Dr. Z is Dr. D. J. Zerbolio. He earned his BA at San Jose University in 1961, MA from the Michigan State University in 1963, and Ph. D in Experimental Psychology from Michigan State in 1965. Dr. Z also did Post-Doctoral work at the University of California at Irvine.
Dr. Z taught Learning, Statistics, and Research Methods amongst other courses at the University of Missouri , St. Louis for over 3 decades. He also did basic research in Learning . He has published scores of research articles in the most respected Learning Journals over his career, as well as several book chapters.
Several years ago, Dr. Z decided to do something about his Smoking Habit, but, like most folks, he found that none of the usual procedures allowed him to "quit" for more that a short period of time. Since Dr. Z's professional specialities were Learning and Research, he decided to research the literature on programs claiming to help smoker's control or quit their habit.
Being a researcher, the first thing to do was go to the research journals and read what had been done, and what the results of these other procedures. These included the Patch, Gum, Hypnosis, the typical behavioral procedures, Aversion training, and several others. In general, Dr.Z found that any or all of these procedures had success rates of about 10%-12%.
In case you didn't. get that-- it also means that , of the people who try to "Quit" using one or more of these usual procedures, 88% or more fail, or are smoking as usual within 2 years of stopping their program.
These findings confirmed the problems Dr. Z was finding in his own efforts to control his own smoking habit. Therefore, he decided to see if he could use his professional expertise in theoretical learning to develop a behavioral learning procedure that would allow him to teach himself to "Not Smoke" . PBYS was the result of Dr. Z's efforts.
PBYS is theoretically sound with regard to any learning theory model. But a theoretically valid procedure does not always mean it can be used in the real world. While Dr.Z was the first to use PBYS (on himself), he was concerned that it would be as successful for others as well. Therefore, Dr. Z decided to treat PBYS like any other research project and collect basic data on it.
To determine what PBYS could do, Dr. Z designed and built a smoking machine where the smoke from a cigarette was drawn through a filter to trap the materials in the smoke stream. Some of these filters are shown in another page on this site. To determine the reduction in these materials from Poking, Dr. Z and a colleague, Dr. G, "smoked" hundreds of cigarettes and analyzed the results. The results for the effects of 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 pokes are also shown in another page of this site. The figure on that page is also the result of this basic resarch.
In addition, Dr. Z has introduced many people to PBYS, and kept records on their experiences. If you do use PBYS, Dr. Z would appreciate hearing from you and about your experiences. You can contact Dr. Z by pressing the following E-mail Link button at the bottom of this page..
