Examined the effectiveness of a cognitive behavioral intervention to help adolescents with cystic fibrosis (CF) cope with daily stressors. Five youths were referred for the therapy by medical staff because of perceived problems with anxiety or coping. Treatment impact was assessed on measures of coping, anxiety, perceptions of functional disability, and parental reports of behavior. A multiple ...

A limitation associated with communication-based interventions for problem behavior is the potential for requesting reinforcement at high rates. Multiple-schedule arrangements have been demonstrated to be effective for controlling rates of responding (Hanley, Iwata, & Thompson, 2001). In the current study, we extended previous research by teaching individuals to attend to naturally occurring di...

Problem behavior maintained by social-negative reinforcement often is evoked by a specific type of social interaction--the presentation of task demands. This study involved assessment and treatment of a more general form of social avoidance in which the establishing operation (EO) for problem behavior consisted of social interaction per se. Four subjects exhibited high rates of problem behavior...

A functional analysis identified the reinforcer maintaining feces throwing and spitting exhibited by a captive adult chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). The implementation of a function-based treatment combining extinction with differential reinforcement of an alternate behavior decreased levels of inappropriate behavior. These findings further demonstrate the utility of function-based approaches to ...

Results of a functional analysis indicated that a man diagnosed with autism engaged in bizarre sexual behavior in the presence of women wearing sandals. Several treatments proved to be ineffective or impractical. By contrast, a response-interruption/time-out procedure quickly eliminated the problem behavior in multiple settings.

Previous research suggests that language-training procedures for children with autism might be enhanced following an assessment of conditions that evoke emerging verbal behavior. The present investigation examined a methodology to teach recognizable mands based on environmental variables known to evoke participants' idiosyncratic communicative responses in the natural environment. An alternatin...

The earliest stages of functional communication training (FCT) involve providing immediate and continuous reinforcement for a communicative response (FCR) that is functionally equivalent to the targeted problem behavior. However, maintaining immediate reinforcement is not practical, and the introduction of delays is associated with increased problem behavior. The present study evaluated the eff...

Extinction-induced resurgence is the recurrence of previously reinforced behavior when another behavior is placed on extinction (Lieving, Hagopian, Long, & O'Connor, 2004). This phenomenon may account for some instances of treatment relapse when problem behavior recovers during extinction-based treatments. The current study sought to determine whether resurgence of problem behavior would reliab...

The paper begins with a brief discussion of issues that must be resolved in building a freeway data management system. Following this is a description of the design choices that dealt with these issues in a functioning system for California freeways. The system is called PeMS. Some concrete uses of PeMS are presented next. These uses imposed the functional requirements that led to the design ch...

Lesion and functional imaging studies have shown that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is critically involved in the avoidance of risky choices. However, detailed descriptions of the mechanisms that underlie the establishment of such behaviors remain elusive, due in part to the spatial and temporal limitations of available research techniques. We investigated this issue by recording directly ...