Questionable validity, not vitality.
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Behaviorism↗
Biomedical subjects
M L Kerwin
Publications and source records attributed to M L Kerwin.
The relationship between food refusal and self-injurious behavior: a case study.
Food refusal and self-injurious behavior often co-occur in children with developmental disabilities and mental retardation. The subject of the case study was a 3-yr-old boy with food refusal, self-injurious behavior and developmental delay. Using an alternating treatment design, positive reinforcement for acceptance combined with either nonremoval of the spoon or guidance for refusal increased food acceptance and resulted in a decrease in self-injurious behavior despite not being targeted. Although the contingencies for acceptance, refusal and self-injurious behavior remained constant, self-injurious behavior increased with an increase in grams consumed. A combined treatment of positive reinforcement for acceptance, guidance for refusal, position change and gastrojejunal feedings resulted in a decrease in self-injurious behavior and an increase in grams consumed.
Behavior Therapy↗
An alternating treatments comparison of two intensive interventions for food refusal.
We compared two treatment packages involving negative reinforcement contingencies for 3 children with chronic food refusal. One involved physically guiding the child to accept food contingent on noncompliance, whereas the other involved nonremoval of the spoon until the child accepted the presented food. Subsequent to baseline, an alternating treatments comparison was implemented in a multiple baseline design across subjects. After each child had been exposed to at least nine sessions of each treatment condition and percentage of bites accepted had increased to at least 80%, the child's caregivers selected the preferred treatment package. The results indicated that both treatments were effective in establishing food acceptance. However, physical guidance was associated with fewer corollary behaviors, shorter meal durations, and parental preference.
Anorexia↗
Effects of elaboration and relational distinctiveness on sentence memory.
Memory for normal and distinct target sentences in elaborated and isolated contexts was examined in two experiments. Distinctiveness was operationalized as the uniqueness of the stated relation among the elements (words) of the sentence. In both experiments distinct target sentences were recalled significantly better than normal target sentences. Robust elaboration effects emerged only in Experiment 2, however, when care was taken to construct elaborations that were causally related to the target sentences. Further, the positive mnemonic effects of elaboration in Experiment 2 combined additively with the distinctiveness effects. These results demonstrate that text manipulations emphasizing both relational distinctiveness and causal elaboration facilitate memory performance. Several possible theoretical mechanisms underlying this facilitation are outlined.
Attention↗