Inside Behavior Analysis
Volume 1 | 2009 | Number 1
ABA of Brazil
By Martha Hübner and Patrícia Piazzon
The Brazilian Association of Psychotherapy and Behavioral Medicine (ABPMC) was founded on November 4, 1991. Its objective is to congregate psychologists, researchers, professors, and students who are interested in scientific and technological developments in behavior analysis.
ABPMC, the Brazilian ABA chapter, currently has 4,000 names registered in its mailing list. Each year for the past five years, 1,800 people have attended its convention, which typically occurs in the month of September. In 2004, ABPMC had the honor to organize the second international meeting of ABA, which 2,420 people attended. Today, ABPMC has 1,800 members.
The ABPMC’s members come from all over Brazil, from north to south of the country. Many regional meetings have been held over the past six years, with around 400 people attending each one. We have the Center-West Region meeting and meetings in the State of São Paulo (city of Campinas and São Carlos), São Luis State, Goiania, Bauru, Rio Verde, Vitoria, and Salvador, among others.
For the years of 2008 and 2009, the ABPMC central office is located in Campinas, São Paulo. According to its bylaws, every two years the chapter’s directory board has to be changed. The ABPMC central office has already been located in the cities of Campinas (SP), Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, and Londrina. If we consider the annual meeting and the regional meeting, we have 3500 behavior analysts meeting each other every year.
Since 1999, ABPMC also publishes a regular journal called Revista Brasileira de Terapia Comportamental e Cognitiva (Brazilian Journal of Behavior and Cognitive Therapy), which is nationally recognized and very well received by the academic community. In 2007 the Brazilian ABA chapter published an article in this journal describing the relationship among scientific associations in Brazil, which included the history of ABPMC and ABA, as well as the foundation of our chapter. Congruent with this initiative, behavior analysts have been discussing better ways of political representation for the field within government institutions, so as to increase the power and the inclusion of the field in the mainstream of the decisions that support the development of research and the diffusion of the knowledge produced by behavior analysis. In the beginning of 2009, ABPMC played an important role in the defense of the behavioral analytic approach to autism, which was attacked by psychoanalysis, in reaction against a Rio de Janeiro´s government decision that institutionalized behavioral treatment to autism.
ABPMC also publishes a book series, named Sobre Comportamento e Cognição (About Behavior and Cognition), which has already published 19 volumes in applied and basic research areas. From 2009 on the main objective of the collection will be publishing articles that can be used as teaching material in BA.
Since its foundation, ABPMC has organized an annual meeting where members and interested people present papers and promote the most important advances in many areas of Behavior Analysis. In 2008, for the XVII Annual Meeting 1,800 people came to the national conference that was held in Campinas, São Paulo, from the 25th to 28th of August.
This year, the XVIII annual meeting of ABPMC will be from the 24th to 26th of August, in Campinas, São Paulo. ABPMC is going to celebrate 18 years since its foundation and many celebrative events are programmed. The president of the association is Martha Hübner and the president of the annual meeting is Patrícia Piazzon Queiroz. To submit papers to the convention or to get more information about it, go to www.abpmc.org.br.