Treatment of escape-maintained aberrant behavior with escape extinction and predictable routines

We evaluated the effects of two daily activity schedules on 2 participants' rates of aberrant behavior and their compliance. Functional analysis identified the operant function of the participants' aberrant behaviors to be escape from tasks. Participants were taught to use stimuli contained in daily schedules, and were tested based on a modified stimulus-equivalence model that consisted of flash cards and activity schedules comprised of words or photographs that corresponded to the participants' daily activities. On pretests, the participants demonstrated simple and conditional discriminations with the photographs but not with the printed stimuli. A time-delay procedure was used to teach the participants to name the flash cards. Following training, the printed activity schedules corresponded to lower rates of problem behavior and higher rates of compliance than the photographic activity schedules. Performance on posttests indicated the establishment of functional classes of stimuli involving the flash cards and activity schedules even though this type of correspondence was not directly trained.     

Application of the bootstrap methods in factor analysis

A Monte Carlo experiment is conducted to investigate the performance of the bootstrap methods in normal theory maximum likelihood factor analysis both when the distributional assumption is satisfied and unsatisfied. The parameters and their functions of interest include unrotated loadings, analytically rotated loadings, and unique variances. The results reveal that (a) bootstrap bias estimation performs sometimes poorly for factor loadings and nonstandardized unique variances; (b) bootstrap variance estimation performs well even when the distributional assumption is violated; (c) bootstrap confidence intervals based on the Studentized statistics are recommended; (d) if structural hypothesis about the population covariance matrix is taken into account then the bootstrap distribution of the normal theory likelihood ratio test statistic is close to the corresponding sampling distribution with slightly heavier right tail.This study was carried out in part under the ISM cooperative research program (91-ISM · CRP-85, 92-ISM · CRP-102). The authors would like to thank the editor and three reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions which improved the quality of this paper considerably.     

Assessing the stability of principal components using regression

This paper presents an analysis, based on simulation, of the stability of principal components. Stability is measured by the expectation of the absolute inner product of the sample principal component with the corresponding population component. A multiple regression model to predict stability is devised, calibrated, and tested using simulated Normal data. Results show that the model can provide useful predictions of individual principal component stability when working with correlation matrices. Further, the predictive validity of the model is tested against data simulated from three non-Normal distributions. The model predicted very well even when the data departed from normality, thus giving robustness to the proposed measure. Used in conjunction with other existing rules this measure will help the user in determining interpretability of principal components.The authors would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers and the two editors for their valuable comments. Atanu R. Sinha gratefully acknowledges the research support received from the Marketing Studies Center, AGSM, UCLA. Send requests for reprints to Atanu R. Sinha, B418 Gold Hall, 110 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90095.     

Content variations and performance on formal operational tasks by gender,social class and ability1

The role of task content, gender, social class and cognitive ability in performance on two formal operational tasks is explored in this paper. The participants were 110 Icelandic 12-year-olds, early and late developers, males and females from all socio-economic groups. Two tasks of variable isolation (the pendulum and three content versions of the “plant” problem) and two measures of volume conservation (three traditional tasks and three tasks formally identical whose content was pictorial social play) were presented individually in a school setting. The results suggest that content variations have differential consequences for the performance of early and late developers at age 12. Both the nature of logical competence and task content affect solutions, as suggested by Overton and collaborators in 1987. Some social class and gender differences were observed on two Piagetian tasks (pendulum and volume), which was reduced by changing the task content in the case of social class but not in that of gender. As the gender difference in volume conservation was not reflected ins chool achievement nor on other cognitive tasks it was interpreted as a gender bias. The findings are discussed in view of recent literature on the development of cognitive theory with increased emphasis on context and meaning in a post-structural intellectual climate.     

Cultural attitudes: in contexts of argumentation and explanation

Traditionally, attitudes are supposed to predict behavior. However, due to their poor performance, we are sometimes advised to abandon the notion. The present study attempts to preserve the concept but takes attitudes to be evaluative goals accomplished through interactional, especially argumentative and explanatory activities. The paper uses reasoned-discourse analysis and demonstrates the attainment of positive attitudes towards the Dutch by expatriate Chinese intellectuals in the Netherlands by attending to a variety of argumentative and explanatory strategies in their interview talk. Results suggest that there is good empirical reason to believe that attitudes are accomplishments of communicating actors' rhetorical contextualizations.     

Psychological and educational characteristics of instruction for people with severe disabilities: Interacting systems of responding

This paper presents a behavioral model which proposes that operants are organized and regulated into systems of responding. Multi-operant theory proposes that operants are organized into response systems that interact to adapt behavior to the complexities of the environment. The operant is the interaction between behavior and the environment which includes the conditions under which responses may occur, the class of behavior that is likely to be effective in producing outcomes, and the antecedent conditions that define the context of behavior. A central feature of this theory is that operants within a repertoire are organized into regulated systems of responding. The mechanisms of regulation are themselves operants that are learned and controlled by processes that are the same as those that govern more overt behavior. Operants stand in relationship to each other in coordinated response systems with some operants directly affecting and organizing the performance of other operants. An important implication of the systemic nature of behavioral repertoires is that bringing some aspect of a behavior class under control of new variables may demonstrate a spread throughout the entire operant system depending on past histories linking the classes.deceased     

Comparative evaluation of two superior stopping rules for hierarchical cluster analysis

A split-sample replication stopping rule for hierarchical cluster analysis is compared with the internal criterion previously found superior by Milligan and Cooper (1985) in their comparison of 30 different procedures. The number and extent of overlap of the latent population distributions was systematically varied in the present evaluation of stopping-rule validity. Equal and unequal population base rates were also considered. Both stopping rules correctly identified the actual number of populations when there was essentially no overlap and clusters occupied visually distinct regions of the measurement space. The replication criterion, which is evaluated by clustering of cluster means from preliminary analyses that are accomplished on random partitions of an original data set, was superior as the degree of overlap in population distributions increased. Neither method performed adequately when overlap obliterated visually discernible density nodes.This research was supported in part by NIMH grant 5R01 MH 32457 14.