The purpose of this research was to investigate the relationship between the length of time that work groups had been meeting and the verbal behavior patterns and perceptions of group members about their groups. The verbal behavior patterns and perceptions of 180 members of 26 work groups were examined. Perceptions of 639 people in 88 work groups also were explored. Significant relationships an...

The author reviews the book that B. F. Skinner considered to be his most important work, namely Verbal Behavior in terms of its content and effect on the field. He considers such elements as the paucity of experiments, the host of allusions to literature and the masterful behavior analysis directed at elucidating verbal behavior, the latter constituting an admirable example of how behavior anal...

Access to psychological therapies continues to be poor for people experiencing psychosis. To address this problem, researchers are developing brief interventions that address the specific symptoms associated with psychosis, i.e., hearing voices. As part of the development work for a brief Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) intervention for voices we collected qualitative data from people who hea...

OBJECTIVE We tested the hypothesis that pain threat appraisal and catastrophizing by children with functional abdominal pain (FAP) will moderate the relation between parent verbal behavior and children's symptom complaints following experimentally induced visceral discomfort. METHODS Thirty-three pediatric patients with FAP and their parents participated. Children completed measures of pain t...

Amid the novel terms and original analyses in Skinner's Verbal Behavior, the importance of his discussion of multiple control is easily missed, but multiple control of verbal responses is the rule rather than the exception. In this paper we summarize and illustrate Skinner's analysis of multiple control and introduce the terms convergent multiple control and divergent multiple control. We point...

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 writing Verbal Behavior, B. F. Skinner (1957) made clear his intention not to review the extant literature on the subject matter (Skinner, 1979, p. 282). Nonetheless, he did formally and informally cite many scientific, philosophical, and literary books and articles throughout his text. The formal citations appear as references in footnotes at the bottoms of pages, but are not found in any r...

The verbal behavior literature, in the pages of this journal and elsewhere, includes both data-based research on verbal behavior and talk about verbal behavior. Acknowledging that we have ourselves occasionally contributed to the imbalance, we nevertheless believe that there should be more of the former and less of the latter. For example, we once submitted a chapter to a book about verbally go...

This article describes a program based on behavioral principles to develop verbal behavior in severely handicapped young children and designed to be conducted by college students. The results indicate that college students are able to apply their technical skills, obtained mainly from an increasing number of beha11iorally oriented courses offered at the undergraduate level, and make important c...