Identifying the processes by which environmental stimuli can come to influence drug use is important for developing more efficacious interventions. This study investigated derived relational responding and the transfer of differential conditioned effects of environmental stimuli paired with "smoked" cocaine in accordance with the relations of symmetry, transitivity, and equivalence using Heart Rate as the measure of conditioning among 12 adults with significant histories of cocaine use. Match-to-sample (MTS) procedures were used to test for emergent relations among two four-member stimulus groupings. One member of a group was then paired with 25-mg of smoked cocaine and one member of the other group was paired with 0-mg of smoked cocaine. 10 participants completed the MTS protocol: 4 participants demonstrated two four-member equivalence classes, 3 participants demonstrated two three-member equivalence classes and 2 participants demonstrated symmetry only. One participant demonstrated no derived relations. Differential respondent elicited changes in HR was demonstrated in the presence of stimuli paired with smoked cocaine among 4 of the 6 participants completing the conditioning phase; all 4 of the participants demonstrated a bi-directional transfer of these functions in accordance with symmetry. Transfer was not reliably demonstrated in accordance with transitive or equivalence relations. The results suggest that drug respondent elicitation in the context of drug use may be a function of both direct conditioning and relational processes. These findings have implications for studying and understanding the processes by which stimuli in the natural ecology can set the occasion for cocaine use and developing cocaine use disorder.

Stimulus equivalence is a behavioral phenomenon that has been related to complex human behavior (e.g., remembering, cognitive functioning, and symbolic behavior). As a rule, people diagnosed with severe mental disorders (e.g., schizophrenia, bipolar disorder) that exhibit delusional and hallucinatory behavior, and disorganized speech have shown cognitive impairment (e.g., processing speed, reasoning/problem solving). Not enough research has analyzed the stimulus equivalence performance in this population. This study aims to investigate the stimulus equivalence performance in adults diagnosed with severe mental disorders. In particular, this study analyzes the many-to-one (MTO) and one-to-many (OTM) training structures effects, and the simultaneous (SIM) and the simple-to-complex (STC) training and testing protocol effects on equivalence class formation in this population. To achieve it, we analyzed the behavior of 18 participants diagnosed with severe mental disorders in three different conditions (Condition 1 OTM/SIM; 2 MTO/SIM; and 3 MTO/STC). Behavior consistent with stimulus equivalence was found in 11 out of 13 participants who had finished the study (5 participants decided to leave before completing the tasks). STC yielded better results than the SIM protocol. No differences were found between MTO and OTM training structures. Implications and suggestions for further research have been discussed.

The stability of delay discounting across time has been well-established. However, limited research has examined the stability of probability discounting, and no studies of the stability of effort discounting are available. The present study assessed the steady-state characteristics of delay, probability, and effort discounting tasks across time with hypothetical rewards in humans, as well as whether response characteristics suggested a common discounting equation. Participants completed delay, probability, and effort discounting tasks on three occasions. We found moderate relative stability of delay and probability tasks, and similar evidence for absolute stability across time for all tasks. The interclass correlations coefficient showed some correspondence across time points and tasks, and higher levels of between subject variability, especially for the effort discounting task, suggesting trait level variables has a stronger influence on performance than state level variables. Performance on the delay and probability tasks were moderately correlated and similar mathematical functions fit choice patterns on both tasks (hyperbolic), suggesting that delay and probability discounting processes shared some common elements. Lower correlations and different function fits suggested that effort discounting involves more unique features.

Resurgence following expanded-operant treatments (i.e., increasing the number or variability of alternative responses to problem behavior) has been the focus of numerous studies over the last five years. Researchers have evaluated several techniques for expanding the operant such as serial-, lag-, and concurrent-training procedures. Given the increasing number of recent studies on the topic, the various forms of training used, and the variability in outcomes, it is critical to review this area of research and identify clear future directions. Our brief review identified 10 published studies and eight unpublished theses or dissertations on this topic; however, only three published studies directly evaluated expanded-operant treatments as a strategy for relapse mitigation. All three studies evaluated serial-training procedures, and results across the studies were inconsistent. We summarize the findings of each study and provide recommendations for future research.

Unemployment, homelessness, and substance use are interrelated. The present study took place as part of a clinical trial aimed to promote employment and abstinence from alcohol in unemployed, homeless adults with alcohol use disorders. Participants earned abstinence-contingent financial incentives for completing employment-seeking activities and hourly stipends for working with an employment specialist. In the initial condition, participants were paid all earnings on Bi-Monthly intervals. Despite the availability of incentives for completing employment-seeking activities, participants completed activities at low rates. A multiple-baseline across participants was used to evaluate the effect of providing pay every day for completing employment-seeking activities. Daily pay increased rates of completing activities for all three participants. Results suggest that reinforcer immediacy can be an important parameter in the control of employment-seeking activities.

Discounting refers to decreases in the subjective value of an outcome with increases in some attribute of that outcome. The attributes most commonly studied are delay and probability, with far less research on effort and social discounting. Although these attributes all represent costs that reduce subjective value, it is as yet unclear how the extent to which they do so is related at the individual level. Accordingly, the present study examined the degree to which individual participants discounted hypothetical monetary rewards on each of four discounting tasks in which the delay, probability, effort, and number of people with whom the money was to be shared were manipulated. At the group level, larger amounts were discounted less steeply than smaller amounts when delay and effort were varied, whereas larger amounts were discounted more steeply when probability and number of people were varied. At the individual level, the correlational pattern was examined using exploratory factor analysis. A six-factor structure (with separate factors for delay and effort, and two factors each for social and probability discounting) described the relations among indifference points. At a more molar level, a two-factor structure, which corresponded to the direction of the observed magnitude effects, described the relations among area-under-the-curve measures of discounting in the eight conditions resulting from crossing two monetary amounts with the four cost factors. We conclude that despite sharing some similarities, individual and group differences in discounting involving the different types of costs reflect mostly separate processes and traits.

The overarching goal of the present study was to determine whether a behavioral economic framework of demand analysis is applicable to texting while driving. To this end, we developed a novel hypothetical task designed to quantify the intensity and elasticity of the demand for social interaction from texting while driving. This task involved a scenario in which participants receive a text message while driving, and they rated the likelihood of replying to a text message immediately versus waiting to reply until arriving at a destination when the amounts of a fine for texting while driving ranged from $1 to $300. To assess the construct validity of the task, the scenario presented two delays to a destination (15 min and 60 min). The demand for social interaction from texting was more intense (greater at the lowest amount of the fine) and less elastic (less sensitive to the increase in the amounts of the fine) for drivers who self-reported a higher frequency of texting while driving than for those who self-reported a lower frequency of texting while driving. Demand was also more intense and less elastic under the 60-min delay condition than under the 15-min condition. The results of this proof-of-concept study suggest that behavioral economic demand analyses are potentially useful for understanding and predicting texting while driving.

Impulsive choice underlies several psychological disorders and can be assessed in laboratory rats using delay-discounting tasks, in which choice is for either one food pellet immediately or three food pellets after a delay. Choice for the smaller, immediate reinforcer is considered the impulsive choice. Lewis (LEW) and Fischer 344 (F344) rats differ in the number of impulsive choices made during this task when singly housed, with LEW choosing the impulsive option more often. Due to increasing recommendations to provide environmental enrichment as a component of animal-husbandry practices, a systematic replication of two previous studies was conducted using pair-housed LEW and F344. Delay discounting was assessed with pair-housed LEW and F344 and compared to previous data from singly housed LEW and F344 collected from the same laboratory. Results showed that differences in impulsive choice between the two strains were attenuated with pair housing. The main result driving this change appears to be an increase in impulsive choice in pair-housed F344 relative to singly housed F344.

Behavioral momentum theory posits a paradoxical implication for behavioral interventions in clinical situations using Differential Reinforcement of Alternative Behavior (DRA): When alternative reinforcers are presented within the same context as the problem behavior, the added reinforcers may decrease the frequency of the behavior but also increase its persistence when the intervention ends. Providing alternative reinforcers in a setting that is distinctively different from that in which the target behavior occurs may avoid or reduce this increase in persistence. The present experiment compared behavioral persistence following standard DRA versus DRA in a different context that was available after refraining from target behavior (Differential Reinforcement of Other Behavior, DRO). We arranged a human laboratory model of treatment intervention using computer games and token reinforcement. Participants were five individuals with intellectual disabilities. Experimental phases included (a) an initial multiple-schedule baseline with token reinforcement for target behaviors A and B, (b) an intervention phase with alternative reinforcement using a conventional DRA procedure for A and a DRO-DRA procedure for B, and (c) an extinction phase with no interventions and no tokens. Response rates as proportion of baseline in the initial extinction phase were greater for A than for B for three of five participants. Four participants whose response rates remained relatively high during the extinction phase then received a second extinction-plus-distraction test with leisure items available. Response rates were greater for A than for B in three of four participants. The results indicate that DRO-DRA contingencies may contribute to reduced post-intervention persistence of problem behavior.

Despite real-world implications, the pattern of delay discounting in alcohol users when the commodities now and later differ has not been well characterized. In this study, 60 participants on Amazon's Mechanical Turk completed the Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) to assess severity of use and completed four delay discounting tasks between hypothetical, equivalent amounts of alcohol and money available at five delays. The tasks included two cross-commodity (alcohol now-money later and money now-alcohol later) and two same-commodity (money now-money later and alcohol now-alcohol later) conditions. Delay discounting was significantly associated with clinical cutoffs of the AUDIT for both of the cross-commodity conditions but not for either of the same-commodity delay discounting tasks. The cross-commodity discounting conditions were related to severity of use wherein heavy users discounted future alcohol less and future money more. The change in direction of the discounting effect was dependent on the commodity that was distally available suggesting a distinctive pattern of discounting across commodities when comparing light and heavy alcohol users.

Drug addiction is a chronic, relapsing health problem that is associated with the degree to which individuals choose small, immediate monetary outcomes over larger, delayed outcomes. This study was a secondary analysis exploring the relation between financial choices and drug use in opioid-dependent adults in a therapeutic workplace intervention. Sixty-seven participants were randomly assigned to a condition in which access to paid job training was contingent upon naltrexone adherence (N = 35) or independent of naltrexone adherence (N = 32). Participants could earn approximately $10 per hour for 4 hours every weekday and could exchange earnings for gift cards or bill payments each weekday. Urine was collected and tested for opiates and cocaine thrice weekly. Participants' earning, spending, and drug use were not related to measures of delay discounting obtained prior to the intervention. When financial choices were categorized based on drug use during the intervention, however, those with less frequent drug use or frequent use of one drug spent a smaller proportion of their daily earnings and maintained a higher daily balance than those who frequently tested positive for both drugs (i.e., opiates and cocaine). Several patterns described the relation between cumulative earning and spending including no saving, periods of saving, and sustained saving. One destructive effect of drug use may be that it creates a perpetual zero-balance situation in the lives of users, which in turn prevents them from gaining materials that could help to break the cycle of addiction.

The detrimental health effects of exposure to air pollution are well established. Fostering behavioral change concerning air quality may be challenging because the detrimental health effects of exposure to air pollution are delayed. Delay discounting, a measure of impulsive choice, encapsulates this process of choosing between the immediate conveniences of behaviors that increase pollution and the delayed consequences of prolonged exposure to poor air quality. In Experiment 1, participants completed a series of delay-discounting tasks for air quality and money. We found that participants discounted delayed air quality more than money. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether the common finding that large amounts of money are discounted less steeply than small amounts of money generalized to larger and smaller improvements in air quality. Participants discounted larger improvements in air quality less steeply than smaller improvements, indicating that the discounting of air quality shares a similar process as the discounting of money. Our results indicate that the discounting of delayed money is strongly related to the discounting of delayed air quality and that similar mechanisms may be involved in the discounting of these qualitatively different outcomes. These data are also the first to demonstrate the malleability of delay discounting of air quality, and provide important public health implications for decreasing delay discounting of air quality.

The 21st century has seen rapid enrollment in online courses and environmental and biological determinates, such as COVID-19, that challenge how universities respond to education. However, this "new way of doing things" has empirical support from the past. Skinner (1968) laid out a science of teaching derived from operant conditioning principles and provided methods for adopting programmed instruction into what he termed a "teaching machine." This series of investigations evaluated the validity of programmed instruction in online courses, as measured by quiz performance, the frequency of discussion posts, instructor time commitment, generalization, and student perceptions of the online modalities used. Results are discussed for the synthesis of programmed instruction and group learning towards a modern teaching machine.

The present study was a preliminary analysis of college students' willingness to self-isolate and socially isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic analyzed through a probability discounting framework. Researchers developed a pandemic likelihood discounting task where willingness to isolate from others was measured in days as a function of the perceived probability of the escalation of a virus to pandemic levels. Experiment 1 was conducted immediately prior to the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring COVID-19 a pandemic and results showed that participants were more willing to self-isolate when the perceived probability of reaching pandemic levels was high and when there was a guarantee that others in the community would do the same. Experiment 2 was conducted with a subset of participants from Experiment 1 with the same discounting task, and results showed that participants were more willing to self-isolate 2 months following the onset of the pandemic, supporting the view that willingness to isolate from others is a dynamic process. Finally, Experiment 3 evaluated willingness to socially distance and introduced a hypothetical timescale to evaluate common trends with the real-world temporal dynamics observed in Experiments 1 and 2. Results showed similar trends in the data, supporting the use of hypothetical scenarios within probability discounting tasks in future behavior analytic research related to public health.

Staff training is an important line of research to ensure that clinicians in the field of applied behavior analysis provide quality services. One approach to providing training involves the use of asynchronous training materials in which the trainer and trainee do not need to be physically present at the same time. This allows for training despite limited numbers of trainers or geographic restrictions. The purpose of this study was to train participants to create equivalence-based instruction (EBI) materials in Qualtrics, a commercial survey software package. In the first phase of the study, participants experienced a training package consisting of a video model and task analysis that described how to create EBI materials. Phase 2, evaluated whether the EBI materials created in Phase 1 led to equivalence-based responding. Results indicated that the training was effective for training staff and that staff found the training socially acceptable. Results also demonstrated that the EBI materials resulted in the learning of the trained and derived relations.

Seeking to identify the common and distinguishing attributes of effects one might call "aesthetic," I examined hundreds of examples in music, visual arts, poetry, literature, humor, performance arts, architecture, science, mathematics, games, and other disciplines. I observed that all involve quasi-emotional reactions to stimuli that are composites of multiple elements that ordinarily do not occur together and whose interaction, when appropriately potentiated, is transformative-different in kind from the effects of the separate constituent elements. Such effects, termed can evoke surprise-tinged emotional responses. Aesthetic reactions, unlike many other kinds of emotional reactions, are never evoked by biologically urgent action-demanding events, such as threats or opportunities. The examined effects were created by various concept manipulation devices: class expansion, identification of new relations, repetition, symmetry, parsimony, and emotional displays for the audience to mirror (I identified a total of 16 such devices). The effects would occur only for individuals with the necessary priming, in circumstances that include effective potentiating factors. Synergetic stimuli that evoke aesthetic responses tend to be reinforcing, via mechanisms related to their biological utility during our evolution. I offer a theory as to how aesthetics may have evolved from its primordial pre-aesthetic roots, with examples of how consideration of those roots often explains aesthetic and related effects. The article suggests that aesthetic phenomena are a special case of a more pervasive aspect of behavior and proposes research approaches involving laboratory models and fMRI technology.

The study replicated research on metacontingencies that used a chessboard simulating a simplified chess game, in a completely online environment, with participants in their homes. Dyads of participants had to work together moving two knights in L-shape. Each trial ended when the knights met in adjacent squares. The squares where the knights should meet (aggregate product [AP]) varied in two conditions, using an ABAB design. In conditions A, knights should meet anywhere on the chessboard, and there was no consequence. In conditions B, the matrix of reinforceable squares was gradually reduced in four phases and knights' encounters were followed by different messages when correct or incorrect (cultural consequences). In group 1, five dyads were allowed to communicate. In group 2, dyads had no access to video call. Results of group 1 corroborate the findings of the original studies that showed a decrease in APs variability from conditions A to B, when communication was allowed. Group 2 showed similar results, therefore extending to the setting that not allowed communication. The online platform XadrezWeb, developed for this study, was an important tool to program the interlocked behavior contingencies and collect data during social isolation.

The objective of this study was to examine the effects of acceptance and commitment training (ACT) plus behavior parent training (BPT), when delivered via telehealth, on parental implementation of behavioral strategies, experiential avoidance (EA), and stress. The study also examined the subsequent effects on the parents' autistic children's behaviors. A multiple baseline design was implemented across four parent-child dyads who participated in the online training. The findings showed that ACT+BPT resulted in parental implementation reaching and maintaining high levels. The training also decreased EA and stress in three parents. Moreover, the parents' ratings of their children's challenging behaviors decreased. However, such a trend was not as clearly depicted by direct measures of the children's behaviors. A social validity interview revealed parents found ACT beneficial in assisting them to learn and use the BPT strategies. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Travis Thompson's lengthy review of Staddon's requires several corrections and extensions. This response discusses Staddon's analysis of Herrnstein's matching law and concludes that Thompson misinterprets a gentle critique as a paean. The response goes on to defend the utility of models and "internal states" (i.e., postulated processes that are not directly measurable) as "formal representation[s] of the data reduced to a minimal number of terms," a position similar to one of B. F. Skinner's statements. The response ends with a defense of Skinner's empirical brilliance, but a critique of his sweeping societal prescriptions.

Behavioral Momentum Theory (BMT) is often described as analogous to Newton's (1687) laws of motion. That is to say, similar to an object in motion continuing in motion unless acted upon by a force, responses occurring in a static environment will continue to occur at the same rate, unless presented with a disruptor (Nevin, Tota, Torquato, & Shull, 359-379, 1990). When evaluating response rates through a behavioral momentum framework, responding continuing after a change in reinforcer conditions is said to persist. Previous research conducted with nonhuman animals indicates greater response persistence following conditions with either higher reinforcer rates or higher reinforcer magnitudes (Nevin, (3), 389-408, 1974; Nevin et al., , 359-379, 1990). Although BMT's implications extend across human and nonhuman species, this literature review attempts to provide practitioners and researchers information regarding response persistence across various conditions with human participants.