-esteem and a shift towards internal locus of control. These changes are, however, of short duration and the self-esteem shift may be the result of increased staff contact or other non-specific therapy factors.     

Learned taste aversions in rats as a function of delay,speed, and duration of rotation

Rats fed a saccharin solution and then rotated on a turntable showed an aversion to the saccharin solution on later testing. In the first experiment, the rats learned to avoid saccharin with delays of as much as 9 hr between drinking the saccharin and the start of rotation. The second experiment showed that the critical determinant of aversiveness of rotation was number of rotations. The rats avoided saccharin as much after rotation at high speeds for short durations as after rotation at low speeds for long durations.     

Preference as a function of the correlation between stimuli and reinforcement outcomes

Pigeons' preferences for stimuli that were to varying degrees correlated with outcomes were studied in two experiments using a concurrent-chain procedure. The pigeons chose between two terminal links, each ending with food reinforcement and with blackout on half of the trials. In the first experiment, one terminal link (nonpredictive or unreliable link) provided stimuli completely uncorrelated with the outcomes while the other terminal link (predictive or reliable link) provided stimuli that were, to varying degrees, correlated with these outcomes. All pigeons showed increasing preferences for the predictive link as the reliability of the stimuli in that link increased. In the second experiment, stimuli in both terminal links were differentially correlated with the outcomes. The pigeons again preferred the more reliably correlated terminal link. The relation between these results and the delay-reduction hypothesis and conditioned reinforcement account is noted. The behavioral value of predictive stimuli may lie in their permitting the organism to more effectively apportion its time between interim activities and terminal responses.     

Alcoholic drinking: suppression by a brief time-out procedure

Volunteer chronic alcoholics were given daily access to substantial quantities of alcohol within a residential research setting. Drinking was suppressed to an average of approximately one-half of Baseline levels when 10 or 15 min of physical and social isolation was required as an immediate consequence to receiving each one-ounce drink of 95-proof ethanol. This time-out procedure suppressed the drinking of nine out of ten subjects. Drinking returned to high levels when brief contingent time-out was discontinued. The relevance of such reversible controlling relationships to the treatment of alcoholism is discussed.     

A study of some conditions relating to the retarded adult's stereotyped responding in a binary-choice task

This study was a longitudinal one that examined the effects of certain conditions on alternation and perseveration in a binary-choice task. The conditions manipulated included: (1) lapse of time (stability of the pattern), (2) stimulus dissimilarity, (3) spatial location of the two alternatives, (4) time-out (time away from the task), (5) delay between responses, and (6) differential reinforcement of the two choices. Eight mentally retarded adults, identified as “pure” alternaters or perseveraters, served as subjects. Perseveration was “disrupted” only by differential reinforcement. Alternation was affected by all experimental manipulations with the exception of stimulus dissimilarity.     

Critical procedural variables related to the physiological effects of progressive relaxation: a review.

Twenty-five investigations of the physiological effects of progressive relaxation training were classified according to whether relaxation was found to be superior or equivalent to control conditions. The two sets of studies differed significantly on number of training sessions and in the use of taped vs live administration of training, and they tended to differ in the use of normal vs patient samples. The likelihood of producing significant physiological reductions via progressive relaxation appears to be greater when multi-session, subject-controlled training is conducted with subjects for whom physiological activity contributes to a presenting. clinical problem.     

Stimulus control of free-operant avoidance: The contribution of response rate and incentive relations between multiple-schedule components

The associations formed in the components of a multiple schedule can be classified as (1) stimulus-response (S-R) associations and (2) stimulus-reinforcer (S-S^R) associations. The present experiments sought to determine the individual contribution of these S-R and S-S^R associations to stimulus control by manipulating them independently. Responses postponed shocks by 25 sec in the presence of a tone alone and a light alone in all experiments. The contingencies programmed in the absence of both tone and light established a reference for the S-R and S-S^R associations in tone and in light. All four possible combinations of signalling response increase or decrease together with incentive increase or decrease were studied. Although the influence of the contingencies operating in the absence of tone and light was difficult to detect from response rates in tone or light, presenting tone and light together revealed clear effects. Response rates in tone and light together relative to those in either alone depended upon the contingency operating in the absence of tone and light. Stimulus-response and stimulus-reinforcer associations appeared to counteract each other when in opposition and combine together to enhance each other when in agreement. This suggested that the associations of a stimulus to response and to incentive combine algebraically in determining stimulus control. An algebraic analysis in terms of the S-R and S-S^R associations conditioned to the stimulus elements comprising the training and test stimuli accounted for the observed patterns of data.     

Rapid educational rehabilitation for prison inmates

One of the major goals of prisons has been the educational rehabilitation of inmates. Studies have shown that predelinquents as well as delinquents could be motivated to achieve in academic areas through the use of an incentive system. The present study attempted to extend the behavioral yield of such a system with prison inmates. The academic performance of two inmates in math and English were compared when two levels of incentives were made contingent on that performance. The results showed that the two inmates passed academic tests as much as nine times faster under an enriched schedule of incentives than under a standard one. This increase in rate of performance was translated into actual academic achievement as one of the inmates passed 9th through 12th grade algebra in only 14 days. A standardized test confirmed this academic advancement for both inmates. These high rates of performance and academic achievement are even more dramatic in view of the fact that five months prior to this procedure, both inmates had been tested as being below average in intelligence.     

Reversal and nonreversal shifts in autistic children

Reversal and nonreversal shifts in nineteen 2- to 14-year-old autistic children were studied. Each child was taught both a reversal and nonreversal shift discrimination task. The reversal shift condition entailed teaching the child to respond to one (the S+) of a pair of stimuli during training and subsequently reversing the S+ during testing. The nonreversal shift condition consisted of teaching the child two unrelated discriminations during training and testing. The results indicated that the older autistic children did better on reversal shifts than younger children who did better on nonreversal shifts. These findings are consistent with those for normal children.