Rat lab for fun and profit

Many applied behavior analysts have little or no personal exposure to the basic animal experimentation that provided the foundation for applied behavior analysis. However, personal experience in the animal laboratory provides many benefits to students of applied behavior analysis. Animal laboratory experience provides convincing, vivid illustrations of basic principles of learning and facilitates generalization and application of the basic principles. The laboratory experience also teaches interpersonal skills that may be important in future employment in applied fields. The animal laboratory can also provide public relations opportunities, especially with university-sponsored events such as the Rat Olympics. These points, as well as concerns about the resources needed for an animal laboratory and compliance with federal animal-use guidelines, are addressed. It is concluded that the animal laboratory offers many educational profits to students while making learning fun for a reasonable outlay of effort and resources.     

Effects of parent training on parent instruction and child learning of intellectual skills

The present investigation examined the effects of a brief parent training package on parental application of behavioral procedures during child instruction. In addition, it investigated the effects of parent training on child learning of two intellectual skills. Forty-nine parents and their $\text{2}\text{1}\text{2}$ to 5-year-old children participated. A discriminant analysis revealed that the parent training package produced variations in parental use of modeling, physical prompting, verbal instructional prompting, and aversive control. However, the pattern of variations differed across instructional tasks. Regression analysis showed that parent training produced differences in child learning in one of the two skills targeted for instruction.     

Development of the Apperceptive Personality Test

The rationale for a new, objectively scored apperceptive technique, the Apperceptive Personality Test (APT) is presented. Drawing primarily on the history and experience of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) and similar picture-story devices, an eight-card set comprised of stimulus cards depicting recognizable people in everyday settings was developed. An effort was made to portray various combinations of young and old, male and female, and to include persons of minority status. Each card is briefly described and standard administration procedures are presented. Objective scoring is provided by the APT Questionnaire, a six-item format that allows the subject to directly provide codable responses derived from the narrative stories. Computer-assisted scoring procedures are described for a select set of variables. Preliminary findings of some basic psychometric properties of the APT and relations with other standard tests are reported.     

Recommendations for the Clinical Use of the Apperceptive Personality Test

The Apperceptive Personality Test (APT) is a new technique that combines the traditional story-telling method with a questionnaire about the characters in the story, to be filled out by the person being tested. The resulting information is tabulated, and a variety of scores are generated which yield information about the person's personality. The identified clinical signposts indicated by such scores are summarized in this article, along with two illustrative protocol fragments showing how the usual interpretive method is supplemented by the information from the questionnaire.