Association for Behavior Analysis International

This article questions how prescription medicines reach the market and proposes law-policy reforms to enhance the FDA's science standard for human clinical trials and new drug approvals. The core message is that relying too heavily on clinical research data generated through the global "gold standard" of group experimental design--reliance on statistical analysis to compile and compare group averages--risks predicting little about the actual impact of prescription medicines on individuals, including members of the groups under study. This article introduces a law-policy methodology based upon commercial incentives and intervention by Congress and the FDA to raise the science standard for human clinical research, and to make drug development more closely parallel the reality of drug delivery in the practice of medicine. The objectives of this proposal are to promote several pressing needs: maximize drug performance and minimize adverse events; end the pattern of putting new prescription medications on the market with too much dependence on the medical profession to introduce meaningful clinical understanding of drugs through patient use over time; improve biopharmaceutical R&D decision making; align the regulatory standard with the infusion of added precision associated with contemporary genetics-based R&D; and realize more sound scientific information directly through the regulatory process to support the integrity of science in an age of academia industry integration, aggressive commercialization, secrecy in science, and constantly, rapidly evolving technology.

Take-home idea: Behavior analyses reveal surprising psychological features and neurobiological mechanisms underlying intense motivations of reward-related "liking" and "wanting," and relations to negative-valence motivations of fear and disgust. Abstract: Clinical disorders of addiction, binge eating, depression and schizophrenia often involve intense psychopathological mood or motivation states. So it is of interest to understand how limbic brain circuits (involving nucleus accumbens) generate intense motivational states of reward "wanting" and "liking," and also of fearful or aversive states. Behavioral analyses and affective neuroscience studies indicate that "wanting" a reward is generated by a different brain mechanism from "liking" the same reward. The difference between wanting versus liking has implications for understanding addiction and related disorders. Yet surprisingly, desire and fear can both can both be generated by an overlapping mechanism, which may have different modes for each. This lecture will address such dissociations and convergence in affective brain mechanisms.

Self-control is sometimes necessary for optimal choice behavior, and perhaps even for future-oriented decision-making. Humans sometimes show self-control by choosing better, but more delayed outcomes over more immediate outcomes. However, the failure of self-control (impulsivity) underlies many problematic human behaviors, and has led humans to train themselves to overcome their "animal impulses." But is it fair to assume that animals cannot do the same, and also exhibit self-control? The presentation will argue that it is not fair, and that many species do show some degree of self-control. Delaying gratification (or postponing a response to a present reward for the sake of a future bigger or better reward) is one of the hallmark aspects of self-control. It also is not a unique human capacity. The presentation will discuss recent studies with chimpanzees and other animals that examine the capacities of those animals to delay gratification and the behavioral strategies that they employ to cope with impulsivity. In some cases, there are close parallels between nonhuman animal performance and that of humans, but in other cases those similarities decrease. But, overall, comparative research suggests that humans are not alone in their capacity to demonstrate some degree of "willpower."

Early studies showing that drugs that people take illicitly can maintain IV self-administration in laboratory animals have led to a continuing role for such studies to measure abuse potential of existing and new drugs and, as well, continuing interest in understanding the multiple determinants of the reinforcing effects of drugs and how to measure them. Laboratory studies have shown that, in addition to subject-related and drug-related variables, contextual factors can qualitatively and/or quantitatively influence drug-maintained behavior. Among these factors are the schedule of availability, drug-taking history, and reinforcement options. Their influence will be reviewed with examples of differences in the dose-related effects of selected drugs under varying schedule conditions, the role pharmacological history can play in the expression of a drug's reinforcing effects, and the utility of using the availability of an alternative reinforcer under concurrent schedule conditions to study drug-maintained and drug-seeking behavior.

The target audience is researchers and practitioners interested in substance abuse and current laboratory procedures for assessing abuse liability of drugs.

Language has always been assumed to be uniquely human. And many linguists (for example, Chomsky and Pinker) still subscribe to this assumption. However, extensive research since the 1970s has shown that primates are capable of acquiring language skills. This presentation focuses on language studies with bonobos at the Language Research Center of Georgia State University and at Great Ape Trust, using a keyboard with lexigrams as a communication system. The language environment the bonobos were exposed to will be described, as well as their language acquisition process and the language skills they acquired. Theoretical and philosophical implications of these studies will be discussed along with methodological issues and criticism this research raised. The ape language studies have challenged traditional views on language and cognition: findings regarding the abilities of nonhuman primates to acquire symbols, comprehend spoken words, decode simple syntactical structures, learn concepts of number and quantity, and perform complex perceptual-motor tasks have helped change the way humans view other members of the primate order.

Photo: Russ RuBert, RuBert Studios 2012

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