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open access

Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Competency-Based Training Package to Teach Behavior Management Skills to Direct Support Staff

Description: Cooper, Heron and Heward define maintenance as the extent to which a learner continues to perform a target behavior after the intervention has been terminated. Testing for maintenance allows the trainer to see if gains were sustained following the termination of a treatment program. In addition, once it is shown that a learner's skills have remained in the repertoire, assessment of generalization is possible. Previous literature in behavior skills training have assessed maintenance in a variety… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Harris, Kellen-Jade S.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

A Laboratory Human Operant Examination of Extinction Bursts

Description: The present study examined operant extinction in a controlled setting using a human operant paradigm. Participants watched a preferred video. During the video, either the video or audio portion of the video was selectively removed, on average every 15 s. Participants could restore the video by pressing a force transducer. In one group, relatively low forces were required (250 g) and in the other relatively high forces were required (750 g). At the 20th and 30th minute during the session, th… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Lilly, Bryanna
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Naturalistic Study of College Drinking

Description: The prevalence of Alcohol Use Disorders is rapidly increasing among college students. The use of real time monitoring in conjunction with contingency management procedures to reduce alcohol consumption has only recently been developed. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to learn more about natural patterns of alcohol consumption in college-aged adults. A second goal was to evaluate a novel, handheld technology for obtaining reliable samples over extended time periods. College students wer… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Rueb, Skyler Nicole
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

On the Further Exploration of Interactions between Equivalence Classes and Analytic Units

Description: Sidman's (2000) theory of stimulus equivalence predicts an interaction between the development of analytic units and the development of equivalence relations. Previous research has documented these interactions (stewart, Barnes-Holmes, Roche, & Smeets, 2002; Vaidya & Brackney, 2014), therefore the current study attempted to replicate the effects seen in Vaidya & Brackney, 2014 (Experiment 2). Baseline conditional discriminations were trained for two sets of three, three-member classes, while pa… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Stancato, Stefanie S.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

A Sequential Analysis of Therapist and Child Social Behavior Following a Conditioned Reinforcement Procedure

Description: We conducted a contingency analysis to evaluate if a sequential relation between social initiations and positive social responses increased for both therapists and children with autism following a conditioned reinforcement procedure. Participants included child-therapist dyads, which were previously identified as having low rapport. These dyads were observed prior to and following an intervention designed to establish therapists' social behavior as a reinforcer. Sessions consisted of unstructur… more
Date: May 2016
Creator: Cortez, Kristi
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Do contingency-conflicting elements drop out of equivalence classes? Re-testing Sidman's (2000) theory

Description: Sidman's (2000) theory of stimulus equivalence states that all positive elements in a reinforcement contingency enter an equivalence class. The theory also states that if an element from an equivalence class conflicts with a programmed reinforcement contingency, the conflicting element will drop out of the equivalence class. Minster et al. (2006) found evidence suggesting that a conflicting element does not drop out of an equivalence class. In an effort to explain maintained accuracy on program… more
Date: December 2015
Creator: Silguero, Russell V.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

The Effects of Programmed Reinforcement and Chained Mastery Criteria on Yoga Pose Performance in Two Young Children with Autism

Description: Community exercise can offer many benefits for children, including the opportunity to engage in physical activity and interact with peers in a social setting. Children with autism do not engage in as many community activities as their typical peers. This study examines conditions to teach young children to complete yoga poses to mastery. The effects of prompting, programmed reinforcers, and a chaining criteria were evaluated using a comparison design with two baselines and one intervention cond… more
Date: December 2015
Creator: Nguyen, Linda N.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Examination of Sexual Differences in the Acute Effects of Haloperidol on Licking

Description: Schizophrenia is a debilitating psychiatric condition affecting almost one percent of the US population. Typical antipsychotics (e.g., haloperidol) have been in use for several decades and are generally very effective in treating the emotional and cognitive effects of schizophrenia, but are used as the last line of treatment due to their severe extrapyramidal motor side effects under chronic exposure. The present study was conducted to investigate the role of sex in determining the oromotor sid… more
Date: December 2015
Creator: Shoemaker, Danton L.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Effects of a Computer-based Self-instructional Training Package on Novice Instructors’ Implementation of Discrete Trial Instruction and a Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Intervention

Description: Discrete trial instruction (DTI) and naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBIs) are often incorporated into early intensive behavioral interventions for young children with autism. Recent advances in staff training methods have demonstrated that self-instructional manuals, video models, and computer-based training are effective and efficient ways to improve staff implementation of these teaching strategies however research in this area is limited. The current evaluation assesse… more
Date: August 2015
Creator: Horsch, Rachel M.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

An Evaluation of an Intensive Toilet Training Model

Description: The current evaluation assessed the effectiveness of an intensive toilet training procedure for three young boys with autism. The evaluation extended the work of LeBlanc et al. (2005) by assessing parents’ preference to include the usage of urine alarm and positive practice. In addition, we collected descriptor data on challenging behaviors. All three parent participants’ elected not to use the urine alarm and one parent elected to discontinue the implementation of positive practice techniqu… more
Date: August 2015
Creator: Doan, Dai
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

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

An Evaluation of Matrix Training Approaches for Teaching Compound Labels to Toddlers

Description: Matrix training techniques arrange instruction for stimulus relations that facilitate emergent responding to novel stimulus arrangements, which is a phenomenon known as recombinative generalization. The current study compared two common matrix training approaches, an overlapping (OV) design and a non-overlapping (NOV) design, with respect to arranging relations targeted for training. Two, typically-developing toddlers were taught compound action-object labels in either an OV or NOV matrix tra… more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Wilshire, Tayla C.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

An Evaluation of Reinforcement Effects of Preferred Items During Discrete-Trial Instruction

Description: This study compared the relative reinforcing efficacy of high-preferred and low-preferred stimuli, as determined by two types of preference assessments, on acquisition rates in three children diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The study also evaluated the indirect effects of preference on students’ stereotypy and problem behavior during instructional periods. Participants were presented with a task and provided high or low-preferred stimuli contingent upon correct responding. Res… more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Rorer, Lynette
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

A Multimodal Investigation of Renewal of Human Avoidance, Perceived Threat, and Emotion

Description: Many people who receive exposure-based treatments for anxiety disorders exhibit a return of fear and avoidance which is often referred to as renewal or relapse. Human and nonhuman research on fear conditioning and renewal has been instrumental in helping understand relapse in anxiety disorders. The purpose of this investigation was to examine renewal of human avoidance and assess whether avoidance may aid in sustaining renewal of fear responses. We adopted a multimodal measurement approach cons… more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Ludlum, Madonna L.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

A Training Package for Parents and their Toddlers with Autism: Observed Changes in Parent Teaching Episodes, Child Turn Taking and Social Attending, and Parent-Child Engagement

Description: Research has shown that parents of children with autism report higher stress than parents of children with other developmental disabilities. It has been suggested that parent training programs, specifically naturalistic social-communication training, can reduce parental stress and enhance the quality of the parent-child relationship. Although the development of a multilevel assessment has been suggested, much of the research in this area has relied on measures of parent implementation fidelity … more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Hunt, Nina Marie
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Yummy Starts: A Constructional Approach to Food Selectivity with Children with Autism

Description: Food selectivity exhibited by children with autism creates a myriad of barriers for families and children, ranging from social to nutritional. The typical approach to food selectivity is pathological. The pathological approach attempts to eliminate food selectivity through the use of techniques such as escape extinction. While successful in decreasing aspects of food challenges, such as food refusals, the pathological approach does not necessarily establish desired responses to foods or mealtim… more
Date: May 2015
Creator: Cihon, Joseph Harvey
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

The Behavioral Economics of Effort

Description: Although response effort is considered a dimension of the cost to obtain reinforcement, little research has examined the economic impact of effort on demand for food. The goal of the present study was to explore the relationship between effort and demand. Three Sprague Dawley rats were trained to press a force transducer under a series of fixed-ratio schedules (1, 10, 18, 32, 56, 100, 180, 320, and 560) under different force requirements (5.6 g and 56 g). Thus, nominal unit price (responses / f… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Nord, Christina M.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

The Effects of Model Prompts on Joint Attention Initiations in Children with Autism

Description: The general purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effects of minimally intrusive prompting procedures and preferred stimuli on protodeclarative joint attention initiations in children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Two boys and one girl diagnosed with ASD participated. The experimenter provided attention and social interaction following protodeclarative initiations throughout all phases of the study. During intervention, a model prompt was delivered every 30 s if the … more
Date: December 2014
Creator: James-Kelly, Kimberly L.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Evaluation of Ethanol’s Effects on the Biophysical Characteristics of Licking

Description: Alcohol use disorders are a public health issue related to adverse effects for individuals and society. A low level of response, or decreased sensitivity, to alcohol has been identified as a heritable risk factor for development of alcohol use disorders. One method for researching level of response to alcohol is through the use of rodent models, which are developed to mimic human conditions while eliminating barriers to conducting research with people. Current rodent models used to evaluate eff… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Stewart, Daryl Ellen
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

An Evaluation of Negative Reinforcement During Error Correction Procedures

Description: This study evaluated the effects of error correction procedures on sight word acquisition. Participants were four typically developing children in kindergarten and first grade. We used an adapted alternating treatment design embedded within a multiple baseline design to evaluate instructional efficacy of two error correction procedures; one with preferred items plus error correction and one with error correction only, and a concurrent chain schedule to evaluate participant preference for instru… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Maillard, Gloria Nicole
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

The Evaluation of Task Preference on Reinforcer Efficacy

Description: Stimulus preference assessments have determined high and low preferred items that increase the rate of frequency of responding for various skills. Within applied settings, high preferred items may not attain the same reinforcing value across tasks which might decrease responding. The preference of the task might have an effect on reinforcer efficacy that is being presented. The purpose of the current study is to evaluate changes in reinforcer efficacy as a function of preference for the task. T… more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Lowery, Wesley J.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

The Measurement and Enhancement of Rapport Between Behavioral Therapists and Children with Autism

Description: Rapport has been acknowledged as an important variable in therapeutic contexts. The current evaluation defined and assessed rapport quality between children with autism and behavioral therapists based on behavioral correlates. In addition, the author evaluated the effects of an operant discrimination training procedure to enhance rapport levels for therapists with low levels of rapport. More specifically, the current study evaluated: (a) if the discrimination training procedure would establish … more
Date: December 2014
Creator: Lapin, Carly Ilyse
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

Development and Evaluation of a Large-scale Pyramidal Staff Training Program for Behavior Management

Description: Training and empirically evaluating caregivers’ implementation of behavior management skills is a particularly challenging task in large residential contexts. A pyramidal training approach provides an efficient and effective way to conduct large-scale competency-based behavior skills training. The purpose of this project was to develop and evaluate a large-scale pyramidal staff training program for behavior management skills. One hundred nine caregivers and 11 behavior service professionals at… more
Date: August 2014
Creator: Shivers, Audrey H.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
open access

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.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
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