We developed a methodology, derived from the theoretical literatures on rule-governed behavior and private events, to experimentally investigate the relationship between covert verbal self-regulation and nonverbal behavior. The methodology was designed to assess whether (a) nonverbal behavior was under the control of covert rules and (b) verbal reports of these rules were functionally equivalen...

Despite the seminal studies of response differentiation by the method of successive approximation detailed in chapter 8 of The Behavior of Organisms (1938), B. F. Skinner never actually shaped an operant response by hand until a memorable incident of startling serendipity on the top floor of a flour mill in Minneapolis in 1943. That occasion appears to have been a genuine eureka experience for ...

Teachers’ verbal behavior is a key contributor to provision of appropriate indirect intervention in language learning contexts; however, it is surprising that professionals in ELT, to date, have not proposed a structured oral/verbal framework to deliver intervention and assistance in language learning contexts. To help redress this gap, Heron’s Six-Category Intervention Analysis was adapted to ...

Clinical theory predicts that individuals high in psychopathic traits possess average or above average intelligence; however findings in adult and child samples have been mixed. The present study aimed to investigate (1) the relationship between verbal and nonverbal intelligence and the three dimensions of psychopathy (callous-unemotional (CU) traits, narcissism, impulsivity); and (2) whether t...

Human communication has been described as involving the coding-decoding of a conventional symbol system, which could be supported by parts of the human motor system (i.e. the "mirror neurons system"). However, this view does not explain how these conventions could develop in the first place. Here we target the neglected but crucial issue of how people organize their non-verbal behavior to commu...

An approach based on Skinner's (1957) theory of verbal behavior has been developed to understand and teach elementary communication skills to children with autism and developmental disabilities (Sundberg & Partington, 1998). However, few studies have directly examined the characteristics of emerging language in children with developmental disabilities. The purpose of this study was to develop a...

One of the key challenges in the development of social virtual actors is to give them the capability to display socio-emotional states through their non-verbal behavior. Based on studies in human and social sciences or on annotated corpora of human expressions, different models to synthesize virtual agent’s non-verbal behavior have been developed. One of the major issues in the synthesis of beh...

Human behavior is, amongst others, influenced by cultural background. Thus research on virtual characters that should imitate human behavior, considers cultural background to influence the behavior of agents as well. This paper presents a hybrid approach of modeling culture-specific non-verbal behaviors for virtual character dialogues based on both: theoretical knowledge and empirical data. A B...