A self-interpretive behavior analysis.

Although it rejects self-awareness as psychological bedrock, behavior-analytic theory can be stated self-inclusively, keeping the theorist within view. Its principles of discrimination and generalization have been elaborated to include concepts and higher order conditionalities, including those of logic and of awareness. Its violating a cultural bias that is called the "fundamental attribution error" may be a primary source of controversies. Its other disagreements with mainstream psychologies hinge more on contiguous vs remote causation than on mentalism vs antimentalism, which Skinner emphasized. The nonmediational, Skinnerian theorist is a participation in the world rather than an isolated self. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Philip Joseph Bersh (1921-2004).

Obituary for Philip Joseph Bersh (1921-2004). A summary of Bersh's life as well as an overview of his career are provided. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ethanol consumption and the matching law: A choice analysis using a limited-access paradigm.

Choice analyses, especially R. J. Hernstein's (1961, 1970) matching law, have recently been extended to substance abuse and drug research. The experiment reported here used a limited-access paradigm to engender ethanol consumption in Sprague-Dawley rats (Rattus norvegicus). After stable ethanol consumption was established, several 2-bottle choice tests were run. Relative volumes of solutions consumed were compared to relative ethanol concentrations as an application of the matching law. The formula for the generalized matching law confirmed that although biases varied, they were small, and more important, sensitivities to the relative concentrations were positive in 24 of 28 subjects. The results also revealed a high positive correlation between baseline ethanol consumption (g/kg) and subsequently assessed sensitivity. Overall, these findings suggest that a matching law analysis can be useful for examining ethanol intake in randomly bred rats. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

James A. Dinsmoor (1921-2005).

This article presents an obituary for James A. Dinsmoor. Jim Dinsmoor was born in Woburn, Massachusetts, on October 4, 1921, and died at his family's summer residence in Laconia, New Hampshire, on August 25, 2005. He received his bachelor of arts from Dartmouth College in 1943 with a major in political science, followed by a master of arts in 1945 and a doctoral degree in 1949, both in psychology, at Columbia University. He was among the pioneering group of students inspired and mentored by F. S. Keller and W. N. Schoenfeld in the days when B. F. Skinner's natural science of behavior was just beginning to gain recognition as a distinctively new approach to psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)