During the past three decades, behavioral practitioners have been applying techniques to improve the performance of athletes. To what extent are interventions, designed to improve the directly and reliably measured performance of athletes in competitions, based on experimental demonstrations of efficacy? That is the question addressed by this review. All issues of three behavioral journals and seven sport psychology journals, from 1972 through 2002, were examined for articles that addressed the above question. Fifteen articles were found that met the inclusion criteria, yielding an average of only one published study every 2 years. This article reviews those articles, discusses reasons for the dearth of research in this area, and makes recommendations for much needed future research.

Many persons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have clinically significant anxiety, with 17.4% presenting with symptoms characteristic of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD; Van Steensel, Bögels, & Perrin, 2011). OCD is characterized by intrusive thoughts, urges or images (obsessions), and engagement in repetitive behaviors or mental acts (compulsions) assumed to reduce anxiety or distress (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed.; DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013). A diagnostic requirement of ASD is restricted and/or repetitive behavior (RRB) that includes stereotyped movements, self-injury, need for sameness, compulsions, ritualized verbal and nonverbal behavior, and circumscribed or perseverative interests (APA, 2013). Increasingly, researchers differentiate RRBs as "higher level"-for example, washing, rigid routines, ordering, and arranging-that resemble OCD symptoms, and "lower level"-for example, restricted stereotypy and selfinjury (

Choices were presented to 9 individuals with developmental disabilities using a two-choice format. Each pair of items, selected based on prior preference assessment, was presented to each participant in three conditions (actual items, pictures of the items, and spoken-name presentation) using a reversal design. The evaluation was conducted using food items, and was then repeated using nonfood items. The participants were also given a test to measure their skills on discrimination tasks ranging in difficulty from simple to conditional discriminations. The participants' abilities to make consistent choices with food and nonfood items were predicted, with 94% accuracy, by their discrimination skills. The findings suggest that presentation methods can affect the accuracy of a choice assessment, and that the systematic assessment of basic discrimination skills can be used to predict the effectiveness of different presentation methods in this population.

This study examined the relationship between performance on the Assessment of Basic Learning Abilities test (ABLA), two auditory matching tasks, and a test of echoics, tacts, and mands with persons with developmental disabilities. It was found that discrimination skill (visual, auditory-visual, and auditory-auditory discriminations) was a better predictor of performance on verbal operant assessments than level of functioning based on diagnosis. The results showed high test-retest reliability for the test of verbal operants and no hierarchical relationship was found among the three verbal operants. The results suggest that the ABLA Level 6 might be a possible bridging task for teaching echoics, tacts, and mands. Further research is needed to ascertain the relation between the auditory matching tasks and the verbal operants.

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