UNT Theses and Dissertations - 131 Matching Results

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Parent Partnership: Towards a Constructional Approach to Improving the Life of Parents with Children with Autism

Description: Parents with children diagnosed with autism face a variety of stressors. The typical approach to dealing with these stressors is pathological which focuses on the problem by attempting to eliminate or alleviate the stressors through counseling, behavioral therapy, tutoring, and/or drugs. The purpose of the current study was to assess an alternative approach, a constructional one, which focuses on solutions by teaching 3 parents to analyze their life, formulate goals, and develop programs to re… more
Date: August 2015
Creator: Liden, Timothy Allen
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The Physiological Control of Verbal Behavior

Description: The current study sought to investigate whether physiological responses, such as the electrodermographic response (EDG) and/or the frontalis muscle electrical potential (EMG) could be developed as a source of control over verbal responses. Discrimination training procedures using points exchangeable for money were employed to condition verbal responses occasioned by minute interoceptive events with 2 adult human subjects. Specific verbal responses were reinforced in the presence of changes in E… more
Date: August 1992
Creator: Field, Douglas Preston
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Post-Hoc Analysis of Challenging Behavior by Function: A Comparison of Multiple-Respondent Anecdotal Assessments, Functional Analyses, and Treatments

Description: The current study examines anecdotal assessment, functional analysis, and treatment outcomes from 44 participants. Agreement across Motivation Assessment Scale (MAS), Questions About Behavioral Function (QABF), and Functional Analysis Screening Tool (FAST) assessments, agreement between those anecdotal assessments and functional analyses, and agreement between those anecdotal assessments and treatment outcomes were analyzed across maintaining variables and topography categories of challenging b… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Dignan, Kathleen
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The Power of One Reinforcer

Description: Animal trainers use shaping to teach many behaviors. However, during shaping, the organism may engage in behaviors other than the target behavior or approximations to the target behavior. If the animal is engaged in other behaviors, the rate of reinforcement may decrease and the trainer may resort to what is sometimes referred to as a “desperation click.” That is, the trainer delivers one reinforcer for a behavior that is not a successive approximation to the target response. Anecdotal reports… more
Date: August 2013
Creator: Hunter, Mary E.
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A Preliminary Evaluation of an Indirect Assessment of Sensitivity to Aversive Stimulation

Description: Aversive tasks and activities are commonly encountered in the everyday routines of most individuals. For individuals with intellectual disabilities, a means to assess individual sensitivities to aversive stimulation could allow caregivers to avoid unnecessary contact with aversive events, teach appropriate ways to avoid or escape aversive situations, and condition tolerance to unavoidable aversive tasks and activities. The current study, conducted at a large, state-operated residential facility… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Hope, Mariah L.
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A Preliminary Investigation of How to Teach Undergraduate Students How to Build Rapport and Create Meaningful Interactions with College-Aged Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Description: University peer-mentoring programs have shown to increase the retention rates of students, including students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and improved satisfaction with the college experience. The perceived quality of a mentee-mentor relationship may predict satisfaction with a peer-mentoring program; therefore, teaching peer mentors to engage in behaviors that could contribute to a high-quality mentee-mentor relationship may be beneficial. The current study identified target outcomes,… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Espericueta-Luna, Williams A
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Preschool Life Skills: A Systematic Replication with Children with Developmental Disabilities

Description: School readiness literature indicates that skills which lend themselves to readiness and success in primary school are not amongst the skills generally taught in center based care facilities. Furthermore, children enrolled in non- maternal care settings are at greater risk for developing problem behavior. To address this issue, the Preschool Life Skills (PLS) program was created as a preventative intervention to teach functional communication and social skills to typically developing children.… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Lopez, Melinda Alysha
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Response Patterns in Functional Analyses: a Preliminary Analysis

Description: Functional assessment procedures have proven effective in identifying the operant contingencies that maintain problem behavior. Typically, the evaluation of responding during functional analyses is conducted at the condition level. However, some variables affecting occurrences of behavior cannot be evaluated solely through the use of a cross-session analysis. Evaluating within-session patterns of responding may provide information about variables such as extinction bursts, discriminative stimul… more
Date: August 2012
Creator: Gibson, Christine M.
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The role of common stimulus functions in the development of equivalence classes.

Description: College students were exposed to training designed to teach nine simple discriminations, such that sets of three arbitrary visual stimuli acquired common functions. For seven of eight participants, three 3-member contingency classes resulted. When the same stimuli were presented in a match-to-sample procedure under test conditions, four participants demonstrated equivalence-consistent responding, matching all stimuli from the same contingency class. Test performance for two participants was sys… more
Date: August 2004
Creator: MacIver, Kirsty
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Second-Order Conditional Control of Members of an Equivalence Class

Description: The conditional control of equivalence has received much attention in the analysis of verbal behavior. While previous research identified conditional control of relational responding and conditional control of equivalence class formation, this study investigated the possibility of conditional control of members of an equivalence class. Following baseline conditional discrimination training and equivalence testing, subjects were taught to select a particular member in the presence of a Green bac… more
Date: August 1997
Creator: Cammilleri, Anthony Peter
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Shaping: From art to science.

Description: This study evaluated the effectiveness of a procedure for teaching a caregiver to shape vocal language in a young child with autism. A multiple baseline design was employed to assess caregiver use of shaping procedures, child vocal language progress, and the social validity of the procedures. Following baseline and introductory sessions, the coach and caregiver reviewed video from the previous session and the coach gave descriptive feedback to the caregiver about her performance. Following the … more
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Date: August 2005
Creator: Schooley, Kathryne Balch
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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A Stimulus Control Analysis of Imprinting in a Human-Reared Pigeon

Description: Events that occur early in the life of birds greatly influence social and sexual preferences throughout the course of life. Traditionally, this is explained by a learning process known as imprinting. Young birds are thought to imprint to early stimuli, causing the development of permanent preferences for those stimuli. In the present study, imprinting is examined with respect to behaviors of an adult human-reared pigeon in several conditions. The subject was either presented with no stimulus, a… more
Date: August 2011
Creator: Varnon, Christopher A.
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A Stimulus Control Analysis of the Misinformation Effect

Description: This paper explores research on the misinformation effect and hypothesizes a new explanation for the occurrence misinformation effect. Current psychological theories states the misinformation effect occurs when memories are skewed by the presentation of new information after an initial event. This effect has been tested in a multitude of ways, including testing words lists, pictures, colors, and change blindness. Socially, the misinformation effect has been used to explain the inaccuracies of e… more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Tait, Kelly M.
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Stimulus Control Effects of Changes in Schedules of Reinforcement

Description: Sometimes, changes in consequences are accompanied by a clear stimulus change explicitly arranged by the experimenter. Other times when new consequences are in effect, there is little or no accompanying stimulus change explicitly arranged by the experimenter. These differences can be seen in the laboratory as multiple (signaled) schedules and mixed (unsignaled) schedules. The current study used college students and a single-subject design to examine the effects of introducing signaled and unsig… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Abdel-Jalil, Awab
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Superstitious Behavior Classroom Game Teaching

Description: Superstitions flourish in cultures around the word and in everyday life. Superstitions are so prevalent and influence personal and political decisions, therefore, we sought to develop a classroom demonstration of superstitious behavior that could be used to show quickly and effectively how powerful adventitious reinforcement could be in modifying behavior. An online game was developed and played by one hundred thirteen university students enrolled in a class on critical thinking. Participants g… more
Date: August 2016
Creator: Pourmorshed, Hormat Saadat
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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
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Teacher Training: An Examination of Skill Acquisition, Generalization, and Increases in Child Appropriate Behavior

Description: The effects of a training package (modeling, role-playing, and feedback) were evaluated using a multiple baseline across skill areas. Two trainers taught two teachers to use basic intervention skills that included components of both discrete trial teaching (DTT) and the Natural Language Paradigm (NLP). Training occurred in the context of one task. Generalization was assessed with two untrained tasks. Teachers' responses in the target task increased following training, as did appropriate respond… more
Date: August 2000
Creator: Sawyer, Rebecca Jo Moore
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Teaching Behavior Professionals to Use the Interview-Informed Synthesized Contingency Analysis (IISCA): A Preliminary Investigation

Description: We assessed the implementation accuracy and fidelity of two board certified behavior analysts (BCBAs) using the open-ended interview from Hanley. Participants interviewed a confederate using the open-ended interview, and were then asked to use information gathered from the interview to create operational definitions of target behaviors as well as test and control condition procedures for a subsequent matched test-control functional analysis as is characteristic of the interview-informed synthes… more
Date: August 2017
Creator: Metras, Rachel
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Teaching Two Children with Autism to Follow a Computer-Mediated Activity Schedule Utilizing Microsoft® PowerPoint® Presentation Software

Description: Children with autism typically exhibit deficits in behavior and also in visual processing. Development and implementation of visually-cued instructional procedures, combined with electronic technology, have been used successfully to teach children with autism complex behavior chains. This study used photographic activity schedules on computer slideshow software to teach two children with autism to follow computer-mediated cues and engage in four play activities, and to transition between each a… more
Date: August 2005
Creator: Carmichael, Tammy
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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Topographical analysis of reinforcement produced variability: Generalizations across settings and contingencies.

Description: This study evaluated the effects of programming a variability contingency on one object and the generalization of variability across other objects and contingencies when the defining features of the variable responses were topographical differences. A dog's interactions with five different objects were measured under both ANY (where any physical contact with the object would be reinforced on a fixed ratio schedule) and the VAR contingencies (where only the novel responses per trial would be rei… more
Date: August 2007
Creator: Gomez, Francisco
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Toward a systematic evaluation of evaluating favorable conditions in a parent training program: The pursuit of happiness.

Description: Research has shown that parents of children with disabilities, such as autism, experience significantly higher stress levels than parents of typically developing children. It has been suggested that parent education programs, in particular naturalistic communication training, will reduce parental stress. Most of the literature in this area has relied on parental reports and has only focused on decreasing stress and has not directly addressed increasing alternate feelings, such as happiness. In … more
Date: August 2007
Creator: Broome, Jessica L.
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Toward an Experimental Analysis of a Competition between Dimensions of Cultural Consequences

Description: The exponential growth of the human population has contributed to the overuse and degradation of common pool resources. Using science as a tool for informed policy-making can improve the management of our common pool resources. Understanding the conditions that influence groups of individuals to make ethical self-controlled choices may help solve problems related to the overuse and degradation of common pool resources. Ethical self-control involves the conflict of choice between one that will b… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Guerrero, Maria Brenda
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Tracking to Pliance: Effects of Punishment on Non-Compliance

Description: Inaccurate instructions have been shown to interfere with or override the effects of otherwise effective behavioral contingencies. This effect may be mediated by such factors as the discriminability of current contingencies, histories with accurate and inaccurate instructions, and consequences associated with following instructions. The current experiment investigated the effects of instructions (both accurate and inaccurate) on response patterns when paired with feedback regarding corresponden… more
Date: August 2005
Creator: Harmon, D. Austin
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Training Practitioners to Implement Practical Functional Assessments

Description: Functional analysis is considered best practice for behavior analysts who work with people who have intellectual and developmental disabilities and engage in problem behavior. Unfortunately, a majority of practitioners do not complete functional analyses. The purpose of the present study was to train 10 practitioners to implement a practical functional assessment (PFA) decision making model and to evaluate the ecological validity of the model. Pre- and Post-training overall test scores increase… more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Upthegrove, Madelyn
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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