Richard Colombo

Richard Colombo

Assistant Professor in Behavioral Psychology
Stockton
Email Address
rcolombo@pacific.edu
Teaching Interests

I design my teaching around the belief that students learn most effectively when they’re given repeated opportunities to engage with the material and to independently identify and describe concepts through exams and discussion. My classes include weekly written and oral assessments, which give me a read on classroom progress. As I track that progress, I adjust class time to address more challenging concepts. I focus on helping students develop critical thinking skills and empirical methods, giving them the tools to understand the world around them while avoiding pseudoscience and falsehoods.

Outside the classroom, I enjoy supporting students through advisement and other opportunities around campus. As students prepare to engage with the underlying question of psychology (why do we do what we do?), I enjoy supporting their varied interests in pursuing answers to this question.

Research Focus
  • Impulsivity
  • Self-control training
  • Pavlovian Conditioning
  • Choice
  • Severe behavior-change interventions

My lab focuses on translational and applied research on the principles of operant and Pavlovian conditioning to reduce impulsivity and support self-control. I’m the recipient of the 2026 Faculty Research Award from the California Association for Behavior Analysis and serve as a reviewer for Behavioral Interventions, Behavior Analysis in Practice, and the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Colombo, R., Garland, K., Nichols, K. C., Salinas, A., Kuo, Y., & Madden, G. J. (in press). A Pavlovian approach to increasing effort-based self-control in children. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.

Colombo, R., Mahmoudi, S., Wright, W. B., Huang, Y., & Madden, G. J (2026). Appetitive Pavlovian conditioning in two inclusive kindergarten classrooms. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 125(3), e70107. https://doi.org/10.1002/jeab.70107

Colombo, R., Wallace, M. (2024). Evaluating the effects of a problem-solving tool for single-case design selection in practice. Behavioral Interventions, 40.

Colombo, R., Munoz, A., Wallace, M., & Legaspi, D. (2023). Functional analysis and treatment of adult problem behavior: A systematic review. Behavioral Interventions, 39.