The use of a self-control package to enhance temporal generality of a parent training program

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of a self-control package in enhancing temporal generality of a parent training program. Sixteen mothers and their clinic-referred noncompliant children were assigned to either a parent training alone group, or a parent training plus self-control group. All mother-child dyads were treated individually by teaching the mother to reward compliance and other prosocial behavior, and to use time-out for noncompliance. In addition, mothers who also received self-control training learned to self-monitor their use of their new parenting skills and to reinforce themselves for use of the skill during a 2 month follow-up period. Assessment consisted of four home observations by independent observers prior to treatment, after treatment, and at a 2 month follow-up. The data indicated that the children in the parent training plus self-control group were significantly more compliant and less deviant at the 2 month follow-up than the children in the parent training alone group. Parental behavior did not differ between the two groups at the follow-up.     

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.     

Suppression and substitution in the treatment of nailbiting

The effectiveness of a package treatment for reducing nailbiting was studied. The package was composed of both positive procedures aimed at teaching adaptive behavior to substitute for nailbiting and negative procedures aimed at advancing skills for suppressing nailbiting. The design of the study permitted an analysis of the contributions of both positive and negative components of the package. Subjects assigned to combined, positive, negative and placebo groups received four weekly treatment sessions, and changes in their nailbiting behavior were compared with untreated controls. As in previous studies, nonspecific factors such as demand and attention to ones nails were found to be important determinants of outcome. In addition, positive procedures were found to be substantially more important than negative procedures in the maintenance of reductions in nailbiting over a 4-month follow-up period.     

Alcohol consumption by college women following exposure to unsolvable problems: Learned helplessness or stress induced drinking?

Three experiments were intended to examine the relationship between alcohol, depression and learned helplessness. In Study I, more female undergraduate heavy drinkers than light drinkers were found to have critically elevated scores on a depression index. A sex difference in the relationship between drinking and depression is suggested since male depressives were equally distributed among drinking categories. In Studies II and III, female undergraduates were given unsolvable problems in a learned helplessness paradigm. Relative to controls these subjects reported increased depressive and hostile affect and drank more beer in a taste rating task. However, we failed to find deficits in anagram solution with those subjects given the learned helplessness manipulation. Specific questions are raised regarding the boundary conditions of learned helplessness while implications bearing on stress-related alcohol consumption are discussed.     

Self-report and physiologic responding during in vivo flooding

Self-report and physiologic measures of arousal were obtained during in vivo flooding sessions. Minimal correspondence was found between these two assessment modalities. The significance of these findings for treatment is discussed.     

A new measure for determining children's subjective organization of speech

A new technique for determining children's subjective organization of speech is described. The technique consists of teaching a child a sentence and then repeatedly (1) reading the sentence up to a selected point, (2) sounding a tone, and (3) having the child supply the next word. The time from the tone to the onset of the child's voice is the dependent variable. In the first study 6- and 8-year-old children memorized the following sentence: “John likes to feed the little puppies in the barn.” Their response times suggested that the dominant segmentation pattern consisted of four phrases: a subject phrase, a verb phrase, an object phrase and a modifier phrase. Within each phrase differences between reaction times were on the order of 30 msec. Across phrases they were on the order of 120 msec. The same trend emerged for subsamples of the children with various short-term memory sizes, and for adults. It also appeared for subsamples of the total scores (e.g., first six trials and last six trials). In order to provide further evidence of the technique's validity, different sentences of the same general type were presented to children with short-term memory spans of either 3, 4, or 5. As predicted, it was found that when children's spans corresponded to the number of hypothesized chunks (i.e., 4), they could repeat the sentences verbatim on the first exposure. They could not do so, however, when their spans were lower than that value or when the number of phrases was increased. It was concluded that the new technique is a promising one for assessing young children's patterns of speech segmentation.