Association for Behavior Analysis International

E. Ribes-Iñesta’s analytic scope of psychology is vast and warrants attention by behavior analysts. The contents of this book are not limited to a description of psychology as a scientific system. The topics covered in the twelve chapters of this book are diverse, ranging from historical remarks about general psychological assumptions (such as descriptions, causes, and explanations of behavior), overviews of concepts and their origin in other sciences (such as molecular versus molar notions in chemistry and the concept of the field in physics), defining ways in which psychology relates to other disciplines (such as in interdisciplinary studies or creating multidisciplines), offering a re-interpretation of psychological problems in terms of moral problems and, in doing so, proposing the nonexistence of actual ‘psychological problems’. This review describes the content of the first nine chapters focusing on the main taxonomy of psychological events in terms of molar contingencies. For the most part, Ribes-Iñesta’s main thoughts about psychology have remained in their original form (Spanish), warranting a translation and not just a review. Thus, we present a hybrid between translation and commentary, emphasizing what seems to be more indicative of a line of thought, the skeleton of this book.

In the study of behavior, the degree to which research questions directly address challenges with a clinical population varies. This variation can be conceptualized as a continuum. On one end of this continuum is “applied” research. Applied research includes intervention studies with participants who are members of the population for whom the treatment might later be implemented. In applied studies the participants are intervened upon within the study. On the other end of this continuum is “basic” research, conducted in a highly-controlled lab setting, typically with non-human subjects. The goal of furthering our understanding of behavior does not vary across this continuum. However, generalizability of basic findings to clinically relevant applications may vary, especially for areas in which the mechanisms of action are not particularly well understood. Research that falls between the basic and applied ends of the continuum, translational research, seeks in part to bridge the gap between the two ends of the continuum. One type of translational research is human operant-based experimental preparations. The goal of this synthesis was to explore and identify the various contributions of human operant research to the study of behavior. Specifically, studies in which participants were typically developing adults are examined.

Stimuli which, during the life of an organism, acquire the ability to increase the probability of behavior that they follow are called conditioned reinforcers. The concurrent-chains procedure has been used to study conditioned reinforcement for over 60 years. During this time, several different models have been proposed to explain how stimuli become conditioned reinforcers. This poster will use the Akaike Information Criterion (AICc) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) to analyze the necessity and role of free parameters in several prominent models (Contextual Choice, Cumulative Decision, Delay Reduction, Hyperbolic Value Addition) of conditioned reinforcement. In particular, this poster will focus on concurrent-chains research that has studied choice between one aperiodic and one periodic terminal link schedule of reinforcement. For all calculations, programmed initial-link durations, terminal-link durations, and rates of reinforcement were used. This poster will discuss the implications of the AIC and BIC analyses and provide suggestions for future research and analyses.

Within the field of behavior analysis, visual analysis is a skill used frequently by behavior analysts in the clinical setting. Although the interpretation of data is intended to be objective, there are several factors which may influence a behavior analyst’s interpretation. One such factor may be the context under which the data is presented. In the current study, BCBAs were asked to evaluate the efficacy of treatment based on data which was presented to them either blinded or with the empirical citation. Although not statistically significant, preliminary data suggest that behavior analysts rated blinded data to have larger effect sizes compared to empirical data after balancing between-subject variabilities. This data suggests there may be slight differences between how behavior analysts interpret data taken from empirical journal articles compared to clinical data. Our findings suggest that visual analysis as a stand-along method may not yield the most accurate interpretation of the obtained data. Practitioners should consider additional analysis modalities (descriptive statistics, effect size, percentage of non-overlapping data, etc.) to aid the process of synthesizing the obtained results.