Newsletter
Volume 31| 2008 | Number 2
ABA of Brazil
By Dr. Martha Hübner
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 that are interested in the scientific and technological development of behavior analysis.
ABPMC, the Brazilian ABA chapter, currently has 8,000 names in its mailing list. Each year for the past five years, 1,600 people have attended its convention, which typically occurs in August or September. In 2004, ABPMC had the honor to organize the second international meeting of ABAI, which 2,420 people attended. Today, ABPMC has 1,510 members. However, recognizing that the average Brazilian’s budget can not afford an annual membership to a scientific association, we believe the number of behavior analysts in Brazil to be close to 8,000 people (the total number of names of behavior analysts in our database).
ABPMC’s members come from all over Brazil, from north to south. Many regional meetings have been held over the past six years, with ABPMC support, and around 400 to 500 people attended each one. We have regular annual meetings in the State of São Paulo (city of Campinas and São Carlos), Center-West Region meeting (in Brasília), São Luis State, Piauí State, Goiania, Bauru, Rio Verde, Vitoria, and Salvador, among others. The Board of Directors of 2008/2009 decided that every person that goes to these regional meetings will receive a discount for the annual meeting of ABPMC.
For the years of 2008 and 2009, the ABPMC central office is located in Campinas, a very modern city in the State of São Paulo.
According to its bylaws, every two years the chapter’s directory board must change. The ABPMC central office has already been located in the capital of the country (Brasília), and in the cities of Campinas (SP), Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Londrina.
Since its foundation, ABPMC has organized an annual meeting where members and interested people present papers and disseminate the most important advances in many areas of behavior analysis. In 2007, for the XVI Annual Meeting 1,100 people came to the national conference that was held in Brasília on September 24th–27th.
This year, the XVII Annual Meeting of ABPMC will be from August 28th to 31st. The president of the association is Martha Hübner and the president of the annual meeting is Patrícia Piazzon Queiroz.
Since 1999, ABPMC has published 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. Its editorial board is now dedicated to making it an international journal. In 2007, the Brazilian ABA chapter published an article in this journal describing the relationship among scientific associations in Brazil, which includes the history of ABPMC and ABAI, as well as the foundation of our chapter. Coherent with this initiative, behavior analysts have been discussing better political representation of the area among government institutions, in order to increase the power and the inclusion of the area in the decisions that support the development of research, as well as the diffusion of knowledge produced by behavior analysis. Recently, ABPMC created a formal committee responsible for the diffusion of behavior analysis, called “Committee of the Diffusion of Behavior Analysis.”
The proceedings and papers presented during our annual convention will be published in a book series named Sobre Comportamento e Cognição (About Behavior and Cognition), which has already published 21 volumes. We also have a newsletter, Contexto, where members, invited authors and affiliated organizations may expose their ideas about behavior analysis and about our association.
The Brazilian ABA chapter (ABPMC) will be very honored by your presence at our annual meeting! To submit papers to the convention or for more information, go to www.abpmc.org.br. We also invite you to submit your paper to our journal: (www.rbtcc.org).
Come and join us at the XVII ABPMC convention, August 28th–31st, Campinas, Royal Palm Plaza, São Paulo State!