The present study explored whether (a) positive or negative reinforcement would produce higher percentages of on-task student behavior at set timed intervals, (b) positive, negative, or total reinforcement would increase student attentiveness after reinforcement, and (c) if natural fluctuations in teacher approval/disapproval would have any bearing on percentages of student attentiveness. Findings of the 15-day study concluded that (a) positive reinforcement maintained significantly higher levels of student attentiveness over negative reinforcement, (b) negative reinforcement did not significantly lower percentages of student attentiveness, and (c) natural fluctuations in rates of teacher approval/disapproval had no apparent effect on the amount of on-task behavior in the beginning strings class.

Aggression in dogs is a significant public health concern with 7.2 mortality cases per 100 million inhabitants and approximately 4.7 million dog bites annually. Canine aggression is typically viewed as a genetic trait and treated as pathology through the use of medical or respondent behavioral procedures. In this study the effects of the differential negative reinforcement of safe, alternative behaviors to aggression using distancing as the reinforcer were evaluated. The results demonstrated that even when the aggression was in evidence throughout most of the dog's lifetime, it responded quickly to changes in reinforcement contingencies.

Four elementary school children were tested on 120 words containing the short e (e.g., ten, pen) and short a (e.g., tan, pan) sounds. Words were tested in the hear-write (H/W) and see-say (S/S) channels. No programmed consequences were scheduled during baseline (BL) tests 1-3. After BL, an error analysis categorized words based on channel error and topography of error. Praise was delivered during tests 4-6 for correct responses. Children's responses were variable within channel and across channels for a majority of words. By the end of the praise phase, there was a decrease in the number of words with errors, for all children in their error word group. Error topographies began to stabilize for some words during praise.

Social stimuli that function as reinforcers for most children generally do not function as reinforcers for children diagnosed with autism. These important social stimuli include smiles, head nods, thumb-ups, and okay signs. It should be an important goal of therapy for children with autism to condition these neutral social stimuli to function as reinforcers for children diagnosed with autism. There is empirical evidence to support both a pairing procedure (classical conditioning) and a discriminative stimulus procedure to condition neutral stimuli to function as reinforcers. However, there is no clear evidence as to the superiority of effectiveness for either procedure. Despite this most textbooks and curriculum guides for children with autism state only the pairing procedure to condition neutral stimuli to function as reinforcers. Recent studies suggest that the discriminative stimulus procedure may in fact be more effective in conditioning neutral stimuli to function as reinforcers for children diagnosed with autism. The present research is a further comparison of these two procedures. Results from one participant support recent findings that suggest the discriminative stimulus procedure is more effective in conditioning neutral stimuli to function as reinforcers. But the results from the other participant show no effects from either procedure, suggesting future research into conditions necessary to condition neutral social stimuli to function as reinforcers for children with autism.

Contingency management has been utilized to improve treatment compliance and attendance in a medical setting. A related question involves the effect of contingency management on attendance in outpatient psychotherapy. Sixty-nine individuals ranging in age from 8 to 50 years agreed to participate in such a study. These individuals agreed to sign a contract specifying consequation for failure to notify the centers 24 hours in advance of an impending absence. Data on attendance and notification of impending absences were collected weekly for five sessions. After five sessions, dropouts and remainers were interviewed and the course of treatment was discussed. For the purpose of this study, a "dropout" occurred whenever an individual terminated therapy by missing an appointment and not rescheduling, or whenever an individual missed three consecutive appointments.

The present study demonstrates the effectiveness of combining medication packaging, verbal and graphical feedback, and pill count probes on increasing medication compliance. Eight chronic adult outpatients were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (a) a regimen card medication packaging system, and (b) a 7- day baggie medication packaging system. A staggered group treatment design was used to ascertain whether either of the two special packaging systems was effective relative to baseline and reversal conditions (using the standard medication vial) in increasing medication compliance behavior among both over-and undercompliant outpatients. Results indicated that the use of the special packaging of medication in combination with the behavioral techniques of verbal and graphical feedback aided in improving compliance in 4 out of 8 noncompliant outpatients.

Evaluating our environment by deciding what is beneficial or harmful, pleasant or punishing is a part of our daily lives. Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is a common trait all mobile organisms exhibit and understanding how rewarding stimuli are represented in the brain remains a major goal of neuroscience. Studying reward learning in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster has enabled us to better understand the complex neural circuit mechanisms involved in reward processing in the brain. By conditioning flies with sugars of differing nutritional properties, we determined that flies trained with sweet but non-nutritive sugars formed robust short-term memory (STM), but not long-term memory (LTM). However, flies conditioned with a sweet and nutritious sugar or a sweet non-nutritious sugar supplemented with a tasteless nutritious compound, formed robust 24 hour LTM. These findings led us to propose a model of parallel reinforcement pathways for appetitive olfactory conditioning in the fly, in which both sweet taste and nutrient value contribute to appetitive long-term memory. We followed this line of research by examining the neural circuitry in the fly brain that represents these parallel reward pathways. We found that the biogenic amine octopamine (OA) only represents the reinforcing effects of sweet taste. Stimulation of OA neurons could replace sugar in olfactory conditioning to form appetitive STM. Surprisingly, implanting memory with OA was dependent on dopamine (DA) signaling, which although being long associated with reward in mammals, was previously linked with punishment in flies. We found that OA-reinforced memory functions through the α-adrenergic OAMB receptor in a novel subset of rewarding DA neurons that innervate the mushroom body (MB). The rewarding population of DA neurons is required for sweet and nutrient reinforced memory suggesting they may integrate both signals to drive appetitive LTM formation. In addition, OA implanted memory requires concurrent modulation of negatively reinforcing DA neurons through the β-adrenergic OCTβ2R receptor. These data provide a new layered reward model in Drosophila in which OA modulates distinct populations of both positive and negative coding DA neurons. Therefore, the reinforcement system in flies is more similar to that of mammals than previously thought.

Aversive tasks and activities are commonly encountered in the everyday routines of most individuals. For individuals with intellectual disabilities, a means to assess individual sensitivities to aversive stimulation could allow caregivers to avoid unnecessary contact with aversive events, teach appropriate ways to avoid or escape aversive situations, and condition tolerance to unavoidable aversive tasks and activities. The current study, conducted at a large, state-operated residential facility for adults with intellectual disabilities, used an anecdotal assessment, the Sensitivities to Aversive Stimulation Survey (SASS), to evaluate the relative aversiveness of an array of commonly encountered tasks and activities for each participant. Five caregivers complete the 25-question assessment, using Likert-type scales to rate individual participants' affect, compliance or tolerance, and severity of problem behavior related to each item. The mean scores of the raters were used to estimate the aversiveness of each task, condition, or activity. The outcomes from the SASS were then compared with outcomes of an experimental analysis in which participants could emit responses to escape situations that were ranked either high or low using the SASS. Relative aversiveness was evaluated by comparing the percentage of trials with escape behavior and duration of exposure for each stimulus. Preliminary results indicate that the SASS may be useful in identifying aversive tasks and stimuli.

Observational learning (OL) occurs when an individual contacts reinforcement as a direct result of discriminating the observed consequences of other individuals' responses. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may have deficits in observational learning and previous research has demonstrated that teaching a series of prerequisite skills (i.e., attending, imitation, delayed imitation, and consequence discrimination) can result in observational learning. We sequentially taught these prerequisite skills for three young children with ASD across three play-based tasks. We assessed the direct and indirect effects of training by assessing OL before and after instruction across tasks and task variations (for two participants) during both in-vivo and video-model probes using a concurrent multiple-probe design. All participants acquired the prerequisite skills and demonstrated observational learning during probes of directly-trained tasks. Generalization results varied across participants. Observational learning generalized to one untrained task for one participant. For the other two participants, observational learning generalized to variations of the trained tasks but not to untrained tasks. Generalization additionally occurred during the in-vivo probes for both participants for whom we assessed this response. Implications of these findings, as well as directions for future research, are discussed.

Falk's pivotal 1961 study showed that rats would drink excessive amounts of water when exposed to a time based schedule of reinforcement. Since then, schedule-induced drinking or polydipsia, has been demonstrated with several species and with a variety of different behaviors. Rats, the most commonly used animal, have been shown to drink excessive amounts of water under a variety of different time based schedules of reinforcement; exclusively during a free operant procedure. The current study shows that water drinking can be induced during a discrete trial procedure, and instead of using a time-based schedule of reinforcement, this study used a variable-ratio schedule of reinforcement. The results showed that excessive water drinking was induced under these conditions with a canine.