Behavior analysis (Washington, D.C.)最新文献

Delivery of healthcare services via telehealth has been growing in popularity, and work completed by behavior analytic researchers and practitioners have supported this trend. Behavior analysts at the University of Iowa Children's Hospital (UICH) developed a telehealth model of service delivery to build upon their already established in-clinic and in-home services. Results from their telehealth studies showed positive effects. Social functions were identified for most children, and problem behavior decreased by an average of 94.14%. Additionally, parent satisfaction was quite high, suggesting this mode of service delivery was acceptable to caregivers. Given the increasing empirical support for providing behavior analytic services via telehealth, careful consideration needs to be given to the numerous ethical issues involved in telehealth service delivery. The current article describes the telehealth service delivery model developed at UICH as well as the ethical issues considered at different points when delivering these telehealth services. Following these ethical considerations, implications for future research and clinical practice are discussed.

Chronically unemployed adults may benefit from intensive job-skills training; however, training programs do not always reliably engage participants in mastering skills. This study examined effects of voucher reinforcement for performance on a job-skills training program in the therapeutic workplace. Participants were four unemployed, substance abusing adults who earned monetary vouchers for working on programs targeting typing skills. Participants were exposed to two payment conditions that differed in whether or not pay was dependent on performance in a within-subject reversal design. In the productivity-pay condition, participants earned $8.00 per hour for attending the workplace plus a bonus for performance. In the base-pay condition, participants were paid an hourly wage that was equivalent to the total hourly earnings from the previous productivity-pay condition. Participants completed less work on the typing programs in the base- than the productivity-pay condition, but the amount of time spent in the workroom and the accuracy and rate of typing were not affected by the pay manipulation. All participants reported preferring base pay over productivity pay. Explicit reinforcement of productivity maintains consistent work in training programs, but more aspects of productivity pay need to be refined for effective, efficient, and socially valid implementation with unemployed, substance-abusing adults.

The present study investigated the role of drug-paired stimuli in controlling the behavior of rhesus monkeys. Systematic observations were made with nine monkeys who had a history of drug self-administration; they had been lever pressing to produce intravenous infusions of various drugs. These observations revealed that the stimulus light co-occurring with drug infusion produced robust and cue-directed behavior such as orienting, touching and biting. Experiment 1 showed that this light-directed behavior would occur in naïve monkeys exposed to a Pavlovian pairing procedure. Four monkeys were given response-independent injections of cocaine. In two monkeys, a red light preceded cocaine injections by 5 s, and a green light co-occurred with the 5-s cocaine injections. In the other two monkeys, the light presentations and cocaine injections occurred independently. Light-directed behavior occurred in all four monkeys within the first couple of trials and at high levels but decreased across sessions. The cocaine-paired stimulus maintained behavior longer and at higher levels than the uncorrelated stimuli. Furthermore, light-directed behavior was not maintained when cocaine was replaced with saline. Light-directed behavior did not occur in the absence of the lights. When these monkeys were subsequently trained to lever press for cocaine, light-directed behavior increased to levels higher than previously observed. Behavior directed towards drug-paired stimuli is robust, reliable and multiply determined; the mechanisms underlying this activity likely include Pavlovian conditioning, stimulus novelty, habituation and operant conditioning.