Association for Behavior Analysis International

The current COVID-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of over 1.5 million people across the world and have changed the lifestyle of humanity, possibly, for years to come. In this context, specific behaviors that had received minimal or no attention in the past have been moved up the social validity scale overnight. In this symposium we will evaluate various interventions addressing some key COVID-related behaviors. Online teaching and internet use has exploded during the pandemic. The first study looks at the potential role of social media in facilitating academic performance during online university-level courses. There are essentially no experimental analyses in the literature evaluating whether social media engagement (in the context of closed Facebook learning groups) could be an important channel for multi-component behavioral interventions. The second study presents a telehealth mask-wearing training program for children with autism presenting mask-induced problem behavior. The study evaluates a caregiver-delivered intervention among an international sample of participants from Belgium, India, Mexico, and Costa Rica. In the final study we turn to face touching. Face touching is thought to account for tens or hundreds of thousands of Sars-CoV-2 infections across the world due to physical contact with contaminated surfaces. It has been suggested that face touching, a high frequency behavior, may limit the protective role of hand washing, which occurs inevitably at lower rates. In this third presentation we evaluate the suppressive effect of contingent vibrotactile stimulation on face touching in a group of typical adults as they go about their daily lives. In addition to the treatment evaluation side of the study, it also provided an opportunity to conduct a thorough quantitative and descriptive analysis of face touching in ecologically relevant settings. Overall, these studies give a perspective of the diversity of behavioral applications that can be brought to bear in order to mitigate the effects of the current pandemic.

Students, practitioners and applied researchers.

SARS-CoV-2 is the virus causing COVID-19 and is spread through close person-to-person contact. The use of face masks has been described as an important strategy in the combat to contain and slow down its transmission while a vaccine is not made widely available. We evaluated the effects of telehealth training for caregivers to teach mask wearing to children with ASD. Six participants with a history of challenging behavior associated with mask wearing were recruited from different parts of the world, and trained using a combination of graduated exposure, shaping and contingent reinforcement. By the end of the intervention all participants wore a face mask for a target period of 10 min without exhibiting challenging behavior, and generalized the skill to a novel mask and a community setting. The findings support previous tolerance training treatment evaluations in children with developmental disability exhibiting resistance to healthcare routines. Clinical recommendations and areas for future research are discussed.

Facial contact behavior is a high frequency, high duration behavior that contributes to the transmission of communicable diseases by interaction with contaminated surfaces. Studies indicate that the Sars-CoV-2 virus remains viable for hours on surfaces such as paper, plastic, or metals. Hand-face contact has a long history among mammals and primates and is likely maintained by sensory consequences. It is estimated that thousands of infections may be mediated by hand contact with contaminated surfaces with pathogens being subsequently transferred to mucous membranes by hand contact with the mouth, nose, or eyes. We used contingent vibrotactile stimulation as an intervention to reduce hand-face contacts in ecological settings. Ten consecutively recruited adults wore one or two bracelets that delivered vibrotactile stimuli following face touching. Stimuli were delivered through Bluetooth-connected devices that were calibrated for each participant. We also evaluated the social validity of the intervention and how various environmental events were related to the level of face touching. In addition, the study provides an opportunity to discuss the quantitative characteristics of face touching. The results indicated that the face touching can be reduced considerably with this simple intervention.