E. Scott Geller

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• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Virginia Tech

Museums struggle with visitors touching artworks, sometimes causing extensive damage. No known empirical study counted the frequency of visitors touching art displays, nor tested strategies for preventing this. This field study employed an alternating treatments design to evaluate the behavioral impact of three sign conditions designed to alleviate...

Every researcher, scholar, and teacher of psychological science has likely perceived critical gaps between the science of human experience and particular information circulated widely to benefit human welfare or psychological health. In other words, so-called “pop psychology” is often invalid or incomplete, and could be more accurate or complete, a...

Objective It is important for college students to engage regularly in physical activity. While psychological factors, such as motivation, are likely to increase attendance at fitness facilities, positive perceptions of the fitness facility (e.g., the type of classes offered) might also influence use of a fitness facility. Participants Data were co...

This article reviews the Actively Caring for People (AC4P) Movement, initiated in 2007 to increase occurrences of interpersonal acts of kindness worldwide. Resources to support the AC4P Movement, including research-based training manuals and AC4P wristbands for adults and children, are available at www.ac4p.org. This prosocial movement incorporates...

With inconsistent COVID-19 prevention guidelines being issued across different local governments, an examination of how individual businesses are implementing infection-control interventions on their own is needed. This study assessed the relative compliance of businesses with infection-control guidelines implemented to decrease the spread of COVID...

To investigate the impact of writing a gratitude letter on particular mood states, we asked students in two university classes (a research class and a positive psychology class) to complete a 15-item mood assessment survey (MAS) twice a day (once in the morning and once at night). The research students who signed up for one or two pass/fail field-s...

Universities in five different states are collaborating on an original large-scale COVID-prevention effort by asking many of their students to complete an innovative survey that strategically asks them to identify areas on and around campus that are “hot spots” for spreading the coronavirus. These universities—Virginia Tech, Appalachian State, West...

While researchers have dispensed considerable effort in the past decades to reduce the risk of occupational injuries in the construction industry, the large amount of safety incidents occurring each year indicate that many of the safety interventions and technological advances have not fully achieved their safety goals. This fact suggests the possi...

Mental toughness (MT) predicts outcomes across several high-stress contexts such as athletics, the military, and the workplace. Despite this, researchers have struggled to reach consensus regarding how best to conceptualize and measure MT. MT assessments have focused on measuring general MT rather than domain-specific MT. The current study proposed...

A goal-setting and prompting intervention was promoted by a restaurant manager to increase the frequency of cashiers’ ID-checking behavior. An A-B-A (Baseline-Intervention-Withdrawal) reversal design at one of two restaurants showed that the socially-valid intervention increased the percentage of ID-checked purchases significantly from 2.4% at Base...

Cambridge Core - Social Psychology - Applied Social Psychology - edited by Linda Steg

Written by world-renowned health and safety researcher E. Scott Geller, Working Safe: How to Help People Actively Care for Health and Safety, Second Edition presents science-based and practical approaches to improving attitudes and behavior for achieving an injury-free work environment. This book teaches proactive applications of behavior-based psy...

This field study evaluated the impact of an intervention designed to prevent bullying among elementary-school students by prompting and rewarding prosocial behavior. More specifically, teachers of 404 second-, third-, fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students from an elementary school in northeast Virginia asked their students to look out for other...

Pay-it-forward behavior reflects actively caring for people (AC4P) and the reciprocity principle. Interventions to increase the frequency of pay-it-forward behavior were evaluated. At a buffet-style dining hall, a research assistant (RA) entered the line and paid for the next person’s meal. In the Sign Intervention Phase, the RA discreetly paid for...

The efficacy of novel field sobriety tests to predict breath alcohol content (BAC) and perceptions of driving risk was evaluated. Participants (N = 210) were passersby at two downtown locations near local bars and one on-campus location near a late-night dining facility between the hours of 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. Participants gave ratings of thei...

Two studies examined factors influencing cashiers’ identification (ID)-checking behavior in order to inform the development of interventions to prevent credit-card fraud. In both studies, research assistants made credit purchases in various stores and noted the cashiers’ ID-checking behavior. In the first study, the store type, whether the cashier...

Two studies examined interventions to increase the frequency of gratitude expression among college students in two large lecture classes of an Introduction to Psychology course at a large university in southwest Virginia. Both studies evaluated the impact of a writing exercise designed to increase intentions to express gratitude in a prescribed man...

Intervention research in the field of environmental psychology examines the effectiveness of situational approaches to encourage environmentally responsible behavior (ERB). In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of interventions implemented to increase the frequency of ERB. We then discuss two main research designs that have been used to eval...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This volume demonstrates how readers can become more effective parents, teachers, students, coaches, managers, or work supervisors, while also gaining practical skills to enhance their self-motivation, communication skills, and intervention acumen. The first eight chapters explain evidence-based principles from applied behavioral science (ABS) that...

This chapter discusses behavioral safety as a means for improving occupational safety in organizations. It provides an overview of research and practice in the area of behavior-based safety (BBS). The chapter details the theoretical and empirical foundation of BBS, as well as practical applications and directions for future research. Ideally, BBS a...

Seven evidence-based guidelines for improving the quality and increasing the frequency of desirable behavior are described and illustrated as relevant for benefiting human welfare and well-being. If practiced extensively, these life lessons would most assuredly improve overall quality of life by reducing interpersonal conflict and bullying; prevent...

Objective: The determinants of alcohol consumption among university students were investigated in a downtown field setting with blood alcohol content (BAC) as the dependent variable. Participants: In total, 521 participants completed a brief survey and had their BAC assessed during April 2013. Methods: Between 10:00 pm and 2:00 am, teams of re...

Each year hundreds of youths' lives are lost as a result of alcohol-impaired driving. College students leaving at-risk drinking environments are at particular risk for harm. Yet, little field research has been performed to examine college student transportation choices paired with breath alcohol testing of intoxication. This study assessed the tran...

A community-based prompting intervention for safety belt promotion was field tested at two parking lots on a large university campus. The intervention involved a coed displaying a flash card that read, “Please buckle up —I care” to unbuckled drivers of vehicles exiting the parking lots. If the driver buckled up, the “flasher” flipped the card over...

Relative effects of probabilities associated with task-relevant and irrelevant stimuli were studied in a probability learning paradigm. Four groups of 24 subjects each received different training experiences prior to sequentially predicting 200 occurrences of a green or yellow color. For 200 training trials subjects predicted the shape of arrows ou...

In a two-stimulus, two-response choice reaction time (RT) experiment, the probability of a correct stimulus prediction was controlled: the probability (P) was.70 or.30 for 400 trials or P was.70 or.30 for 200 trials and 1 — P for the remaining 200 trials. The difference between RT to correctly predicted stimuli and RT to incorrectly predicted stimu...

Subsequent to receiving small reward magnitude in the straight runway during Stage 1, rats were given consistently large magnitude of reward or varied large and small reward during placement trials (Stage 2) in a housing cage or in the goalbox. During Stage 3, only animals receiving consistently large magnitude of reward in goalbox placement trials...

The “arousal” hypothesis was studied by investigating whether a familiar presentation style (a word spoken relatively “normally”) would result in more verbal transformations (VTs) than would an unfamiliar presentation style (a word spoken slowly). A VT is any perceptual change that subjects hear when the same word is repeated several times. Forty-t...

Twelve high-boredom-susceptible and 12 low-boredom-susceptible college students were presented with seven neutral words for 7 min each on a tape recorder, repeated at a constant rate. Contrary to the arousal hypothesis, the low-boredom-susceptible students reported significantly more verbal transformations or word distortions than did the high-bore...

Purpose This paper aims to report on a study promoting energy conservation on Virginia Tech's campus. It explores whether the behavior of students living in university residence halls would change when various electricity conservation strategies are introduced. Design/methodology/approach Intervention strategies, including educational media, infor...

Because environmental degradation has the potential to negatively affect mental and social well-being, environmental sustainability is highly relevant to psychologists, who have a tradition of interventions designed to change behavior. Although many psychologists are already using psychological knowledge and tools to protect environmental resources...

During Phase 1, rats received contingent reinforcement (food), noncontingent reward, or no treatment in an operant chamber. The results, which did not support a “leamed-helplessness” interpretation, showed response-independent food to facilitate rather than inhibit the acquisition of a running response in the straight alley during Phase 2.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate age and verbal IQ as factors influencing frequency of imagined verbal transformations (VTs). Words, sentences, and nonwords were presented repeatedly to children (ages 8–13) and young adults (ages 18–21), and the subjects reported experiences of hearing VTs. More VTs occurred for young adults than...

One-on-one interviews and focus-group meetings were held at 20 organizations that had implemented a behavior-based safety (BBS) process in order to find reasons for program success/failures. A total of 31 focus groups gave 629 answers to six different questions. A content analysis of these responses uncovered critical information for understanding...

During Phase 1, 30 rats were given CRF training in a straight runway. During Phase 2, subjects received contingent reinforcement (food), noncontingent reinforcement, or no treatment in an operant chamber. The results, which supported a “learned helplessness” interpretation, showed the noncontingent group to be the most resistant to extinction in th...

As the first field study of perceived behavioral control (PBC) to assess alcohol consumption with a physiological measure (i.e., blood alcohol content; BAC), the research examined the impact of intoxication on alcohol-specific PBC (APBC). In total, 665 passersby were recruited into the study at several late-night drinking locations near a large uni...

Prior to each of 200 stimulus presentations in a two-choice reaction time (RT) paradigm, subjects made a stimulus prediction and then estimated their prediction confidence by verbalizing a number from 50 to 100. The probability of a correct stimulus prediction was experimenter controlled at.70 for a competent condition and at.30 for an incompetent...

Two coactors performed simultaneously in a two-choice reaction time paradigm; one individual was the subject while the other was a confederate of the experimenter. Prior to each presentation of the symbol ⊔ or ⊓, the subject and the confederate verbally predicted which stimulus they expected, and after each presentation, the subject and the confede...

This chapter reports on a study to promote environmentally relevant behavior on a university campus. Ten residence halls at Virginia Tech were included in the study, and the project employed five different strategies, each with a different number of prompting strategies to determine which approach was most effective at influencing reductions in wat...

During Phase 1, all rats received a delay of food reward following a traversal of a straight alley. During Phase 2, rats received contingent (CR), noncontingent (NCR), or no food reward (NR) in an operant chamber. During the 1st day of Phase 3 (running in the straight alley), no differences in speeds occurred between groups receiving contingent and...

After receiving large rewards in a straight gray runway during Phase 1, rats were given small rewards during placement trials (Phase 2) in a gray housing cage or in a gray goalbox. During Phase 3, only animals receiving small reward in housing cage placement trials showed a successive negative contrast effect (NCE). The results suggest that alley c...

A verbal transformation (VT) is any perceptible change that subjects hear when the same word is repeated several times. Habituation was studied by investigating whether more VTs would occur during the second 3 min of word repetition. We also attempted to replicate the finding of Snyder, Calef, Choban, and Greller (1992) that a familiar word present...

Decision speed was studied as a function of value preference determined by a subjective and a measured ranking of the six value areas of the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Study of Values (AVL). Ss were sequentially presented with a list of 180 value-related words and were required to categorize each word into one of the six AVL value areas by pressing one...

Sixteen high-boredom-susceptible (HBS) and 16 low-boredom-susceptible (LBS) college students recorded word distortions on a structured data sheet (i.e., numbered) or on a nonstructured data sheet, resulting in groups of 8 college students who were presented with six neutral words for 6 min each. In the structured situation, the LBS subjects produce...

A professor and a group of student leaders initiated the Actively Caring for People (AC4P) Movement to establish a more civil, compassionate, and inclusive culture by inspiring intentional acts of kindness. This article explores the AC4P Movement in a first-year residence hall at Virginia Tech and a second-year residence hall at University of North...

Environmental campaigns often promote energy conservation by appealing to economic (for example, lower electricity bills) rather than biospheric concerns (for example, reduced carbon emissions), assuming that people are primarily motivated by economic self-interest. However, people also care about maintaining a favourable view of themselves (they w...