Association for Behavior Analysis International

Skinner’s 1945 treatise, “An Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms,” established a defining and fundamental characteristic of radical behaviorism by emphasizing the necessity of understanding scientific verbal behavior in terms of the same principles applied to the understanding of any behavior – that is, in terms of its antecedents and consequences. Further, his call for a functional analysis of any psychological concept was predicated on the position that only such an analysis would lead to more effective action with respect to the subject matter at issue. To the extent that “service” contributes to the survival of our discipline and world view, it follows that an examination of the conditions under which we speak of “service” may prove useful in our efforts to target and increase such activities. Thus, this talk will review some of the varied forms of professional activity that occasion service descriptions, with an eye toward creating and identifying opportunities, facilitating the professional actions needed, and consequating service efforts effectively.

Vincent Strully, Jr., CEO and Founder of The New England Center for Children (NECC®), is proud to accept the 2017 SABA Award for International Dissemination of Behavior Analysis on behalf of NECC. Despite the growing acceptance and demand for behavior analytic services, there are considerable challenges to developing sustainable models of service delivery internationally, including language barriers, differences in cultural practices, and funding considerations. Over the past 40 years, we have identified several components that are essential for the development of sustainable models of service delivery worldwide. Government funding and support are critical for success, as are training programs that provide local staff access to graduate-level instruction in behavior analysis. Also, NECC’s development of the Autism Curriculum Encyclopedia (ACE®), an application providing an interactive interface containing assessment tools, lesson plans, teaching materials, and student performance reports for over 1,900 skills, has provided an effective and efficient curriculum necessary for delivering sustainable services.

Behavior analysis has been foundational for a broad range of treatment and prevention interventions. However, there are reasons to believe that behavior analysts are not contributing to the improvement of societal wellbeing to the extent that B. F. Skinner envisioned in his seminal writings. In the past 2 years, I have spoken with hundreds of behavior analysts, many of whom expressed this kind of concern. I will summarize these concerns and suggest principles that might help behavior analysis as a field fulfill its promise to bring about unprecedented advances in human wellbeing. Specifically, I will suggest changing the criteria regarding what a behavior analysts should know from one that restricts our focus to practices and methods that are explicitly labeled as “behavior analytic” to one that encourages behavior analysts to embrace any empirical evidence or methods that contribute to human wellbeing, initiating much more empirical research on strategies for influencing climate change, and forging alliances with other areas of behavioral science.

Behavior Analysis has been a significant focus of the Psychology Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington since 1976. The department’s contributions to the field can be measured in research, teaching, and service. The faculty have published hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles, books and book chapters spanning the experimental analysis of behavior, applied behavior analysis, and translational research. Faculty and students closely collaborate on research, including: basic learning principles, choice, teaching, behavioral pharmacology, behavioral economics, stimulus control, memory span, contingency management, functional analysis, preference assessment, health behavior, animal behavior, and pediatric feeding. In addition to training countless undergraduate students in behavior analysis, the program has graduated 96 master’s students who have completed a thesis with a behavior analytic focus, and will begin training Ph.D. students in behavior analysis in 2017. Faculty have served in leadership roles within ABAI and Div. 25 of APA, and various other national, state and regional organizations. They have served as editors or editorial board members for key journals such as The Behavior Analyst, JEAB and JABA. The presentation will include a brief history of the department’s contributions, as well as a description of its vision for the training of behavior analysts.

Board certified behavior analysts, licensed psychologists, graduate students.

Delay discounting refers to a preference for smaller, sooner over larger, delayed outcome. Domain effects refer to a tendency for some outcomes to be more strongly discounted than others. We will review research that reports domain effects across a variety of special populations, but focus on an outcome that is one of the most steeply discounted food. Our laboratory, which examines delay discounting with obese rats and humans has uncovered a consistent pattern of domain-specific discounting effects with food as the outcome. In other words, the largest differences in obese and healthy-weight subjects tend to be with food or food-related outcomes. This domain-specific finding also has been shown in response to the treatment of mindful eating. Implications for using multiple relevant outcomes in discounting studies will be discussed. This presentation will also serve as an introduction to a panel discussion on the application of behavioral economics to obesity.

Certified behavior analysts, licensed psychologists, graduate students.

Behavioral analyses of the stimulus control for the phenomena characterized as bi-directional address critical issues in verbal behavioral development, verbal behavior, and relational responding. Laboratories have investigated naming as (a) derived relations, (b) its effects on other derived relations, (c) as well as the identification of experiences that contribute to the onset of naming as a behavioral developmental cusp. We present the perspectives of four laboratories on bi-directional naming.

The target audience consists of all behavior analysts with a theoretical and/or practical interest in the emergence, "generativity," or "explosion" of verbal skills in young children, and in how the basic behavioral principles can be utilized in teaching children with language delays more effectively.

Naming types have been identified as verbal behavior developmental cusps that result from a history of experiences. Different types of naming have been identified according to the stimuli controlling stimuli including: (a) naming involving actions, (b) additional auditory stimuli, (c) exclusion conditions, (d) familiar and unfamiliar stimuli, and (e) additional auditory stimuli. Some children who do not demonstrate naming can do so after several interventions and their educational prognosis improves as a result.

Humans often solve problems by engaging in a variety of strategies, some of which involve talking to themselves. This requires that they speak with understanding. Bidirectional Naming (BiN) is the term used (in behavior analysis) to refer to the ability to react as a listener to one's own speaker behavior. In this talk, I will describe basic, translational, and applied studies supporting the role of BiN in the development of complex skills such as categorization and analogical reasoning. Evidence for the role of BiN as a problem solving strategy comes from positive performances on complex matching-to-sample tasks after the use of verbal behavior training alone, and also from spontaneous vocalizations on the specific verbal strategies utilized by participants during or after task completion.

In the paper that gave rise to the study of stimulus equivalence, Sidman (1971) used the terms name/naming to generically designate responses under the discriminative control of pictures and printed words. In Skinnerian terms, he was referring to tact and textual relations. In Sidman's study, these discriminated operants emerged as a by-product of learning stimulus-stimulus relations. Although the response in a tact (or textual behavior) occurs under the control of a specific stimulus, if that stimulus is a member of an equivalence class, this implies that the response comes under the control of the class as a whole. The class, in turn, involves at least the primary item or environmental aspect, the spoken word/s, which was/were conventionally related to this item by the learner's verbal community [in the tact], and the corresponding printed word/s [in textual behavior]. Consequently, the learning history established listening and speaking behaviors in the same individual. This presentation will illustrate the formation of equivalence classes and the development of listening comprehension, tact, and textual behaviors in a sample of deaf children with cochlear implants.

The prevalence of obesity continues to climb in all age groups, and around the world. The standard paradigm assumes that we “eat too much and exercise too little, that obesity is due to two aberrant “behaviors”. However, are these behaviors cause or effect? Our research on children with brain tumors who develop hypothalamic damage and become obese after surgery or radiation, termed “hypothalamic obesity”, demonstrates that they have anatomic “leptin resistance”. In these subjects, excessive insulin release blocks leptin signaling to drive weight gain and hunger, while pharmacologic insulin suppression results in reduced food intake, increases spontaneous activity, and promotes weight loss. Why should insulin block leptin signaling? Leptin is a necessary signal to the VMH for the initiation of high-energy processes, such as puberty and pregnancy. If leptin always worked, then nobody could gain weight, and our reproductive capacity would be shot. Most obese people are hyperinsulinemic. But is that cause or effect? It is assumed that as you gain weight, cytokines are released from adipose tissue, which drive insulin resistance. However, our research demonstrates that dietary sugar is metabolized to fat in the liver, and it is this liver fat that drives insulin resistance unrelated to peripheral fat. Why should sugar drive insulin resistance? Naturally occurring sugar in fruit is what makes fruit palatable. But for our ancestors, fruit was readily available for one month per year, called “harvest time”. Then came four months of winter, and no food at all. We needed to stock up, to increase our adiposity in preparation for four months of famine. In other words, seasonal insulin resistance was evolutionarily adaptive; but year-round insulin resistance due to ubiquitous sugar availability has become maladaptive. It is assumed that people consume sugar because of its palatability. However, there is now evidence that sugar may be addictive in humans. Obese subjects will use sugar to treat psychological symptoms. Overweight women who were self-reported carbohydrate cravers reported greater relief from dysphoria in response to a carbohydrate-containing beverage as compared to a protein drink. Why are we drawn to sweet? Evolutionarily, sweetness was the signal to our ancestors that a given food was safe to eat because there are no sweet foods that are acutely poisonous (even Jamaican vomiting sickness only occurs after consumption of unripe ackee fruit, which is not sweet). Unfortunately, the food industry knows this and adds excess sugar to processed food to make us buy more. Thus, the behaviors associated with obesity are secondary to our biochemistry, and our biochemistry is secondary to our environment. Understanding these evolutionary precepts explain our obesity epidemic, and also point to environmental and policy solutions.

Practitioners working in behavioral medicine settings or environments where dietary issues impact behavioral responses.

This session is coupled with, and immediately follows, a SQAB tutorial on Behavioral Economics and Obesity presented by Dr. Erin Rasmussen. Panelists will be asked to speak briefly about their research program and to bring questions designed to foster discussion with audience members. The goal is to generate ideas and collaborative efforts among basic, translational, and applied scientists. The tutorial and panel discussion has arisen because the Society for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior (SQAB), an organization that emphasizes fundamental sciences related to behavior analysis, meets immediately before ABAI. The tandem meetings of these two organizations present opportunities for attendees to hear about core sciences related to behavior analysis. The SQAB tutorials have provided an excellent spur for such discussions but we SQAB and ABAIs Science Board wish to take this a step further. This panel discussion, which represents a partnership between SQAB and ABAI, will create a setting in which basic and applied scientists, as well as practitioners, can meet to discuss applications of the topics raised in a SQAB tutorial.

individuals interested in applying the fundamental principles of behavioral economics to reducing caloric intake of increasing caloric expenditure.

Behavioral economic demand analyses quantify the degree to which organisms defend consumption of reinforcers. Emanating from the experimental analysis of behavior, demand analyses have rendered an abundance of success in modeling consumption and choice in highly controlled nonhuman studies. Translational applications in the 1980s demonstrated the potentiality of demand analyses in understanding substance use in human subject. Accordingly, contemporary research in addiction sciences has seen a marked proliferation in applying demand analyses in both translational and clinical settings. This SQAB Tutorial highlights translations of findings from basic studies on reinforcer demand to various issues of societal important. The presentation begins with a primer on demand assessment and analysis. Discussion of demand metrics with immediate translation to applied behavior analysis is provided. Particular examples from behavioral health domains are provided in the areas of alcohol, cigarette, marijuana, and indoor tanning demand. The presentation concludes with a discussion of other areas of translation in mainstream applied behavior analysis, such as validating preference assessments, determining token delivery and exchange schedules, and classroom based reinforcement contingencies for work completion.

Certified behavior analysts, psychologists, graduate students.

B. F. Skinner argued that neurobiology was not necessary to explain operant behavior. However, some of his most publicized conjectures could only be tested using neurobiological methods. For instance, 1959, in what may be one of the most decisive debates in modern psychology (or cognitive neuroscience), Noam Chomsky gutted Skinner's claims that human language were acquired via operant processes. By understanding and comparing the neurobiological mechanisms of operant learning in different animals, we now are beginning to accumulate evidence that Skinner was at least partially correct: there is a dedicated, evolutionarily conserved biochemical mechanism underlying behavioral learning which does not seem to be involved in the other forms of learning tested so far. This mechanism is also involved in acquiring at least the speech component of language, articulation. Coincidentally, such experiments also solved a technical problem first formulated by Skinner in 1935. Behavioral experiments were performed ~80% statistical power and have been internally replicated before publication. These replications often included different genetic modifications targeting the same biological structure, providing converging evidence for any given effect.

Fellow researchers, but it is my aim that graduate students should be able to follow and understand the talk nevertheless.

Schedule-induced or "adjunctive" behavior may occur related to a time based schedule when an individual produces behavior accompanying a scheduled stimulus delivery. In 1978, Foster exposed a lack of the term "adjunctive behavior" within the usage of JABA, while noting the potential significance of "adjunctive behavior" to applied settings. He had observed "numerous cases where professionals and paraprofessionals devoted strenuous, shortsighted, and futile efforts at directly modifying apparently adjunctive behaviors by imposing medications or consequences on them." Today, despite its contributions to the basic literature and its massive potential significance to applied settings, adjunctive behavior remains a topic infrequently explored by researchers interested in human populations, and may still be unfamiliar to behavior analysts lacking research experience or comprehensive backgrounds. This paper explores using a schedule-related analysis in providing ethical supervision and treatment for populations affected by trauma (for example, young children experiencing court-ordered visits with caregivers previously associated with aversive stimuli). Data are discussed in the context of engineering supportive environments for children with previous schedule related aversive experiences, as well as providing appropriate education and training for such families or others new to the analysis of stimulus schedule effects.

PENDING

The recurrence of previously eliminated operant behavior (i.e., relapse) represents a challenge to the long-term success of a wide variety of behavioral interventions. This tutorial will provide a review of common relapse phenomena (e.g., reinstatement, renewal, resurgence) using examples from both basic research and applied settings. A major emphasis will be on providing user-friendly descriptions of existing theories of relapse, especially theories of resurgence. Theories discussed will be Behavioral Momentum Theory, Context Theory, and Choice Theory. The successes and failures of these theories will be addressed, as will areas in need of additional empirical and theoretical development. Finally, translational relevance will be discussed by considering how insights provided by the theories might be used to prevent or reduce relapse following common behavioral interventions (e.g., DRA). This presentation will also serve as an introduction to a panel discussion on the application of theories of relapse.

Certified behavior analysts, graduate students.

Methods to support students' competencies often target isolated contexts or activate individual treatment agents. Conjoint Behavioral Consultation (CBC; Sheridan, Kratochwill & Bergan, 1996; Sheridan & Kratochwill, 2008), on the other hand, is an indirect intervention focused on the attainment of students' goals through (a) collaborative and consistent implementation of evidence-based interventions across home and school settings, and (b) data-based problem solving with parents and teachers working as partners. This presentation will review CBC and decades of empirical investigations that have documented its efficacy for promoting behavioral, social-emotional and academic competencies among children facing a range of behavioral and learning challenges. Research exploring outcomes for students, parents and teachers will be presented. A focus on translation and considerations for practice will be highlighted by exploring empirically-derived "active ingredients" (mediators) responsible for CBC's effects, conditions (moderators) under which desired outcomes are maximized, and a number of implementation lessons learned. Opportunities for future research and training will be explored.

Professionals who serve as consultants or who are interested in school/home consultation.

This session immediately follows Dr. Tim Shahan's SQAB tutorial entitled "Relapse," which introduces the fundamental principles underlying resurgence, renewal, and reinstatement. Panelists will be asked to speak briefly about their research program and to bring questions designed to foster discussion with audience members. The goal is to generate ideas and collaborative efforts among basic, translational, and applied scientists. The tutorial and panel discussion arose because the Society for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior (SQAB), an organization that emphasizes fundamental sciences related to behavior analysis, meets immediately before ABAI. The tandem meetings of these two organizations present opportunities for attendees to hear about core sciences related to behavior analysis. The SQAB tutorials have provided an excellent spur for such discussions but SQAB and ABAI's Science Board wish to take this a step further. This panel discussion, which represents a partnership between SQAB and ABAI, will create a setting in which basic and applied scientists, as well as practitioners, can meet to discuss applications of the topics raised in a SQAB tutorial.

The target audience is investigators involved with translating or applying the core principles of behavior analysis.