Kurt Salzinger

Hofstra University · Department of Psychology

Two groups of goldfish were trained to strike a small target for food reinforcement. One group was injected with puromycin, the other with saline, immediately following training. On testing. 2 days later, puromycin fish performed as well as saline controls.

As we struggle with evaluating our many forms of psychotherapy, we are met with a panoply of differing means of introducing change. To compare these various forms of intervention, we need a common theory to make that comparison productive. This paper suggests that behavior analysis can provide us with such a theory.

Mientras luchamos con evaluar nuestras muchas formas de psicoterapia, nos encontramos con toda una gama de diferentes medios de introducir cambios. Para comparar estas diferentes formas de intervención, necesitamos una teoría común de tal forma que la comparación sea más productiva. Este artículo sugiere que el análisis del comportamiento nos puede...

The author reviews the book that B. F. Skinner considered to be his most important work, namely Verbal Behavior in terms of its content and effect on the field. He considers such elements as the paucity of experiments, the host of allusions to literature and the masterful behavior analysis directed at elucidating verbal behavior, the latter constit...

Reviews the book, Mass media effects research: Advances through meta-analysis by Raymond W. Preiss, Barbara Mae Gayle, Nancy Burrell, Mike Allen, and Jennings Bryant (see record 2006-12100-000 ). In a sense, this book is an answer to Jimmy Walker, the New York City mayor in the 1930s, who when trying to oppose censorship stated, "No woman ever lost...

The author comments on the article "The primacy of cognition in schizophrenia," by R. W. Heinrichs (see record 2005-03019-003 ) and states that to the pursuit of schizophrenic/normal differences, there is no end. Heinrichs used meta-analyses to argue persuasively for the primacy of cognition for this role. His conclusion not only elicited agreement...

When you look up “ethics” in the thesaurus, you are referred to many different words, among them “duty, what ought to be done, the right thing,” but also “fealty and obedience, conscience, morals, idealism and utilitarianism.” I bring up these words to show the great complexity of what the Institutional Review Board (IRB) is entrusted to do. I need...

The cultural construction of illness model explains the clinical observation that psychological correlates of depression such as sadness and worthlessness are frequently reported in Western cultures, whereas somatic or vegetative complaints are often associated with depression in non-Western cultures. This study employed Portnoy and Salzinger's (J....

Review of the book, "Understanding Behavior in the Context of Time: Theory, Research, and Application" (see record 2005-06803-000 ) edited by Alan Strathman and Jeff Joireman. The editors, Strathman and Joireman, believing that the field has not done enough research, collected a group of time researchers to deal with the lack of research related to...

Accurate prediction of behavior is a critical task for the psychologist, particularly for the practitioner. Outstanding among those who have successfully wrestled with this complicated task is Paul Meehl. Yet, small has been the influence of his work on the everyday practice of prediction. The object of this paper is to review Meehl's work in this...

This paper reviews Immediacy Theory which posits a mechanism making schizophrenic behavior preponderantly controlled by stimuli immediate in the patient¿s environment. It reviewed all studies of schizophrenia in the 2003 year of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. Of those 12 studies, nine were found to confirm that mechanism and three not to be re...

The authors of the provocative subtitle, without embarrassment, set out to produce a revolution in the behavioral study of verbal behavior. I first consider their new definition and then suggest avoiding the definitional problem by describing the properties that characterize verbal behavior, including both those that are like nonverbal behavior and...

Beginning with behavior analysts' tendency to characterize verbal behavior as "mere" verbal behavior, the author reviews his own attempt to employ it to influence both his staff and policies of our government. He then describes its role in psychopathology, its effect on speakers in healing themselves and on engendering creativity. The paper ends by...

This article rejects the idea that the crisis in psychology (if crisis there be) is to be explained by the loss of the romantic, by our failing to take advantage of the kind of literary descriptions of personality that our great writers and other artists provide us. Science gains understanding by reducing information to essentials, not by reproduci...

This study investigated the use of the immediacy theory to explain the existence of auditory hallucinations and delusions in individuals with schizophrenia and to develop treatment strategies. In a 2-phase approach, a therapist trained 6 individuals with schizophrenia to stop responding to the immediate stimuli ostensibly evoking their symptoms and...

Although talk therapy continues to be associated with psychoanalysis and other psychodynamic procedures, we increasingly find exceptions to this association; Kohlenberg and Tsai (1991) and Hayes (1994) are but two examples. At the other extreme, Skinner's (1957) book Verbal Behavior became known almost exclusively through the distorting lens of Cho...

Although talk therapy continues to be associated with psychoanalysis and other psychodynamic procedures, we increasingly find exceptions to this association; Kohlenberg and Tsai (1991) and Hayes (1994) are but two examples. At the other extreme, Skinner's (1957) book Verbal Behavior became known almost exclusively through the distorting lens of Cho...

The present pilot-study is presented in a case study format. After describing the steps of an original behavioral treatment specially designed for children, four cases in which this program was successfully applied are reported.

Some years ago Underwood (1964) grappled with the problem of explaining his finding that rate of forgetting was not a function of the rate of learning but rather seemed to reflect the level of learning achieved. He likened different rates of learning to filling an Erlenmeyer flask of water at different rates and the process of forgetting to the rat...

Comments on the study by P. C. Friman et al (see record 1993-39713-001) examining whether the cognitive school has become the dominant one in psychology. It is argued that there is a nomenclature problem contained in the notion of testing the Kuhnian displacement thesis in psychology. The enterprise of trying to detect, by subtle statistical techn...

This chapter is a follow-up of work (Salzinger et al., 1987; Salzinger et al, 1990) on rats exposed to 60-Hz electromagnetic fields (ELF) or to a sham condition, in utero plus the first 8 days after birth (a total of 30 days). The rats were conditioned as adults on a multiple random interval schedule of reinforcement. All rats eventually responded...

Rats were sham exposed or exposed perinatally to a 60-Hz electromagnetic field, 22 days in utero and the first 8 days post partum. Each of the 30 once-daily exposures was 20 h in duration. The electric component of the field was vertical 30 kV/m rms, and the magnetic field component was 100 microTG rms. Later, as adults, male rats were trained to e...

The approach to theory and history adapted by the contributors is to focus on some of the central figures in the development of discipline. Within this approach, the authors offer analyses of 3 major theoretical currents in psychology: psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the Geneva school. Other chapters focus on psychophysics and on Gestalt, cognitiv...

Tracing the contributions of scientists to their intellectual siblings and descendants is at best a risky business. It should be done a long time after both the contributors and recipients have done their major work, so that one can do the analysis with the required cool calculating gaze that yields objective conclusions. We cannot indulge in that...

The philosphers of science have it that scientists ponder theories for long periods of time, and then, by the use of the method of deduction, come up with testable hypotheses that they then carefully subject to experimentation in order to vote the theory up or down. But life being what it is, and scientists being human beings first and scientists s...

Speech samples emitted by schizophrenics and individually matched normals were compared to test whether the immediacy hypothesis or the lapse-of-attention view explains the basis of schizophrenic verbal behavior more effectively. Intrusions in speech were employed as indicators of fluctuating attention, and the guessability of words deleted from sp...

Reviews the book, The Abnormal Personality, Fourth Edition by Robert W. White and Norman F. Watt (1973). White and Watt have striven for the easy 'read' by emphasizing case histories and presenting generalizations about diagnosis, etiology, and treatment that are based more on clinical hunch than on hard experimental data. In the process of bringin...

Reviews toxicity and behavioral studies of the effects of pollutants on fish and presents and results of an experiment on the effects of 2 levels of polluted water on the behavior of 12 goldfish. Ss were trained to press a lever on FI, fixed ratio, extinction, and discrimination schedules of reinforcement. 3 Ss from each condition were than placed...

It behooves us, as good citizens of the science of psychology, to shirk no area of psychology as long as we can apply scientific method to it. The research in cognitive psychology is certainly interesting, on the whole well executed, and very challenging. It is well within the scope of a behavioristic approach. It merely awaits more attention from...

A fictional discussion between a really behaviorally oriented psychologist and his psycholinguistic colleagues on the proper study of language. In the course of the discussion such linguistic and psycholinguistic concepts as ambiguity, language acquisition device, surface structure, competence, and rules are taken up but not proved to be useful.

Compared speech samples emitted by 10 schizophrenics individually matched with 10 normals and used them to test the validity of the immediacy hypothesis, which states that schizophrenics are primarily controlled by the immediate aspects of their environment, whether response-produced or external. The cloze responses of 230 undergraduates to the ver...

Parents of brain-injured children participated in a project to teach the uses of operant conditioning principles for functionally analyzing behavior and for designing and carrying out behavior modification programs for their own children. They were instructed in objectively observing and reporting their children's behavior and were told to keep dai...

2 types of verbal response classes were used by 68 preschool children (3-6 yr. old) in rendering their judgments of length under unanchored and anchored conditions. 1 of the response classes was that of number (ordinal scale) and the other was color (nominal scale). Results show that the use of the ordinal scale better enabled Ss to resist the anch...

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books , 1970, Vol 15(10), 610-612. Reviews the books, The Measurement of Psychological States through the Content Analysis of Verbal Behavior by Louis A. Gottschalk and Goldine C. Gleser (1969) and Manual of Instructions for Using the Gottschalk-Gleser Content Analysis Scales: Anxiety,...