In this study, students with developmental disabilities were trained to answer the cause of emotional states expressed by a character in a printed passage. In the passage, daily events happen and then, the character expresses either "crying" or "laughing" emotional states (e.g., John went for a walk the park. John met a big dog and was bitten by the dog. John's leg was bleeding. John is crying) . After the passage was read by the students,the trainer asked the cause of the emotional states (i.e. "Why is John crying?") . In the initial intervention, story-emotion words (i.e. "hurt", "sad", "tickle", "funny") matching-to-sample procedure was used. However under these training conditions, it was not possible to show generalization in untrained tasks so that both students needed additional training to choose appropriate emotion words. After this training, the students were able to answer respective Test tasks with appropriate emotional expressions in Probe 1. Next, the events passage which triggered the emotional states were underlined and the matching-to-sample procedure was used again. After that, the students were able to answer not only with appropriate emotional expressions but also with answers which involved the cause of the emotional states (e.g. "Because the dog bit and it hurt"). The answering skills were generalized to other untrained tasks in both students. Results are discussed from a behavior analytic view about the effectiveness of conditional discrimination training for reading comprehension and the importance of making the contextual stimulus stand out.

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The present study aimed to examine the effects of self-instructional training (SIT) upon alleviating shyness in undergraduate students, and to investigate how an individual difference (thought distortion) influences the effectiveness of SIT. Thirty-four male and female undergraduate students presenting severe shyness, served as subjects. They were divided into high thought distortion (H) and low thought distortion (L) groups. They were randomly assigned either to a self-instructional training (SIT) , or a waiting-list control (WLC) group. The main results were as follows. (1) SIT was superior to the waiting-list control, in decreasing cognitive and emotional aspects of shyness in a conversation situation in which subjects were requested to meet their party of the opposite sex. At the follow-up five or six months after SIT was terminated, decreased irrational thoughts regarding shyness and trait shyness were maintained. Irrational thoughts as a cognitive aspect of shyness, decreased with the progress of SIT. (2) Subjects with larger distortion of thoughts, after receiving SIT, improved in cognitive and emotional aspects of shyness in the conversation situation. At the follow-up, regardless of whether they had extremely high or low thought distortion, subjects maintained their decreased trait shyness.

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We present a case of three sisters from a broken family, two of whom have anorexia nervosa (AN). These cases were expected to be difficult to treat and to have a poor prognosis, because the sisters' maladjusted behavior could easily be reinforced by their family situation. It was suggested that the middle sister suffered from AN because she modeled the eating behavior of the oldest sister and that the youngest sister might soon model the behavior of the two elder sisters. Therefore we decided to hospitalize the patients early in order to prevent progression of the disease in the second sister and onset of the disease in the third sister. The early hospital treatment (behavior therapy) removed the reinforcer of the maladjusted behavior from the sibling and the patients' conditions improved. In this report, we discuss the practical treatment of the two sisters with AN, factors of sibling onset with AN, and the relation between sibling onset and broken families.

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Japanese society at large is calling for an improvement of communicative skills, and society's call is in being echoed by the Ministry of Education's recommendation that the communication skills of Japanese students be targeted for improvement in school curriculums. Problematic in the implementation of communicative skill programs, however, is the fact that a significant percentage of the Japanese population suffers from communication difficulties. The body of research concerned with identifying and treating communication difficulties is defined in this paper as Communication Apprehension, Inhibition, and Avoidance (CAIA). CAIA is an umbrella term used to unite the research areas which deal with the research and treatment of communication difficulties. Perhaps due to a historical lack of communication education in Japan, however, many of the behavioral treatments for communication difficulties are relatively unknown. This paper reviews American programs designed for helping students with communication problems caused by skill deficits, mainly rhetoritherapy, and also offers a brief explanation of CAIA measurement instruments.

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