Association for Behavior Analysis International

A Norwegian national implementation strategy aimed to test and conduct a large-scale implementation of The Oregon model of Parent Management Training (PMTO) based on Gerald Patterson's Social Interaction and Learning theory. The program targets children with antisocial behavior and co-occurring problems and their families. A randomized trial demonstrated the effectiveness of the program, and identified central moderators, mediators and predictors. Fidelity to the PMTO model was found to predict child behavioral outcomes better than parent-reported treatment alliance. Several parents seemed to manage with shorter interventions, and the "Early Interventions for Children at Risk" program was designed for implementation in the municipalities. In line with findings from a study of the normative development of aggression, this adapted program targets children from the age of 3 years on. In sum, findings confirmed that PMTO principles and components could be successfully transported from US to real-world settings in Norway with sustained positive outcomes and maintenance of competent adherence. PMTO has been tested with positive outcomes in both individual and group trainings and in high and low dosages of treatment. The Norwegian project may serve as an inspiration for the testing and scaling up of evidence-based parenting programs in other countries, particularly in Europe.

Professionals interested in the effectiveness, implementation, and scaling up of parenting interventions for families with children with antisocial behaviour and co-occurring problem.

Usage-based theories see language as a complex adaptive system: the interaction between history the processes that shape how languages are passed from one generation to the next and human psychology the set of unique social and cognitive capacities that allow generations to learn a language in the first place. I will argue that findings from language acquisition research, typology, and psycholinguistics are converging on the idea that language is fundamentally built out of use and generalizations over those usage events. Interestingly, none of the fundamental mechanisms of the usage-based approach are required to be a language-specific adaptation. Language shows creativity, categories, and recursion because people think creatively, categorically, and recursively. I will discuss a range of experimental, corpus and observational work showing that understanding the developmental of language acquisition can benefit from integrating the developmental of non-linguistic faculties, such as executive control, categorization and social-reasoning.

Researchers and practitioners interested in theories of language

Disruption is the act of changing cultural practices, and introducing new practices, that involve a greater emphasis on social responsibility and sustainability. I will discuss several facets of disruption as it pertains to entrepreneurship. First, I will provide an overview of disruption itself and why it matters, along with case studies from the entrepreneurial world. Secondly, I will address what many consider to be the primary obstacle to disruption, and to entrepreneurship, which is failure, or more precisely, the fear of failure, and strategies that others have used in the past to remove failure as an obstacle to success. I will also discuss how disruption can take place anywhere, and in any industry, toward the improvement of the human condition. Lastly, I will discuss characteristics that comprise the disruptive leader, along with common challenges such leaders face and the outcomes to which they strive.

Professionals, academics, and graduate students.

Scientific research can be studied as investigative behavior. That involves inventing problems as well as solving them. It also involves finding better ways to do one's work. That activity has sometimes been called philosophy. Skinner himself said that behaviorism is a philosophy. I would add that the philosophy was part of a scientific research program. Skinner complained that his critics failed to understand his position, which was based on a hard analogy (not a metaphor) between the processes of learning and evolution by natural selection. Right thinking in the one provides clues to right thinking in the other. The advantage of getting rid of teleology in both is fairly straight-forward. Skinner paid less attention to the importance of getting rid of typological (essentialist) thinking about species and other groups of organisms. These have been treated as if they were abstract classes with essences rather than as concrete wholes. Variation has been screened out and persons have been treated as tokens of stereotypes. One result has been a misguided search for universals of human behavior.

Behavior analysts interested in the historical and conceptual foundations of B. F. Skinner's behaviorism, the relations between the behavioral and biological sciences, and analyses of the behavior of scientists.

The use of cannabis (marijuana) for medical and non-medical purposes is expanding worldwide and now includes legal retail outlets for purchasing cannabis products in many areas. Retail cannabis products are varied with respect to dose and intended route of administration, yet the preponderance of scientific data is limited to analysis of the effects of smoked cannabis. This presentation will summarize data from a series of controlled human laboratory studies evaluating the dose effects of oral, smoked, and vaporized cannabis in healthy, non-tolerant individuals. Outcome measures to be described include subjective ratings of drug effects, cardiovascular measures, cannabinoid quantitation in biological fluid, and performance on psychomotor, memory, and divided attention tasks. Implications of the study findings will be discussed with respect to regulation of medical and non-medical cannabis products, drug testing, and education.

Masters and Doctoral Level BCBAs

The landscape surrounding cannabis use is changing dramatically. Legalized medical and recreational use is spreading, habitual use is growing, perceptions of harm are decreasing and the concentration of THC, the main psychoactive ingredient, is rising; consequently, increased problems associated with cannabis use have been predicted. A better understanding of the mechanisms that underlie cannabis use disorder and effective treatments are therefore needed. This presentation will describe the use of human drug discrimination procedures to determine the neuropharmacological mechanisms of the interoceptive effects of THC and identify targets for treatment. This research has demonstrated that GABA and voltage-dependent calcium channels (VDCC) are involved in the response to cannabis in humans. This presentation will then discuss the use of human laboratory drug self-administration procedures, combined with medication maintenance, as a strategy for determining the initial safety, tolerability and efficacy of ligands at these targets as potential treatments. Studies with the GABA reuptake inhibitor tiagabine and the VDCC ligand pregabalin will be described. Lastly, the presentation will include initial results from research that has integrated neuroimaging, non-invasive electrical brain stimulation and acute drug administration techniques to study cannabis-use disorder.