Association for Behavior Analysis International

Depression is consistently associated with cardiovascular disease (CVD) and other CVD risk factors such as obesity. The mechanisms of this association are likely multifactorial, but identifying behavioral mechanisms of the association are imperative to developing and disseminating effective interventions that can impact both symptoms of depression and health behaviors that lead to CVD. Dr. Whited’s presentation will briefly review the literature regarding depression treatment for CVD prevention, and introduce one potential intervention, behavioral activation treatment for depression (BATD), that has potential to fill this role. BATD is a brief individual treatment for depression that focuses on replacing depressogenic behaviors with behaviors that reduce or eliminate depressive symptoms based on the patients’ life values. Health behavior change can also be seamlessly incorporated into BATD treatment so that both depressive symptoms and health behaviors are simultaneously impacted. Dr. Whited will conclude by presenting data from various sources supporting BATD approaches for health behavior change.

Behavior analysts and clinical psychologists

All my thoughts are in pictures. When somebody says a word, I see a picture in my imagination. If I think about the word goose, I start visualizing pictures of geese, such as Canada geese on the campus quad, Mother Goose of the nursery rhyme, and flocks of geese in corn fields. When I was in my twenties, I thought everybody thought the same way I did. In my first work with cattle, I observed that they would often refuse to move across a shadow on the ground or a coat on a fence. It was obvious to me to look at what the animal was seeing because of the way my thought processes worked. Research studies now provide evidence that animals have specific sensory-based memories. One study showed that habituating a horse to the sudden opening of an umbrella does not transfer to flapping tarp. In my own work, I discovered that if I removed the coat from the fence, the cattle would move easily through the chute. In my work with flighty antelopes, our team was able to condition Nyala and Bongo antelopes to voluntarily enter a box for a feed reward and then receive injections and be blood sampled. A new sudden novel stimulus will send these animals crashing into wall. To prevent this, we had to spend ten days habituating them to the sliding door on the box BEFORE we could start standard operant conditioning. The first day the door was opened only one inch and when the animal oriented towards me, I stopped moving it. The next day it was moved 2 inches. To prevent an antelope from having a massive behavioral response we stopped moving the door when it turned and oriented its head towards it. Never push the antelope past the orienting response when a new thing is introduced.

Individuals interested in animal management.

We describe a model used to teach the principles of behavior analysis and their application in the human services to students and practitioners over the past five decades. Materials for the book were developed in the late 1960’s at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, where the first presenter began his teaching career in 1968. The second presenter supervised the administration and testing of the materials. The course content and testing materials were continuously revised and updated over the following years by both presenters, based on data related to student mastery of the content. The teaching model was influenced by the prominent educational technology at the time, including: (1) the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan; (2) the programmed instructional format of Skinner and Holland, and that of Geis, Stebbins, and Lundin; (3) Fred Keller’s Personal System of Instruction (PSI); and (4) Robert Mager’s influential publication on preparing instructional objectives. The first presenter will describe the methodology used to develop the materials and how they provided the basis for a textbook that has been revised over six editions. The second presenter will describe how the materials and resulting textbook were used in undergraduate, graduate and professional courses and seminars. Together, the two presenters will provide examples of their experiences using the textbook to teach behavior analysis. They will present the rationale for the organization and structure of the text and course, along with reasons for including and excluding specific content. The two presenters identify historical, methodological, and conceptual issues that formed the underpinnings of their unique approach to teaching behavior analysis, as well as how the model has evolved. The two presenters, one from a primarily academic perspective and the other from a primarily applied perspective, provide complementary viewpoints on this topic.

Individuals teaching behavior analysis or those training students and practitioners in behavior analysis.

Although evidence has grown with respect to identifying pharmacological approaches to the treatment of severe disruptive behaviors, many challenges have limited progress to date. Few medications have FDA approved indications for the treatment of behavioral disturbance in the population with developmental disorders, and questions can be raised about their specificity. Problems with heterogeneity of study populations can challenge the ability to identify therapeutic signals as well as the generalizability of findings. This presentation will review the current evidence base for addressing common behavioral target symptoms and underscore the need for a change in the current path of drug development to a more integrated, biobehavioral approach.

Behavior Analysts, Psychologists, Psychiatrists

Every time you make a choice—whether it is what soda to buy or who to marry—you are making a creative decision about what kind of person you want to be and what kind of choice that person would make. Sheena Iyengar has dedicated her work to studying these choices, how and why we make them, and what they say about ourselves. Through examples that are at once illuminating and entertaining, she paints a picture of the pleasures and the burdens of a world that offers us seemingly endless options for making our lives unique.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Making sound value-based decisions in a changing environment is an integral part of our daily economic-based decisions and our overall survival. Dopamine is a neuromodulator that is thought to represent reward value, but is almost exclusively studied within the context of positive reinforcement. Here, we are applying behavioral economic theory to address the role of dopamine in the valuation of not only positive, but also negative reinforcement. Either sucrose, or the opportunity to avoid electric foot shock, is provided to rats across ten ascending prices within a single experimental session. By assessing the rate at which individual demand curves decay, we compute a metric (alpha) that represents the worth a rat places on an outcome. Using voltammetry, we found that the concentration of dopamine observed at both sucrose- and avoidance-predictive cues decreased as a function of price, although an initial suppression was observed in the avoidance task. Using optogenetics, we found that modulating dopamine concentration similarly alters the valuation of sucrose and avoidance. Our results suggest that a transient dopamine signal represents the worth an animal places on any advantageous outcome.

BCBAs at both the doctoral and master's level.

Many animal species have been shown to have abilities previously thought to be exclusive to humans, including the use and manufacture of tools, the capacity to solve novel problems without reinforcement of intermediate steps, planning behavioral sequences, and sudden acquisition of relational concepts without reinforcement. These findings pose hard challenges to behavioral analysis, as they require the articulation of hypotheses about the know-how that animals inherit, how this know-how is modified it by individual and social experience, and how all of this information combines to generate innovative behavior. I will present and discuss examples from research on crows, parrots, human infants and other species, with a focus on our quest for parsimonious theoretical accounts of apparently intelligent behavior.

BCBAs with a Master's or Doctoral degree.