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Happiness
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. I personally have always preferred Charles Shultz’s (the creator of the comic strip “Peanuts”) rather structural definition of happiness as “a warm puppy.”
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Dissing Ability
Ability becomes a trait, a universal, unchangeable something the person (or pigeon) carries from situation to situation.
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As Useful as a Third Ear
When I was a graduate student in clinical psychology, lo those many years ago, I was as
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A Signal Experience
The discussion centered around whether or not it is good Behavior-ese to describe a discriminative stimulus as signaling the availability of reinforcement.
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Kudos for One of the Home Team
… Behavior Management Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual meeting of the Association of Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) , in Chicago, Illinois this May. A long list of notable behavior analysts has preceded her as … a master's degree in Special Education where she began her behavioral work. She was taught by Phil Drash’s team in the Verbal Conditioning Laboratory at Johns Hopkins U, exposed to Ted Ayllon’s token economy work at Anna State Hospital, … psychology from WVU, during a time of intense exploration of concepts related to radical behaviorism and the importance of verbal behavior. She worked with psychiatric and prison systems, providing behavioral training and coaching to prison …
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Covid-19 Dreamin’
I, like many people of my age, am gravely concerned about getting infected by the coronavirus and coming down with a devast
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Agency and Shaping
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. In such cases, the human is the agent of the shaping in that the human decides the conditions under which successive approximations do or do not merit reinforcement.
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When Punishment is a Reinforcer
The behavior of punishing. When behavior is reinforced it becomes more likely the next time, and the next, often in an ever-escalating spiral.
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Psychology Spectrum Disorder (PSD)
In a famous article entitled “Are Theories of Learning Necessary,” published in 1950, Skinner
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