A COMPARISON OF TWO APPROACHES FOR IDENTIFYING REINFORCERS FOR PERSONS WITH SEVERE AND PROFOUND DISABILITIES

The development of effective training programs for persons with profound mental retardation remains one of the greatest challenges for behavior analysts working in the field of developmental disabilities. One significant advancement for this population has been the reinforcer assessment procedure developed by Pace, Ivancic, Edwards, Iwata, and Page (1985), which involves repeatedly presenting a variety of stimuli to the client and then measuring approach behaviors to differentiate preferred from nonpreferred stimuli. One potential limitation of this procedure is that some clients consistently approach most or all of the stimuli on each presentation, making it difficult to differentiate among these stimuli. In this study, we used a concurrent operants paradigm to compare the Pace et al. (1985) procedure with a modified procedure wherein clients were presented with two stimuli simultaneously and were given access only to the first stimulus approached. The results revealed that this forced-choice stimulus preference assessment resulted in greater differentiation among stimuli and better predicted which stimuli would result in higher levels of responding when presented contingently in a concurrent operants paradigm.     

College Students Use Implicit Personality Theory Instead of Safer Sex1

Many college students engage in high levels of unsafe sexual behavior that puts them at risk for HIV infection. To better understand the dynamics underlying college students' unsafe behavior, focus group discussions were conducted with 308 students (146 men and 162 women). The results showed that, instead of consistently using condoms, many college students use implicit personality theories to judge the riskiness of potential sexual partners. Specifically, partners whom college students know and like are not perceived to be risky, even if what students know about these individuals is irrelevant to HIV status. The students determine the riskiness of partners they do not know well based on superficial characteristics that are also generally unrelated to HIV status. Therefore, AIDS prevention interventions for college students must expose the ineffectiveness of the students' use of implicit personality theories to determine potential partners' riskiness, and the “know your partner” safer sex guideline should be abandoned.     

FUNCTIONAL ASSESSMENT AND TREATMENT OF LIFE-THREATENING DRUG INGESTION IN A DUALLY DIAGNOSED YOUTH

Few data exist on operant mechanisms associated with drug overdose. In this investigation, a functional analysis indicated that life-threatening drug ingestion exhibited by a dually diagnosed youth was maintained by negative reinforcement. An operant intervention, derived from behavioral assessment data, reduced drug ingestion to near-zero levels.     

Parental Influences on Career Development Perceived by African American and Mexican American College Students

This study examined parental factors that influence career development among African American and Mexican American college students. Analysis of student interviews revealed that parents are influential in the following career domains: encouragement, educational expectations, critical life events, vicarious learning, and work identity. Career development issues that counselors need to address are provided.     

Clarifying an ambiguous functional analysis with matched and mismatched extinction procedures

Results of functional analysis were ambiguous in suggesting that self-injurious behavior (SIB) was maintained by escape, sensory reinforcement, or both. To help clarify these results, we compared escape extinction, sensory extinction, and the combined treatments. Sensory extinction proved to be a necessary and sufficient treatment, whereas escape extinction failed to decrease SIB. These analyses helped to clarify the function of SIB and to identify an effective and efficient treatment.     

Features of Interview Questions Associated with Attenuation of Symptom Reports

Previous studies have suggested that discrepant reporting in a test–retest reliability paradigm is not purely random measurement error, but partly a function of a systematic tendency to say no during retest to questions answered positively at initial testing (attenuation). To examine features of interview questions that may be associated with attenuation, three raters independently assessed the structural and content features of questions from the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (version 2.3) and linked these to data from a test–retest reliability study of 223 community respondents (parent and child reports). Results indicated that for both parent and youth reports, item features most strongly associated with attenuation were (a) being a stem question (asked of all respondents, regardless of any skip structure); (b) question placement in the first half of the interview; (c) question length; (d) question complexity; or (e) requiring assessment of the timing, duration, or frequency of a symptom. Findings may be explained by participants' conscious efforts to avoid further questions or by their learning more about the nature and purpose of the interview as they gain more experience; alternatively, findings may represent a methodological artifact of structured interview design.     

Political Ideologies and Support for Censorship: Is It a Question of Whose Ox Is Being Gored?

Two studies are described. one of 381 university students and the other a statewide survey of 295 adults, both of which examine the relationship between attitudinal support for censorship and political ideologies. The results of these studies are interpreted as challenging the view of Suedfeld, Steel, and Schmidt (1994) that support for censorship is a function of both the works in question and the political ideologies of the respondents. In both studies we find that support for censorship is somewhat consistent across messages and images of differing political content. and that support for censorship is generally greater among those with conservative political attitudes, regardless of the content of the works in question. A model of political attitudes (Maddox & Lilie. 1986) that conceptualizes American political idcologies as consisting of two relatively independent dimensions, rather than a single left-right dimension. is proposed as a more effective means of conceptualizing this issue.     

Multidimensional reaction to therapeutic touch in a hospital setting.

A field experiment focused on some implication of interpersonal touch not explored in earlier research. Conceptually, the research included measuring the effects of touch over a relatively long time frame, for a broad range of response dimensions, and in a nonreactive setting characterized by dependency. On an applied level, the research studied the value of touch as a concomitant of nurse-patient interactions. Specifically, a 2 (touch vs. no touch) X 2 (male vs. female) between-subjects design assessed the effects of nurses touching patients, during preoperative teaching, on patient affective, evaluative, behavioral, and physiological responses. Results indicated that female subjects in the touch condition experienced more favorable affective, behavioral, and physiological reactions than a no-touch control group. In contrast, males in the touch condition reacted more negatively than control subjects on these dimensions.     

Choice reaction time to movement of eccentric visual targets during concurrent rotary acceleration

This study investigates the influence of concurrent rotary acceleration on choice reaction time (RT) to a small, accelerating visual cursor on a cathode-ray tube. Subjects sat in an enclosed rotating device at the center of rotation and observed a 3-mm dot accelerating at different rates across a cathode-ray tube. The dot was viewed at various eccentricities under conditions of visual stimulation alone and with concurrent rotary acceleration. Subjects responded to both vertical and horizontal dot movements. There was a significant inverse relationship between choiceRT and level of dot acceleration (p< .001), and a significant direct relationship between choice RT and eccentricity (p< .001). There was no significant difference between choiceRT to vertical or horizontal dot motion (p>.25), and choiceRT was not significantly affected by concurrent rotary acceleration (p>.1Ol. The results are discussed in terms of the effects of vestibular stimulation on choiceRT to visual motion.     

Validity of Adler's active-constructive,active-destructive,passive-constructive,and passive-destructive typology

This research investigated the validity of Adler's typology: active-constructive, achievement-oriented; active-destructive, hostile; passive-constructive, attention-seeking; and passive-destructive, interpersonal detachment. Four possible measures of the constructive-destructive dimension and two possible measures of activity-passivity were used, with all eight possible combinations being used to establish the Adlerian types (active-constructive, etc.). A total of 192 male undergraduates served as subjects. The Full I-E Scale in combination with the CPS Activity-Lack-of-Energy Scale produced groups that demonstrated the Adlerian relationships, active-constructive, achievement-oriented, and so forth. There were strong secondary personality manifestations within the respective groups.