Association for Behavior Analysis International

SABA Award for Distinguished Service to Behavior Analysis: Kurt Salzinger: The Consummate Behaviorist in the Lab and at Home

This award will be accepted by Dr. Salzinger's wife, Deanna Chitayat.

The health problems that result from our own behavior will increasingly become among the most important challenges to health. For example, alarming increases are already being observed in addiction, obesity, and medication non-adherence. However, efforts to improve these conditions and disorders are hindered by the poor efficacy of most of our treatments. This lack of efficacy, I would argue, results from insufficient understanding of the controlling variables. This is a unique opportunity for those interested in basic science and the underlying theory to make important contributions as translational researchers. I will illustrate these unique opportunities with the application of behavioral economics to important health behaviors.

Dr. Warren Bickel joined the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute in 2011 and serves as Director of the Addiction Recovery Research Center and Co-Director of the Center for Transformative Research on Health Behaviors. In recognition of his extraordinary contributions to research and scholarship achievements, Dr. Bickel was recently awarded the Virginia Tech Carilion Behavioral Health Research Endowed Professorship. He has taught and led research programs at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the University of Vermont, and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.  NIH has funded Dr. Bickel’s work continuously since 1987. Dr. Bickel is an accomplished scholar and researcher whose accolades include receipt of the 2011 APA International Don Hake Translational Research Distinguished Contributions to Basic Research Award and the 2012 Brady-Schuster Award for Outstanding Behavioral Science Research in Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse, Division 28 of the American Psychological Association.  Dr. Bickel was honored to be the recipient of the 2016 Nathan B. Eddy Award from the College on Problems of Drug Dependence. Dr. Bickel was Editor of the journal, Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, has co-edited five books, and has published over 400 papers and chapters. Dr. Bickel’s work is frequently cited and receives national and international recognition.

To make the exhortation "change the world with behavior analysis" a concrete reality, we need the behavior analyst figure to be known, well-estimated and respected by civil society and governmental institutions. At the beginning, we tried to get this approaching the insiders (especially psychologists and educators) to convince them of the goodness of our scientific and evidence-based approach, in order to increase the number of professionals.

Past failures. Unfortunately, to achieve this result we chose to act mainly in universities and public schools, through the publication and spread of experimental research articles and books addressed to psychologists and educators, not to mention all the presentations in congresses and conferences. In time this strategy turned out to be ineffective. In fact, in many countries still nowadays, despite thousands of debates and explanations, only few patients with special needs benefit from ABA treatments, as well as only few companies benefit from performance management, as well as only few hospitals benefit from behavior-based safety, and so on. To demonstrate this, in several countries still there is no law about, or in favor of, behavioral technologies.

A new successful strategy. Starting from the late ‘90s, a small group of ABA practitioners and scientists changed approach in order to get better results in the spread of behavior analysis. They chose to teach ABA to final users rather than to intermediaries (psychologists and educators) and so they started introducing ABA to new categories of professionals as dentists, managers, engineers, medical doctors and industrial safety consultants. The principles and methods of marketing were used to involve new professional categories and, in this way, always more users started to ask to the politicians for more behavior analysis.This unusual strategy demonstrated to be astonishingly better than the previous one. In recent years, in fact, politicians that used to be deaf to the effectiveness proofs brought about by behavior analysts started to care and to pay attention to the demands of professional categories (made by citizens and then voters). Many final users are now demanding for more ABA in their work environment. About this, a list of the actions required to replicate our experience will be presented.

The “ultimate strategy”. Even if the aforementioned marketing-of-a-science tactics are powerful, a faster and more comprehensive strategy it’s in place currently. Our present aim is to influence the state laws writing process in order to change the behaviors of all the stakeholders at the same time. State laws are in fact nothing but conditional statements that, specifying an antecedent, a behavior to be performed, and a consequence (usually a punishment for non-compliance), with the help of prominent judges and politicians could boost a national-level ABA capillary dissemination. Results of this last strategy application will be presented too.

Fabio Tosolin is the behavior analyst and consultant that since the ‘80s has been introducing, spreading and applying Behavior Analysis and Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) principles both in Italy and Europe. In 1985, he founded his own consulting company, FT&A, that is specialized in Performance Management, Learning Technologies and Behavior-Based Safety (B-BS), for the last of which he’s also a referent of European level. His company counts hundreds of PM and B-BS processes implemented in plants and construction sites in Italy and around the world. He is currently professor of Human Factor in HSEQ Management at the Safety Engineering Master’s Degree course, Faculty of Industrial Processes, at Polytechnic of Milano and president of the Italian Associate Chapter of ABAI, made of both the oldest and largest Italian Behavior Analysis Scientific Societies (AARBA and AIAMC). Since 2003 he’s also chair of the European Scientific Conference on OBM, PM & B-BS, held by AARBA.

Founded in 1960, Oregon Research Institute (ORI) is a non-profit, independent, behavioral sciences research center with an international reputation as a leader in research to help people lead healthier lives. ORI scientists embody the belief that the solutions to many of society’s most pressing health and social issues lie in our ability to understand and influence human behavior. ORI researchers apply fundamental behavior analysis and behavior change principles to develop and scientifically evaluate evidence-based interventions to promote health and wellbeing and to prevent and/or treat important behavioral health problems. ORI’s research focuses on (a) promoting healthy child development through interventions to improve parenting skills in at-risk families, improve school environments and instructional practices, and improve peer environments in and outside of school; (b) promoting psychological health through interventions to prevent and treat depression and eating disorders; (c) promoting physical health through interventions to improve diet and exercise throughout the lifespan and to reduce obesity; (d) preventing and treating substance abuse, through interventions focused on nicotine, alcohol, opioids, marijuana, and other drugs, and (e) implementing and disseminating evidence-based behavioral interventions into real-world settings, such as schools, healthcare settings, service agencies, whole communities, and public policy. ORI is funded by research grants from the National Institutes of Health and Institute on Education Sciences, and has 43 scientists and 50 active research projects. ORI is committed to scientific freedom and scientific excellence and provides a collegial and supportive research community for early career scientists and seasoned researchers alike.

Carol Metzler, Ph.D., received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Oregon. Dr. Metzler is a Senior Scientist and the Science Director at Oregon Research Institute in Eugene, Oregon. As a scientist at ORI, she conducts research on parenting practices and child development, and evaluates the efficacy of family interventions for reducing or preventing behavior problems in children. She is particularly interested in research on promoting a public health framework for improving parenting practices and in evaluating the effects of delivering parenting information through non-clinical technology-based approaches. She is currently involved in projects to develop and evaluate technology-based approaches to providing parents of young children with parenting education and support, through video and the internet, and to integrate these parenting programs into pediatric primary care. In addition, Dr. Metzler is also engaged in efforts to summarize what is known about evidence-based programs for children and families and to investigate how these programs can be effectively moved into practice through better integration of science, practice, and policy. As Science Director at ORI, Dr. Metzler works to build awareness of the research done at ORI, build collaborative partnerships between ORI and other research and practice entities, recruit new scientists to ORI, and ensure that ORI continues to provide an optimally supportive environment for world-class behavioral research.