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open access

The Effects of Skilled Dialogue Simulation Coaching on the Collaborative Verbal Behavior of Behavior Analysts in Training

Description: Despite the evidence that supports the benefits of a holistic, collaborative approach to autism intervention, but there is little training to teach those skills to professionals. Behavior analysts working in applied settings will often partner with different individuals from very different backgrounds and disciplines. Skilled Dialogue has been recommended as an approach to conversations that values everyone's contributions in fostering compassionate, collaborative, and culturally responsive car… more
Date: July 2023
Creator: Webb, Maia Grenada
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Multicomponent Evaluation of Food Properties Affecting Rumination in an Adult with Intellectual Disabilities

Description: Rumination consists of voluntary regurgitation of partially digested food, followed by chewing and re-swallowing or expulsion of regurgitated stomach contents (DM-ID2). Little research has systematically analyzed the differential effects of type or quantity of food on rumination across extended observations. This analysis demonstrated that certain (isolated) foods may differentially affect the rate of rumination. Furthermore, patterns of responding and manipulations of quantity may provide evid… more
Date: July 2023
Creator: Sanchez, Aaron Joseph
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Discriminative Control of Behavioral Variability in Video Game Play

Description: Creativity can be a useful skill in today's classrooms and workplaces. When individuals talk about creativity, it's unclear what the controlling variables are when we tact behavior as "creative." Research in understanding the processes behind behaviors that are considered "creative" would assist in identifying functional relations and provide insight on how to teach creativity. Since creativity is often described as doing something different from the norm, behavioral variability may be a potent… more
Date: May 2023
Creator: Arias, Gabriela Isabel
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Evaluating an Exchange Program for the Treatment of Problem Behavior Maintained by Access to Tangibles

Description: Previous studies, typically with children, have used delay-tolerance training to treat problem behavior maintained by access to tangibles. This often involves physical prompting and waiting rather than exchanging, two practices that may not be possible or relevant to adults with intellectual disabilities (ID). For many adults with ID in residential settings, exchanging items, rather than waiting per se, may be evocative for problem behavior. In the current study, I evaluated an exchange program… more
Date: May 2023
Creator: Bauer, Melanie Sue
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Faulty Stimulus Control and Reduced Treatment Integrity: An Analysis of Position Biases

Description: When learning conditional discriminations, it is possible that faulty sources of control develop and interfere with acquisition. In 2021, Bergmann et al. reported the effects of different integrity levels (i.e., to what degree an intervention is implemented correctly) on undergraduate students' mastery of an arbitrary matching to sample task. They found that participants in the reduced integrity conditions at or below 80% were more likely to show stimulus biases (i.e., selecting a particular i… more
Date: May 2023
Creator: Nielsen, Leif Erik
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Intermodal Stimulus Compounding with Ambient Odors Produces Averaging in Rats

Description: In an organism's natural environment, there are always an uncountable number of stimuli, and stimulus features, available to gain control over behavior. When these component stimuli are presented simultaneously, this new stimulus compound can occasion a previously unseen effect on behavior. Stimulus compounding is a method used to better understand how variables in stimulus features may impact the final effect on an organism's responding when presented with a stimulus compound. While stimulus c… more
Date: May 2023
Creator: Kirkland, Sophia B.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Self-Governance in a CPR Game: An Empirical Assessment of Elinor Ostrom's Eight Design Principles

Description: Nobel laureate and economist Elinor Ostrom earned a Nobel prize in economic sciences in 2009 for her research on a community's ability to self-govern a common pool resource with the use of eight design principles. While Ostrom's accumulated efforts to analyze these principles and apply them to community resources have earned widespread recognition, these principles have yet to take off on a grand scale as a blueprint for self-governance systems globally. There is also a lack of empirical eviden… more
Date: May 2023
Creator: Smith, Alexandra Zachary
Partner: UNT Libraries

Change AGENT Project Part 1: Training Staff to Make Responsive Decisions Based on Goals and Rationales and Evaluating the Effects on the Manding Progress of Children with Autism

Description: When autism interventionists within behavioral intervention programs continually assess the child's behavior and context and adjust their teaching behaviors accordingly, the child can quickly progress towards their goals. While evaluations of flexible behavior-change techniques implemented by experienced clinicians are present in the literature, systematic evaluations of staff training procedures to train interventionists in responsive decision making are lacking. In the current study, flexible… more
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Date: December 2022
Creator: Dotson, Anna M.
Partner: UNT Libraries

Change AGENT Project Part 2: Further Analyses of Progress Following Staff Training on Responsive, Goal-Directed, and Rationale-Based Decision Making

Description: Evidence-based practice in ABA is a complex decision-making process involving frequent adjustments in goals and procedures as informed by science, client need, and clinical wisdom. Consistent with the science's foundations, incredible gains are possible for children with autism when practitioners are systematically trained to understand, produce, and be responsive to shifting conditions for change. However, minimal standards for training promote inflexibility and rule following, at the expense … more
This item is restricted from view until January 1, 2025.
Date: December 2022
Creator: Schleifer-Katz, Evan
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating an Online Instructional Program to Teach Students to Evaluate Systemic Social Issues Using a Matrix Analysis

Description: This research aimed to determine the effects of an online training program on the accurate articulation of the concepts and elements needed to conduct a matrix analysis, the accuracy with which participants embedded these elements in a matrix analysis diagram, and the qualitative value of those elements. The development of the online training program was completed through a series of recursive steps. First, four literature searches regarding the matrix analysis, its foundational concepts, and u… more
Date: December 2022
Creator: Smith, Michaela M.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Effects of Skilled Dialogue Training on Behavior Analysts' Verbal Behavior Related to the Provision of Compassionate, Collaborative, and Culturally Responsive Care

Description: Despite the growing recognition of the importance of compassionate, collaborative, and culturally responsive care in behavior analysis, the training programs to develop relevant skills are meager. The purpose of the current study is to evaluate the effectiveness of Skilled Dialogue training for behavior analysts in improving the use of six strategies–welcoming, allowing, sense-making, appreciating, joining, harmonizing–when engaging in conversations with clients, colleagues and other profession… more
Date: December 2022
Creator: Kim, Bokyeong A.
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Effects of Voluntary and Involuntary Muscle Recruitment Training on the Strength of Isometric Muscle Contractions

Description: Approximately 50% of individuals who undergo total knee arthroplasty (TKA) fail to achieve a full functional recovery. Current physical therapy practices commonly utilize neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) to passively activate quadriceps muscles. This passive approach does not directly reteach the lost response, but can strengthen the atrophied muscle. Study 1 compared surface electromyography with biofeedback (sEMGBF) with a changing criterion design to NMES alone. Study 2 compared s… more
Date: December 2022
Creator: Armshaw, Gabriel Luke
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

An Extension of a Peer-Mentoring Training Program for College-Aged Students

Description: An important predictor of the success of a peer-mentoring program is the quality of the relationship between the peer mentor and the mentee. A previous study identified target outcomes, operationally defined target behaviors, and developed a computer-based instruction (CBI) training module to teach peer mentors relationship skills. The previous study suggested that the CBI training module increased target behaviors in pre-and post-tests that were typed. The current study replicated and extended… more
Date: December 2022
Creator: Luna Rodriguez, Araceli
Partner: UNT Libraries

An Evaluation of Differential Attention on Preferred Topics of Conversation for Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Description: Extensive speech on preferred conversation topics may limit conversations with others. For individuals with ASD, extensive speech on a topic may be a form of restricted or repetitive behavior that may be addressed through skill building. However, previous research suggests that skill building may not be necessary if the behavior is sensitive to differential reinforcement contingencies. To evaluate the effects of differential reinforcement in the form of attention on conversation topics, we repl… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Castillo, Michelle Victoria
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Exploring Functional Interdependence of Mands, Tacts, and Intraverbals after Brain Injury

Description: One goal of this study was to evaluate the emergence of mands and intraverbals following tact acquisition for individuals with aphasia due to acquired brain injury. A second goal was to evaluate the transfer of shortened latencies as a function of tact training across untrained operants. In Study 1, the dependent measure was accuracy of responding and in Study 2, the dependent measures were rate and latency of responding. Participants for Study 1 were two uninjured adults (pilot) and two adults… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Baltazar-Mars, Marla
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Investigating the Effects of Teaching on Response Allocation by Implementing a Changing Criterion Procedure

Description: The study of choice and allocation has often focused on certain parameters of reinforcement, but rarely on historical variables. The goal of this study was to investigate the potential effects of gradual vs. abrupt teaching methods on future response allocation. A secondary goal was to see if the results of teaching-method manipulations might be correlated with the parameters that the teaching method produced, specifically unit costs, rate of reinforcement, or error rates. Results indicate that… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Krilcich, Rachel AnnaSoo
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Investigating the Role of Concurrent Verbal Behavior in a Rule-Shifting Scenario

Description: The present study evaluates the effects of incompatible verbal behavior when engaging in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The WCST is a complex task that requires participants to match stimulus cards based on self-generated rules. After a varying number of trials, the rule changes and the participant will have to self-generate a new rule. Verbal behavior, specifically joint control, is likely involved in rule-following. Seven participants took part in this study. Participants engaged in… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Cutler, Jacquelyn Marie
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Tales by Moonlight: An Exploratory Analysis of the Effects of a Storytelling Interview Package for Youths and Elders in an Historically Black Community

Description: Storytelling is a practice that is used to pass down important information about culture, environment, and history. From a behavior analytic perspective, the process of storytelling involves contingencies and can be viewed within the framework of the Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior. For each listener, based on their history of learning and experiences, stories enable a unique type of learning about reinforcers, punishers and cultural context. In African American oral tradition, storytelli… more
Date: August 2022
Creator: Akinwale, Oluwabukola Elizabeth
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Effects of Using Arbitrary Symbols in Naming Procedures with Adults

Description: Naming refers to encountering a new word and subsequently being able to use it both expressively and receptively. Sometimes, this can happen in as little as a single experience. Several recent studies have explored factors that influence the acquisition of naming in adults. However, these studies used familiar stimuli for which the participants already had names. In these studies, preexisting stimulus-response relations with the stimuli could have impeded the acquisition of new names for some p… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Jaramillo, Andia
Partner: UNT Libraries

Exploring the Effects of Cultural Consequences Identified through a Ranking Task on the Interlocking Behavioral Contingencies of Ethically Self-Controlled Responses with Participants with Pre-Existing Relationships

Description: This study explored the effects of cultural consequences identified through a ranking task on the selection of interlocking behavioral contingencies and aggregate products constituting ethically self-controlled responses when participants had pre-existing relationships. Two experiments were conducted to explore these effects. Experiment 1 had two triads of three participants each recruited from a university-based autism center. Experiment 2 had three triads of three participants each; participa… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Elwood, Chelsea Christina
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Exploring the Efficacy of Percentile Schedules with the Amplitude of Muscular Contractions

Description: Percentile reinforcement schedules have been used to systematically alter inter-response times, behavioral variability, breath carbon monoxide levels, duration of social behaviors, and various other properties of behavior. However, none of the previous studies have examined the effectiveness of percentile schedules in relation to the magnitude of muscular contractions. This control over magnitude of muscular responding has important implications relating to the strengthening of muscles and corr… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Goodhue, Rob
Partner: UNT Libraries

Reliability of Treatment Integrity Assessment with Multiple Observers: Can Agreement Be Assumed?

Description: Interobserver agreement (IOA) was calculated across three participant dyads for a generalized treatment integrity tool. No dyads achieved 80% agreement during baseline. Task clarification was piloted as an intervention for two of the three dyads. Form agreement produced stabilization in both dyads and improvement in one dyad. Time agreement did not improve but demonstrated marked trends in one dyad.
Date: May 2022
Creator: Cohen, Lindsay Anne
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Safe and Fast Deworming Procedure for Horses

Description: Most horse owners administer oral deworming medication to their horses on a set schedule, often six times per year. The deworming process involves using a plastic syringe to inject a thick paste into the horse's mouth. Most horse owners do not specifically train their horses to accept this procedure. Consequently, many horses resist the procedure and some horses engage in behaviors, such as head shaking, pulling away, or even rearing, that may be dangerous to humans or to themselves. This study… more
Date: May 2022
Creator: Ward, Jessica Lauren
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Behavior Analytic Account of Humor Responses: Taking a Joke Way Too Seriously

Description: Compared to other examples of human behavior, humor responses have received relatively little attention from the scientific community and by the behavior analytic community in particular. This study investigated what some of the controlling variables for humans to emit a humor response may be. Participants were randomly presented two types of word sequences/jokes: one with a matching punchline and one without a matching punchline. Participants rated whether the jokes were funny or not funny, an… more
Date: December 2021
Creator: Amezquita IV, Edward Brandon
Partner: UNT Libraries
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