An expanded scope for behavior modification in school settings

Behavior modification in the school setting has consisted primarily of the manipulation of consequent conditions to vary children's social and academic behaviors within classrooms. The scope of behavior modification within school settings may fruitfully be expanded by furthering the investigation and application of these additional areas: the interaction between the modification of social and academic behaviors, the manipulation of antecedent conditions in order to evoke reinforceable responses, the use of controlling variables on a school-system-wide basis, and the use of standardized tests as an additional dependent measure.     

Rewarding psychiatric aides for the behavioral improvement of assigned patients

Different ways of modifying the aide-patient relationship to promote improvement in psychiatric patients were investigated. Psychiatric aides were given information about the behavior of assigned patients, cash awards based on the improvement of assigned patients, and different kinds of supervision by the psychology staff; the effects of these variables on a large number of psychiatrically relevant behaviors were measured. Appropriate behavior of patients increased when the aides were given quantitative information about the improvement of assigned patients. Cash awards for aides, which were not contingent on the behavior of patients had little effect, while cash awards contingent on the behavior of assigned patients were associated with more appropriate behavior. Direct supervision of aide-patient interactions was associated with an increase in appropriate behavior, while required consultation for the aides about assigned patients was not. Behavior of patients deteriorated when the program was terminated.     

The accuracy of self-administration and scoring on Holland's Self-Directed Search

This study assesed the extent to which Ss commit various types of errors when completing Holland's Self-Directed Search (SDS) entirely on their own. Nearly all Ss made some type of error and approximately half of the Ss made errors which affected their final three-letter summary codes. Almost one-fifth of the Ss made errors resulting in an incorrect high-point code. Whether or not Ss made errors that affected their summary codes was unrelated to the extent to which they were interested in knowing more about occupations or academic majors they might like. Neither were such errors related to whether Ss felt the occupations suggested by their summary codes seemed reasonable. Only slightly over one-third the Ss actually did feel that the occupations seemed reasonable.     

Standard errors for rotated factor loadings

Beginning with the results of Girshick on the asymptotic distribution of principal component loadings and those of Lawley on the distribution of unrotated maximum likelihood factor loadings, the asymptotic distribution of the corresponding analytically rotated loadings is obtained. The principal difficulty is the fact that the transformation matrix which produces the rotation is usually itself a function of the data. The approach is to use implicit differentiation to find the partial derivatives of an arbitrary orthogonal rotation algorithm. Specific details are given for the orthomax algorithms and an example involving maximum likelihood estimation and varimax rotation is presented.This research was supported in part by NIH Grant RR-3. The authors are grateful to Dorothy T. Thayer who implemented the algorithms discussed here as well as those of Lawley and Maxwell. We are particularly indebted to Michael Browne for convincing us of the significance of this work and for helping to guide its development and to Harry H. Harman who many years ago pointed out the need for standard errors of estimate.     

Physiological learning theory

Attention or concentration requires control of activity in those excess neurons that are not necessary for the present task. The control is probably not a massive inhibitory suppression but may be a recruiting process, a function of complex perceptual and associative learning that begins with early experience. Inhibition, however, may still be of crucial importance as a sharpener of associative mechanisms, and the child with minimal brain damage may have suffered a selective loss of inhibitory neurons.Paper prepared for reading at the Ciba Medical Horizons conference on MBD (minimal brain dysfunction), Omaha, Nebraska, April 2, 1976.     

Individual differences in perceived similarity and preference for visual art: A multidimensional scaling analysis

Previous studies have shown that individuals may attend to different dimensions in making an overall judgment of similarity between complex stimuli. The present study investigated the nature of differences in the perceived similarity of reproductions of paintings by the use of multidimensional scaling techniques. Using the INDSCAL model, a group of art-trained students are shown to differ significantly from a group of nonart students in terms of their differential weighing of a set of common dimensions. The same subjects’ preferences are examined in relation to these differences by use of the PREFMAP hierarchy of models. While the simplest (vector) model was found to be appropriate for almost all subjects, large differences in vector direction and average subject ideal-point location are found. Implications for future studies of responses to art are discussed.