ABSTRACT
Many of us who study infrahuman behavior in a laboratory setting justify our efforts by assuming that we can develop a systematic body of knowledge that will eventually be useful in the rearing of children, formal education, mental hygiene, clinical diagnosis and treatment, and the broader reaches of social psychology in general. The biological sciences seem to offer a promising analogue, in which the results of laboratory investigations with animal subjects are first checked in field studies and then applied to the clinical practice of medicine. It is only within the last few years, however, that serious attempts have been made to bridge the gulf between the psychological laboratory and the clinical setting. Laboratory investigations have gradually been extended from infrahuman to human subjects, from normal individuals to those classified as deviant, and from such index responses as bar pressing and key pecking to socially significant forms of behavior. It has therefore been extremely gratifying to discover a corresponding stir of interest among our clinical colleagues in the possibility of using learning or conditioning principles in their work. In view of the degree of specialization that has developed in the training of psychologists, the task of combining the two types of skill amounts almost to an interdisciplinary undertaking. It is perhaps natural that laboratory investigators have slighted many of the subtleties and complexities of behavioral modification 279in a natural setting and that clinical investigators have misconstrued the theories and ignored the technical details of laboratory investigation. These oversimplifications may be expected in pioneering efforts, although one hopes that continued interaction will bring greater sophistication to both groups.
