Rehearsal strategies of Alcoholic Korsakoff patients

An overt rehearsal procedure was used to monitor the rehearsal strategies that Alcoholic Korsakoff, Chronic Alcoholic, and Normal Control patients used when learning a 20-item list. It was found that Korsakoff patients spontaneously rehearse only one word at a time, that word being the one currently presented, regardless of the organizational salience of the list of words. Alcholics and Control patients, on the other hand, tended to rehearse several words in addition to the one being currently presented, and they demonstrated increasing ability to rehearse semantically related words together as the organizational salience of the list increased. This ability to rehearse in an enriched manner placed the two control groups at a distinct advantage over the Korsakoff patients at the time of recalling the list.     

Fear decrement to anxiety hierarchy items—Effects of stimulus intensity

The effects of hierarchy item intensity and duration of presentation on intra-item fear decrement were assessed with regard to systematic desensitization. Forty-eight color slides of snakes were scaled and ranked for anxiety value with the psychophysical technique of magnitude estimation by 30 female snake phobics using two response methods: verbal report and a non-verbal report instrument, the hand dynamometer. Seven test slides, spanning the scale range, were shown for 257 sec to 42 additional subjects who rated their fear level on 10 separate occasions using the hand dynamometer and verbal report. For all slides significant fear decrement occurred as a function of duration and the fear decrement across time was greater for slides of higher intensity. Negative exponential functions with similar slopes were found to fit the data for each of the slides, indicating that for each slide the same percentage of the total amount of fear decrement was lost per unit of time. The implications of these results and techniques are discussed for desensitization theory, research and therapeutic procedure.     

An experimental analysis of exposure to “explicit” heterosexual stimuli as an effective variable in changing arousal patterns of homosexuals

The effect of exposure to explicit heterosexual stimuli on heterosexual arousal was experimentally analyzed in four homosexuals in a series of single case experimental designs. Each subject was sequentially exposed to films of female or male sexual content under positive therapeutic instructions. Penile response to female slides in separate measurement sessions increased during exposure to the female film, decreased during exposure to the male film, and increased once again when the female film was reinstated. The increase in penile response to female stimuli was paralleled in many instances by changes in masturbatory fantasy, reports of arousal and heterosexual behavior outside the laboratory. Increasing heterosexual arousal had little effect on homosexual responsivity. Results are discussed in terms of exposure facilitating extinction of avoidance responses toward females and providing new sexual fantasy content.     

A community-reinforcement approach to alcoholism

Several theoretical approaches to alcoholism exist. An opérant reinforcement approach was used in the present study to develop a new procedure that rearranged community reinforcers such as the job, family and social relations of the alcoholic such that drinking produced a time-out from a high density of reinforcement. The results showed that the alcoholics who received this Community-Reinforcement counseling drank less, worked more, spent more time with their families and out of institutions than did a matched control group of alcoholics who did not receive these procedures. This new approach appears to be an effective method of reducing alcoholism. An analysis in reinforcement terms is presented of the etiology, epidemiology, and treatment of alcoholism.     

Interaction-priming: a method of reinstating patient-family relationships

The probability of successful discharge for long-term mental hospital patients has been found to depend on strong family and social relationships (Chapman, Day and Burstein, 1961 ; Chase and Silverman, 1943; Paul, 1969; Meichenbaum, 1966; Ullmann, 1967). Yet, long-term institutionalization often results in the weakening of these relationships. These findings suggest that successful discharge would be facilitated by procedures that maintained or restored these social relationships. The present study attempted to develop such a procedure, based on the principles of Response Priming (O'Brien, Azrin and Henson, 1969) and Reinforcer Sampling (Ayllon and Azrin, 1968). Response Priming views complex behavior such as family visits as chains of responses and states that the probability of the completion of the chain (visit) increases during later portions of the chain. The present procedure applies this principle by not requiring visitors to engage in those behaviors remote from the completion of the chain, but rather, by making visits available to them at the terminal portion of the chain. This was done by not requiring visitors to come to the hospital to visit the patient, but rather, by directly transporting the patient to the visitor's home. The Reinforcer Sampling rationale (Ayllon and Azrin, 1968) suggests that future visits would likely increase if visits were reinforcing to the family and the patient. Thus, the patients' behavior was analyzed during visits in the families' homes. Between visits, instruction was given to the patients for improving the reinforcing quality of these types of behavior for subsequent visits. The rationale was that the Response Priming Procedure would produce visits and the Reinforcer Sampling Procedure would show the families and patients that being together was enjoyable. The relationships should, therefore, be maintained and, hopefully, thereby increase the likelihood of successful discharge for the long-term hospitalized patients.