The renaissance of the experimental analysis of human behavior.

The authors counted how many pages in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior showed human studies. They looked at every issue from 1958 through 1990.

They wanted to see if basic research with people was growing, shrinking, or staying flat.

Human studies almost disappeared in the 1970s. Then the trend flipped. By the late 1980s human work filled nearly half the journal.

The authors call this rebound a 'renaissance' for human operant science.

Joyce et al. (1988) tells an earlier part of the story. Their paper shows that in the 1930s Dvorak was already using daily charts and frequency counts. The new boom in the 1980s simply brought those old tools back into peer-reviewed print.

Morris et al. (2018) gives one example of what the boom produced. They trace the idea of behavioral momentum to Ferster’s 1950s human data. The surge noted by Repp et al. (1992) gave later theorists the articles they needed to build momentum theory.

Together the three papers form a timeline: early precision ideas, a mid-century dip, and a strong 1980s comeback that still feeds ABA concepts today.

If you teach graduate students or supervise RBTs, you can point to this growth as proof that basic human research is alive and useful. The same journal that shaped reinforcement schedules now publishes work you can translate into practice. Use the upward trend to encourage staff to read JEAB articles and to collect frequency data the way Dvorak did—simple, daily, and learner-paced.