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Chronic food refusal has traditionally been treated with forced feeding and other physical prompting-based procedures when positive reinforcement procedures prove inadequate. Potential problems with such procedures, however, include exacerbation of feeding difficulties and health risks, as well as low parental approval and probability of implementation. Contingency contacting maximizes contact between oral acceptance and positive reinforcement, prevents escape functions of inappropriate behaviors, and requires minimal physical contact between feeder and child. Performances of two children exhibiting chronic food refusal were observed under baseline, positive reinforcement, and contingency contacting conditions. Positive reinforcement increased acceptance only slightly and did not change negative vocalization or interruption for one child. Contingency contacting rapidly increased acceptance and grams of food consumed, and decreased negative vocalization and interruption for both children. Withdrawal to positive reinforcement decreased acceptance for both children and grams consumed for one. Reinstituting contingency contacting rapidly increased acceptance and recovery of grams consumed for one child. Parental approval ratings and treatment and research implications are discussed.

Many undergraduate research methods texts assume that single-subject experiments are (a) low in generality, (b) merely pilot studies, (c) unsuitable when treatment effects are gradual or irreversible, (d) only useful when multiple-treatment interference is low, and (e) questionable because tests of statistical significance are absent. We critically examine these misconceptions, with the goal of improving the single-subject experiment's description in these texts and increasing its use beyond the area of behavior analysis. We subsequently compare multi-subject and single-subject experimentation in terms of research process and the alignment of psychological research with theory and practice. We conclude that psychological science and practice will be enhanced by methods texts accurately describing single-subject experiments and these texts addressing the problem of "individual-subject validity": the extent causal relations between treatments and outcomes are assessed at the level of the single-subject. Science involves searching for relations among aspects of the universe and aggregating data across units of observation. Researchers in psychology have traditionally aggregated data across subjects and, within the past 15 years, they have begun to aggregate data across experiments (Cooper & Hedges, 1994). Psychologists aggregate data to cope with variability. Ironically, most psychological theory refers to the individual subject and it is not clear how relations derived by aggregating data across experiments or by aggregating data across subjects (Bass, 1987; Valsiner, 1986a, 1986b) can always be validly generalized to individuals. Over the years, many types of validity have been discussed. Most research methods texts , however, have ignored "individual-subject validity": the extent causal relations between treatments and outcomes are assessed at the level of the individual subject. Individual-subject validity has concerned basic researchers in neuropsychology (Dywan &

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Sixty-two adults with mental retardation of heterogeneous etiology performed four facial emotion discrimination tasks and two facial nonemotion tasks. Staff members familiar with the participants completed measures of social adjustment (the Socialization and Communication domains of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales and the Social Performance Survey Schedule). All facial discrimination tasks had very good reliability (internal consistency), but only some of the tasks correlated with measures of social adjustment. Furthermore, no evidence was found that emotion tasks and nonemotion tasks assessed different social constructs. Emotion tasks in which participants were presented with visual emotion stimuli correlated significantly with prosocial behavior, whereas those with verbal emotion stimuli did not.

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