Andy Lattal, PhD

Anday Lattal Headshot

Andy Lattal is Centennial Professor of Psychology at West Virginia University, where he has taught and mentored 45 doctoral students since 1972. Andy’s research, covering a host of topics across the discipline’s spectrum, has appeared in more than 180 research articles, chapters, and edited books. A past Editor of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, he currently serves in editorial capacities for eight professional journals. Andy has been recognized with several teaching and research awards, and for his professional service with the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis’s awards for Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis and for the International Dissemination of Behavior Analysis. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Lille in France and in 2019 will be a Fellow of the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science in residence at Osaka Kyoiku University in Osaka, Japan.

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Natural A-B-A (Reversal) Designs

Natural A-B-A (Reversal) Designs

Friday, 10 Jul 2020
The A-B-A, or reversal, design is one of the most recognized, single-case experimental designs in both research and practice (although in practice, the return to baseline is followed by a return to the treatment, or B, phase). In non-experimental settings, A-B, or non-reversal designs, occur often.
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Happiness

Happiness

Tuesday, 14 Jul 2020
Happiness pervades modern life. It is a major topic of talk-show interviews, best-selling books, psychotherapeutic interactions, everyday gossip (“How can she really be happy with him?”), and personal ruminations. Poets, cartoonists, and novelists have done as good a job as psychologists in understanding it.
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Honk More - Wait More

Honk More—Wait More

Tuesday, 21 Jul 2020
The following article appeared recently in the New York Times. It describes how police in Mumbai, India, undertook an experiment to control the excessive blowing of car horns by drivers caught in what must be nightmarish traffic in that largest of Indian cities.
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a child peaking around a doorframe

Time for a Timeout from Timeouts?

Tuesday, 8 Jan 2019
In a recent article published in the Washington Post entitled, “Timeouts are a dated and ineffective…
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close up image of snowflakes

Operant Behavior and Snowflakes

Tuesday, 23 Apr 2019
Sitting here at my desk on a cold, snowy morning watching the snowflakes gently descend to blanket the landscape outside my window (such descriptions reveal why I am a behavior analyst and not a poet), reminds me of the operant (another reminder, too, of why I am not a poet).
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2019 Life time achievement award Dr. Darnell Lattal

Kudos for One of the Home Team

Tuesday, 21 May 2019
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A dog holding a leash looking around an open front door

Agency and Shaping

Tuesday, 13 Aug 2019
Shaping, or the differential reinforcement of successive approximations, is thought by many to be the most important tool in the behavior analyst’s toolbox. Shaping is usually thought of as something one human does to change the behavior of another living organism, most often to a human but also to a pet or a laboratory subject of the nonhuman persuasion.
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A child with electrodes on their head for a brain scan

Measuring Thoughts

Tuesday, 17 Sep 2019
“Neuroscientists Decode Brain Speech Signals into Written Text.” If you suspect that the National Enquirer wrote this recent newspaper headline, you would be wrong.
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five people sitting in a row of chairs, the third person is sitting on the back of the chair instead of the seat

Pragmatism and Playing Well with Others

Tuesday, 1 Oct 2019
Many applied behavior analysts find themselves in a different world from that in which they were trained. Most are trained by other behavior analysts in programs or even departments where the principal worldview is that of behavior analysis.
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A magnifying glass over an icon of a person

A Self-ish Behavior Analysis?

Monday, 1 Jul 2019
I just googled the word “self”: 3,540,000,000 hits, more or less. That’s three-point five billion, just to be clear. Wow. What a word.
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Graphic of 2 brains with different colors

Psychology Spectrum Disorder (PSD)

Tuesday, 19 Nov 2019
In a famous article entitled “Are Theories of Learning Necessary,” published in 1950, Skinner examined the broad spectrum, that is, psychology, and presented it to the Midwestern Psychological Association. He proposed that approaches at either end of the psychology…
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3 rats in a cage

Behavior in Translation

Tuesday, 26 Nov 2019
Have you ever heard a paper presented at a conference or elsewhere about research with rats or pigeons, and it seems like the findings might be helpful in working with your clients? But then you wonder, is there really a connection between the two? How do people know if a basic behavioral process applies to what we are observing with our clients?
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