We investigate the role of increasing friendship in dialogue, and propose a first step towards a computational model of the role of long-term relationships in language use between humans and embodied conversational agents. Data came from a study of friends and strangers, who either could or could not see one another, and who were asked to give directions to one-another, three subsequent times. ...

Verbal behavior plays a fundamental role in the development of complex social and communication skills. Many children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder exhibit profound deficiencies in intraverbal repertoires and the development of social relationships. Recent studies that investigated the effects of intraverbal training on the emergence of reverse intraverbals produced mixed results (e.g...

Chapter 25 is devoted to verbal behavior, a distinguishing feature of the human behavioral repertoire. Verbal behavior is at once the phenomenon that makes humans particularly interesting and the vehicle with which we express that interest. Verbal behavior makes progress possible from one generation to the next and enhances the development of sciences, technologies, and the arts. Building on Sk...

The present article articulates a cognitive theoretical perspective of delusional beliefs. In contrast to the focus of psychoanalytic therapy (theoretically-derived phenomena beyond personal awareness), the cognitive therapist focuses primarily on the conscious cognitive-experiential level in the treatment of delusional beliefs, thereby emphasizing a 'common-sense' level of analysis or reasonin...

In this study we analyzed 65 fragments of session recordings in which a cognitive behavioral therapist employed the Socratic method with her patients. Specialized coding instruments were used to categorize the verbal behavior of the psychologist and the patients. First the fragments were classified as more or less successful depending on the overall degree of concordance between the client’s ve...

The goals of this study were first, to delineate the co-occurrence of parental severe physical aggression and verbal aggression toward clinic-referred adolescents, and second, to examine the interactive effects of parental severe physical aggression and verbal aggression on adolescent externalizing and internalizing behavior problems. This research involved 239 referrals of 11- to 18-year-old y...

Studies that have compared the effectiveness of differing prompt types to teach intraverbal responses have yielded mixed results, suggesting that individuals' reinforcement histories with prompt types may influence which prompt will be most effective. The purpose of this study was to test whether programmed increases in exposure to specific prompt types would produce concomitant increases in th...

In a recent article, Schlinger (2008) marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1957) by considering its impact on the field of behaviorism and research on verbal behavior. In the present article, we comment on Schlinger’s conclusions regarding the impact of the book and highlight the extensions and alternatives to Skinner’s account proposed by research on sti...