UNT Theses and Dissertations - 121 Matching Results

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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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

The Use of Instructive Feedback to Promote Emergent Verbal Responses: A Replication

Description: Previous research has incorporated instructive feedback (IF) within mastered listener-by-name trials with two children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Participants in a previous study acquired the secondary targets and also demonstrated emergent responding (i.e., listener-by-feature, tact-by-feature, intraverbal, and reverse intraverbal). The current study replicated a previous study on IF with two children with ASD. Therapists conducted a series of three sessions of mastered lis… more
Date: August 2021
Creator: Laddaga Gavidia, Valeria
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Cultivating Liberation: The Effects of Collective Shaping on Context and Power Dynamics within Social Justice Narratives

Description: Social issues are becoming increasingly apparent. More people are experiencing the impact of social issues directly and through their media consumption. It is important to understand and reflect on our collective impact on the media and how the media affects the collective. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of a collaborative workshop (collective shaping) and a verbal community that examined media depictions of social justice and injustice related to context and power… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Morris, Gabrielle N.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Cultivating Liberation within a Verbal Community: Evaluating the Effects of Collective Shaping on Written Narratives and Reflective Statements about Social Issues

Description: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects that a training workshop and collective shaping had on the reflective statements and feeling and emotion labels in a written response to videos relating to social issues. The workshop included a presentation interspersed with videos to help practice dialoguing and guide discussion toward generating discourse for social change. The effects of the workshop were evaluated using a single subject A – B design with multiple probe measures across t… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Perez Glendon, Emily L
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

An Evaluation of Effects of Collective Shaping on Perspective Taking and Social Empathy Statements Related to Social Justice

Description: Prejudice establishes coercive contingencies that restrict human rights and diminish quality of life. Social media has made the oppression experienced by individuals more apparent. Perspective taking and empathy can change prejudicial behavior by fostering relationships and encouraging self-identification with those who are different from ourselves. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of a guided collective shaping program on the occurrence of perspective taking and emp… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Love, Alexandra K
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

An Exploration of Cooperation during an Asymmetric Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma Game

Description: Researchers investigated how the contingent delivery of a cultural consequence on target culturants in an asymmetric iterated prisoner's dilemma game (IPDG) affected players' choices. The asymmetric IPDG creates an analogue to income disparities created by wage gaps and other cultural practices that create wealth inequalities between different members of the population and allows researchers to explore how these inequalities affect cooperation between players. Six undergraduate students divided… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Lopez, Carlos Ramiro
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Finding Out How to Teach the Operant Quadrant: Content and Error Analysis

Description: The goal of this study was to use a nonlinear approach to create a program to teach positive and negative reinforcement and punishment. A specific interest was to determine whether the program and its testing allowed for specific recommendations for future iterations of the program. The tests and program developed for this study were completed by 18 participants. Pre-test and post-test data showed that participants learned the most about positive contingencies, nonexample items, and ambiguous c… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Auzenne, Jessica L
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries

An In-Depth Look at Community Gardens: Practices that Support Community Garden Longevity

Description: Current food production methods in the United States contribute to environmental degradation as well as food insecurity. Food production by means of community gardens has the potential to reduce the deleterious effects of current production methods. However, many community gardens face challenges that hinder their longevity, thereby reducing the likelihood of the support they might provide for environmentally sustainable food production and decreased food insecurity for community members. A beh… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Cran, Stephanie
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries

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
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Variability in the Natural World: An Analysis of Variability in Preschool Play

Description: Children acquire many skills through play. These range from fine and gross motor skills, social skills, problem-solving, to even creativity. Creativity or creative engagement is frequently a component in early preschool curricula. A pivotal repertoire to engage in behaviors deemed creative, such as art, storytelling, problem-solving, and the like, is the ability to vary one's responses regardless of the specific repertoire. Researchers have developed methods to produce response variability. How… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Armshaw, Jared T
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

What Comes Up? Analyzing Patterns of Resurgence using PORTL

Description: The term "resurgence" generally refers to the reappearance of certain behaviors during extinction. Different definitions describe these behaviors as previously reinforced, previously extinguished, or simply previously learned. At first glance, these definitions seem the same. And, researchers have not given much thought to the differences between them. However, these definitions could refer to different initial teaching procedures, and these differences may produce different results during exti… more
Date: August 2020
Creator: Sumner, Sarah
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Behavioral Analysis of the Stroop Effect

Description: Participants demonstrate the Stroop effect when, in naming the color in which a word appears, reaction times are longer when the color and word are incongruent (e.g., "yellow" printed in blue) compared to when they are congruent (e.g., "yellow" printed in yellow). The literature commonly refers to the difference in reaction times as a measure of the interference of word stimuli upon color stimuli, and is taken as support for the theory of automaticity. This study asks whether the Stroop effect … more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Luc, Oanh
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

An Evaluation of Problem Behavior during a Preference Assessment

Description: There is a limited amount of research that has evaluated all three types of modalities and consequences during stimulus preference assessments (SPA) or examined problem behavior during preference assessments with individuals with tangible maintained problem behavior. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to extend this line of research in two ways: (a) compare results of SPAs across three modalities and two consequence, (b) evaluate problem behavior during these SPAs with individuals with pr… more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Tinney, Ashton Corinne
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

Increasing Exercise in Sedentary Adults Using a Contingency and Technology-Based Management Package to Begin and Sustain New Levels of Activity

Description: Using a multiple baseline across participants with a changing criterion, this study explored and evaluated the effects of the individualized contingency management package (goal-setting, education, etc.) with sedentary typical adults while focusing on the mentoring component and the use of the technology of the exercise tracker to increase and sustain physical exercise to a level that increased health-benefiting physical activity. During initial mentoring meeting prior to the start of baseline,… more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Adams, Kristen Lea
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Masking Procedure for Stimulus Control Assessment

Description: The present series of experiments were designed to investigate the utility of the use of a masking system to assess the development of stimulus control. The first experiment compares sample observing time with response accuracy in a match-to-sample task. The second experiment more closely examines this relation by subdividing the sample stimulus mask into four quadrants. The third experiment compares sample observing time during training with accuracy during a subsequent testing condition to de… more
Date: August 2019
Creator: Condon, David
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

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
open access

Assessment of Caregiver Generalization of Reinforcement to the Natural Environment in a Large Residential Facility and Use of Prompting and Feedback to Improve Performance

Description: Behavioral skills training (BST) is often used to train caregivers to implement various behavior management procedures; however, additional strategies are sometimes required to promote the generalization of skills from a contrived setting to the natural environment. Generalizing skills to the natural environment requires that the caregiver's behavior transfer from control of stimuli in the contrived setting to stimuli in the natural environment, and the skill continues to be performed with high… more
Date: August 2018
Creator: Licausi, Ashley
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
open access

A Comparative Evaluation of Outcomes between Indirect Analyses and Functional Analytic Procedures

Description: While descriptive assessment outcomes show limited correspondence with experimental analysis outcomes, they are still often used in the treatment of problem behavior. The most effective way of treating problem behavior is by manipulating its controlling variables; however, if descriptive analyses are not depicting accurate environment-behavior relations, then treatments based off of descriptive analysis results have a higher chance of failing. The current study looks to replicate and extend the… more
Date: August 2018
Creator: Basham, Annika J
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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