Applied Behavior Analysis Commons^™

Using Digital Performance Feedback To Increase Teacher Treatment Integrity, Heather Marie Whipple

Master's Theses

In intervention research, assessing treatment integrity is important to establish functional control of the independent variable and make accurate decisions regarding treatment effectiveness. This study examined the effects of digital performance feedback (DPF) as a follow-up strategy for teachers to increase integrity. A multiple baseline design was utilized to determine the effectiveness of this strategy. Results from this study expanded previous literature on ways to promote treatment integrity and help move toward a science of intervention implementation. The primary dependent variable measured was treatment integrity. Student behavior was also assessed to determine if there is a relationship between treatment integrity ...

A Behavior Analytic Intervention To Teach Exploratory Motor Behavior To Infants With Down Syndrome, Sara M. Bauer

All Graduate Works by Year: Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Exploratory Motor (EM) behavior refers to manipulating a toy in the hand(s). Infants with Down syndrome demonstrate significant impairments in the duration and frequency of EM behavior compared to their typically developing counterparts. A behavior analytic intervention involving multiple opportunities, prompting, and social reinforcement was used to teach three infants with Down syndrome between 4-9 months of age to emit EM behavior. Results indicate that all three infants with Down syndrome emitted the three EM target behaviors to mastery and demonstrated generalized responding across stimuli and other EM behaviors. The importance of these findings in addressing impairments in infants ...

Ptsd From Childhood Trauma As A Precursor To Attachment Issues, Christy Owen

Fidei et Veritatis: The Liberty University Journal of Graduate Research

The past 20 years have been turbulent regarding Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), with conflicting research about its causes, effects, treatment, and prognosis. The current diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5 fails to adequately address this disorder. A number of deviant and maladaptive behaviors common amongst children with RAD are not even mentioned in the diagnostic criteria. As such, the diagnostic definition is almost unidentifiable or incompatible with real-life conduct manifestations of the disorder. Rather, this author contends that RAD is foundationally a unique and extreme form of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from Early Childhood Trauma. The child endured unspeakable neglect and ...

Shop 'Til You Drop: A Coping Mechanism For Stressed University Students?, Aileen M. Pidgeon, Leanne Bottomley, Amy Bannatyne

Amy Bannatyne

Compulsive buying is a concerning problem affecting university students who are particularly vulnerable to experiencing anxiety and stress due to academic workloads, financial difficulties, and social isolation. The current study explores the relationship between compulsive buying behaviour, gender differences, anxiety, stress, and coping styles among university students. As expected, findings revealed female university students reported significantly higher levels of compulsive buying behaviour compared to male students, and students engaging in compulsive buying behaviours were significantly younger than non-compulsive buying students. Compared to university students who reported regular purchasing behaviours, university students who engaged in compulsive buying also reported significantly higher ...

A Collaborative Approach To Address Student Behavior And Academic Achievement Across Systems, Beverly Ngozi Okereke

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Academic achievement and in-classroom behaviors are two significant child outcomes that affect student success in school. According to Systems Theory, in order to truly understand the factors that affect these outcomes for children, one must look to the major systems that encapsulate the child (including their school and home environments). This project is a meta-analytic review that examined the effectiveness of measures representing each system in predicting child achievement and behavior: School-Wide Positive Behavior Supports (SWPBS) for the school as a system, level of parent involvement (high versus low) for the home system, and student motivation (intrinsic versus extrinsic) for ...

A Functional Analysis Of Leader Behavior In A Behavioral Health Setting, Jason White

All Theses And Dissertations

A requirement for Maine behavioral health organizations to provide all employees with evaluations lacks guidelines on how to evaluate leader behavior; best practices are to provide a multifaceted evaluation process that includes direct observation. A single-case research design and continuous partial interval recording procedures were conducted on a male behavioral health clinician leading clinical supervision in which the dependent variable was the clinician’s delivery of positive reinforcement and the independent variable was the provider’s increased discussion of case shares. The basic findings showed that leader behavior changed as follower behavior changed to manage the group and meet group ...

Measure Athletes’ Volition—Short: Evidences For Construct Validity And Reliability, Ioannis Proios, Miltiadis Proios

Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments

The Measure Athletes’ Volition consists of 23 items that measure six elements of volitional competences. The purpose of the present study was to examine whether a subset of these items could form a short version of the scale; to provide evidence for the structural validity and internal consistency of the short version; and to test validity issues of the new scale. A total of 831 individuals from three different samples completed the long version of the scale. Results indicated that the short version consisted of 15 items that measured volitional competences of persistence, expediency, and purposefulness. This scale had acceptable ...

Evaluating Current Practices In Brief Experimental Analysis, Alex P. Isbill

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Brief experimental analysis (BEA) has shown to be an effective method of rapidly testing the relative effects of two or more interventions in order to determine interventions that best supports a student’s learning. Little research has been found in regards to the consistency of methods across studies. A meta-analysis in 2008 by Burns and Wagner looked at BEAs that assessed oral reading fluency and provided recommendations for future practice. This study investigates the methods, procedures, and outcomes in BEA studies from 1994 to 2016. The findings of this study are compared to Burns and Wagner’s (2008) recommendations from ...

The Influence Of Happy Faces On Spatiotemporal Vision, Siera Nicole Bramschreiber

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Past research demonstrates that fearful faces lead to an increase in temporal and a decrease in spatial gap detection, an effect proposed to be caused by a flow of input to the magnocellular pathways from the amygdala to the visual system (Bocanegra & Zeelenberg, 2009). The amygdala is also active for positive and arousing stimuli, including happy faces. The current study extends past research by presenting happy facial cues just before a gap detection task. Facial stimuli (i.e., happy/neutral faces) were presented in the periphery of the receptive field and quickly followed by a Landolt circle. Half of the ...

The Behavioral Analysis Of Gambling, Benjamin Witts, Anne Macaskill, Mack Costello

International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking

A behavioral analysis of gambling is unique among the psychologies. A behavioral analysis seeks answers to questions pertaining to the prediction and influence of gambling in terms of the individual gambler, and thus emphasis is placed on well-controlled small-n studies in which findings are generalized to other individuals. Further, the behavioral analysis of gambling is concerned with environmental and historical relations in accounting for current gambling behavior, and less of a reliance is placed on internal and hypothetical causal factors. This symposium explores two data-driven analyses of gambling behavior from a behavioral account of gambling while a third conceptual and ...

How Modifiable Is Behavior? Factors Of Influence For Adherence To Provisions To Protect Minors In The Sale Of Gambling Products., Doris Malischnig

International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking

A major challenge for lottery operators worldwide lies in motivating sales partners to check whether customers meet the minimum age requirement for the purchase of lottery products and thus use this control measure to prevent their sale to minors. Measures used by Austrian Lotteries to raise awareness of this topic range from responsible gaming (RG) training for sales partners and the provision of information materials for staff and customers to restrictive procedures like warnings and contract termination when a sales partner is caught repeatedly selling lottery products to minors.

A recent study based on 1,421 mystery shopping tests and ...

Minorities' Perceptions Of Child Protective Services, Vernae Elaine Hicks

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The study examined minority persons’ views and experiences with Child Protective Services (CPS) in the community. This study used a qualitative design with face‑to‑face interviews with 12 participants in the community. This study used the “Post‑Positivist” data analysis, which is qualitative in evaluation and explained each participant’s subjective reality.

The study found that most participants were satisfied with the results and were dissatisfied with the process in and of itself. Overall the study found that most participants felt that there was some sort of a disconnect with social workers in reference to cultural competency. Miscommunication between ...

Piloting A Screening Tool For Eating And Eating-Related Behavior, Michael N. Reynolds

Dissertations

Obesity is a common medical condition associated with negative health and social outcomes. Obesity has a primary malleable behavioral cause, eating more calories than are metabolized. While metabolic rate is malleable with exercise, eating can more quickly add calories than exercising can subtract them. In the past, behavioral weight-loss treatment studies relied on multi-component package interventions that have shown reliable patterns of participant weight-loss during treatment and weight-regain in follow-up. Those findings could be conceptualized as an ABA withdrawal design, eating behavior returns to baseline after the prosthetic contingencies of the treatment study are withdrawn. We must develop ways to ...

Individual Differences In Adolescents’ Driving Practice During The Learner Stage, Yinan Zhao

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The implementation of Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) policies has reduced the rate of car crashes among adolescents. However, limited research has focused on adolescents’ supervised driving during the learner permit stage of GDL. The study aimed to describe supervised driving practice during the learner permit stage and to test predictors of individual differences in the amount and the quality of supervised driving. 183 adolescents (M age = 16.4 years, 54.1% female) and their parents (84.1% mothers) participated. Adolescents reported driving an average of 25 minutes per day. Adolescents living in single-parent households, with less family income, and with ...

Interconnections Between Perceptions Of Blame, Mind, And Moral Abilities, Alex Ropes, Steve Guglielmo

Psychology Honors Projects

Theories of blame, mind, and moral attribution consider an individual’s perceived agency, operationalized in part as perceived intentionality and self-control. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may display social deficits and a greater tendency to engage in problem behavior (PB; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) than neurotypical (NT) people, which may lead people to perceive that individuals with ASD act less agentically. Study 1 shows that the mitigated perceived agency of people with ASD leads to mitigated blame attribution. In addition to perceived agency, theories of mind and moral attribution account for perceptions of an individual’s capacity to experience ...

Family Communication Motivating Athletics Over Generations: A Mixed Method Expansion Of Self-Determination Theory, Elizabeth Hanson Smith

Dissertations

Mixed methods were utilized to test the communication within a model of self-determination (Deci & Ryan, 1985) in a multi-generational sports framework in order to argue for an update to self-determination theory (SDT) that includes a communication element. Fourteen qualitative research questions were posed to examine how communication functioned to move tennis players, golfers, and runners from the initial family influence in participating, to integrating family values to the extent that participants modeled athletic values to offspring and community members. Three hypotheses correlating the variables of self-efficacy, autonomy-controlling and autonomy-supportive family communication supported the argument that communication functioned to develop self-determined behavior in a sports context.

The Perception of Parents Scale (Grolnick, Ryan, & Deci, 1991), the Revised Family Communication Patterns Scale (Richie & Fitzpatrick, 1990), and the Self-Efficacy Scale (Schwarzer & Jerusalem, 1995) were used quantitatively, and qualitative interviews were conducted with 38 participants in the southern United States. Results indicated that in a family-based sports context, control does not always lead to introjection or rejection as predicted in SDT. In this setting, autonomy-control, when combined with involvement, led to integration of family sports values with autonomy-supportive communication such as support, validation, and rationale mediating SDT expectations of introjection. The conclusions were that 1) communication functioned to move participants between SDT elements supporting the need for SDT to be updated to include communication and a modeling effect; 2) mixed methodology was an effective approach to this case study; and 3) the variables of control and involvement merit further scrutiny beyond a family sports environment.

Is Nostalgia A Mixed Emotion? Evidence From Emotional Experience And Facial Expressions Of Emotion, Michaela J. Mercer

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Modulating Neuronal Activity: Copper, Isoproterenol, And Beta-Blockers On The Brain, Veronica Go

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

The Peacock Effect: The Influence Of The Opposite Sex On Aggressive Behavior, Kira J. Mason

Celebration

Most widely-accepted models for aggression do not explicitly address an important variable that roots in evolutionary psychology: the presence of a potential mate. The current research investigates whether the presence of an attractive or unattractive member of the opposite sex influences hypothetical aggression. Participants (N = 1035) imagined themselves in front of an attractive or non-attractive member of the opposite sex (accompanied by pictures of corresponding attractiveness levels), and indicate their aggressive intentions after a provocation, or not. Results from the 2(sex) x 2(attractiveness) ANOVA showed that males viewing an image of an attractive female aggressed more when provoked ...

Relational-Interdependence And Life Transitions In College: Study Abroad, First-Year, And International Students, Shelby R. Weisen

All College Thesis Program

The current study examined the sojourner adjustment of U.S. college students studying abroad, international college students studying in the States, and first-year students adjusting to life in the first semester of their undergraduate careers. An online survey was distributed to 412 college students; it included the Sojourner Adjustment Measure (SAM), the Lifelong Learning Scale (WielkLLS), the Relational-Interdependent Self-Construal Scale (RISC), the Brief HEXACO Inventory of Personality, and the Social Media Use Integration Scale (SMUIS). The purpose of the study was to explore the relationships among major emerging adulthood transitions and various measures of adjustment to college. Results suggest that ...