Responsivity of Psychiatric Patients to Verbal Conditioning: “Success” and “Failure” Conditions and Pattern of Reinforced Trials

Abstract

A sample of 64 psychiatric patients was used to study responsiveness to minimal social reinforcement by means of operant verbal conditioning procedures. As in previous work with college students the effects of two types of situational variation were studied: pattern of reinforced trials and examiner's evaluation of performance. Ss told TAT-like stories and on selected trials the use of emotional words was reinforced. Highly significant conditioning was found, indicating that psychiatric patients are responsive to minimal social reinforcement. Significant group differences were not found, however, for either the success-failure dimension of examiner evaluation of performance, or for reinforced vs extinction trials. The results for patients agree with those reported earlier for students only insofar as the initial conditioning is concerned. In general, patients show initial responsiveness to examiner reinforcement, but they are not readily influenced by situational variations occurring later in the session.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.