CONTINGENT EXERCISE: A MILD BUT POWERFUL PROCEDURE FOR SUPPRESSING INAPPROPRIATE VERBAL AND AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR

Two single-subject experiments were conducted in public school classrooms for severely emotionally disturbed children. Both experiments investigated the effects of a treatment requiring a child to exhibit a simple exercise task after a verbal or aggressive response, using reversal and multiple-baseline designs. The independent variable, contingent exercise, required standing up and sitting on the floor five to ten times contingent on an inappropriate behavior. It was found that contingent exercise was easy to carry out, and following it, the child quickly returned to the learning task that had been interrupted by the inappropriate behavior. The contingent exercise procedure required a minimum of prompting or manual guidance. Although contingent exercise was not topographically related to the inappropriate response, it decreased those responses dramatically. The results suggested that contingent exercise was not only more powerful than DRO but also could be administered independently. It was concluded that contingent exercise may constitute an alternative procedure that can be used by therapists confronted with severely abnormal behaviors. It would appear to be particularly relevant in settings where procedures such as timeout and painful consequences find restricted use. Finally, a number of guidelines have been proposed as a safeguard against the misuse of this mild but powerful procedure.     

Near-death experience: A review from pastoral psychology

Published interpretations of near-death experience from the vantage of pastoral psychology are virtually nonexistent. Subjective reports from survivors and investigative contributions from other disciplines are scattered and diverse. A comparison of twenty-one near-death experience transcendence accounts with the available literature may not only offer direction for further systematic inquiry but also contribute to our pastoral understanding of life and death.He is a candidate for the S.T.D. in pastoral psychology at San Francisco Theological Seminary, San Anselmo, California, and a Fellow in the American Association of Pastoral Counselors.The author gratefully acknowledges the help of his brother, Michael B. Sabom. M.D., of the Emory University Medical School, Atlanta. Georgia, in the preparation of this article, it is to his continuing pastoral work with NDE survivors that this article is dedicated.     

Retardation of autoshaping following pretraining with unpredictable food: Effects of changing the context between pretraining and testing

In Experiment 1, pigeons exposed to US ONLY pretraining were observed to be retarded in the acquisition of autoshaping relative to naive controls; however, gross changes in contextual stimuli between pretraining and testing alleviated the retardation effect. In Experiment 2, groups of pigeons exposed to CS ONLY, US ONLY, or random CS-US presentations (TRC) were tested for the acquisition of autoshaping. The US ONLY and TRC groups were retarded relative to naive controls. The context change manipulation eliminated the US ONLY retardation effect and attenuated, but did not eliminate, the TRC retardation effect. Context blocking accounts for the US ONLY effect and contributes to the TRC effect; however, context-independent retardation following TRC pretraining suggests the operation of the learned irrelevance cognition.     

“Basic black” renascent: A new wardrobe

In the dozen years since publication of Uttal’s fundamental paper, “‘Basic Black’ in Com-puter Interfaces for Psychological Research,” many changes have taken place in on-line real-time computing. A look at the basic wardrobe today reveals some striking changes and certain fundamental constants. Most of the interface elements in the wardrobe specified by Uttal are still commonplace in the fashion catalogs of real-time computing. However, they are offered now as fully integrated circuits, chips, or subsystems that are added by inserting a chip into a socket or a printed circuit board into a chassis. Missing in Uttal’s specification are the essential software tools for using the hardware of that wardrobe. The current real-time computing laboratory psychologist will find that the most significant elements in a really adaptable wardrobe are software tools.     

Discriminative responding on associated mixed and multiple schedules as a function of food and ICS reinforcement

Performance on associated mixed and multiple variable-interval-extinction schedules was studied as a function of food versus intracranial stimulation (ICS) reinforcement. For the mixed schedule, differential responding was greater for an ICS reinforcement group than for a food reinforcement group, demonstrating that conditions affecting resistance to extinction help to determine the control exerted by a mixed schedule. Performance on the multiple schedule demonstrated greater differential responding for an ICS group than for a food reinforcement group during the early training sessions, indicating that the control exerted by mixed schedules interacts with that exerted by the exteroceptive discriminative stimuli. The results suggest that the influence of the associated mixed schedule on discriminative responding would be greater, the greater the difficulty of the stimulus discrimination.     

Reinforcement of eye movement with concurrent schedules

Human macrosaccadic eye movements to two areas of a four-dial display were conditioned by concurrent variable-interval schedules of signals. Reinforcers (signals) were delivered to the two right-hand dials on one schedule and to the two left-hand dials on another, independent schedule. The use of a changeover delay between crossover eye movements and reinforcement had the effect of changing the pattern of scanning from fixating four dials in succession or in a Z-shaped pattern to scanning vertically the dials on either side with fewer crossovers. In the presence of a changeover delay, subjects matched relative eye-movement rates and relative reinforcement rates on each schedule. Rate of crossover eye movements, with a changeover delay in effect, was also inversely related to the difference in reinforcements arranged by the concurrent schedules. The results suggest that for stimuli whose critical components are arranged spatially, conditioned eye movements play an important part in selective stimulus control.     

Linear representation of temporal location and Stevens’s law

Ss were asked to indicate points 1 week, 7 months, 3 years, and 9 years in the past and future on two time lines representing birth to present and present to death. Data for 90 college-age Ss fit a psychophysical power function following Stevens’s law. with negatively accelerated growth indicating proportionately greater linear representation of periods nearer to the present. Variability was greater for the representations of the future than of the past, with monotonic increases in variability as distance from the present increased.     

The personal and marital adjustment of parents as related to observed child deviance and parenting behaviors

The purpose of this study was to document the relationship of parents' personal and marital adjustment to their own behavior as parents and the behavior of their children. A total of 31 families who had been referred for behavioral counseling regarding their male child's behavior problems were given a diagnostic battery which included home observations as well as administration to parents of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and the LockeWallace Marital Adjustment Test. Results revealed consistent negative relationships between marital satisfaction and the observed level of child deviance. Similarly, there were consistent negative relationships between marital satisfaction and the level of observed “negativeness” to the child. Analyses using the MMPI indicated that a large number of the fathers ' MMPI scales were related to child deviance, but this finding was not replicated for mothers. Several MMPI scales were related to marital satisfaction for both parents. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for the assessment and treatment of families with a problem child.     

Feature saliency and recognition memory for schematic faces

Memory for schematic faces was studied using a recognition memory paradigm. Ss indicated whether two faces, separated by delays of 6, 12, or 18 sec, were the same or different. Theoretical interest centered on the effects of component feature saliency on response bias and detectability. The main results were that there were fewer misses and more false alarms on the more salient features. Analysis showed that the main effect of feature saliency was on response bias, not detectability.