Association for Behavior Analysis International

Traumatic experiences can have significant, and long-lasting, effects on the individuals who survive them. Frequently, clients who live through trauma experience a host of behavioral, cognitive, emotional, and physical health problems. When these individuals come to therapy, most of them are hoping that they will be able to eliminate the nightmares, memories, anger, anxiety, and other posttraumatic symptoms that they experience. In fact, most of them have tried many things (such as isolation, substance abuse, even suicide attempts) to manage these symptoms. However, what many of these individuals fail to realize is that their heroic efforts to avoid the pain of their posttraumatic experiences may actually be making things worse - and may even be the heart of the problem. In many ways, despite their best efforts, trauma survivors frequently find themselves trapped in a life that is largely devoted to the avoidance of pain. Effective empirically supported treatments for posttraumatic symptoms have been developed to aid trauma survivors in improving traditional PTSD symptoms. However, they are not universally effective, and not all clients are willing to engage in exposure-based treatment. In addition, given the high levels of psychiatric comorbidity with PTSD, treatments are needed that can cut across diagnostic categories and begin to treat presenting problems based on functional dimensions. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a contemporary behavior therapy, provides an alternative to the feel-good agenda and instead focuses on helping clients to reconnect with those ideals and principles for living that are deeply important to them and that dignify the difficult events that they have survived. This presentation will introduce clinicians to contextual behavioral tools to work with trauma survivors on identifying each person’s valued life directions and then help motivate experiential acceptance and behavior change in the service of those values.

Clinicians, supervisors, students

The term “trauma-informed schools” has achieved buzzword status in our current educational landscape, fueled by the urgency schools feel to address the devastating effects of trauma on the academic, social, emotional, and behavioral functioning of our students. However, there is no clear consensus regarding the inputs, or the core components, of trauma-informed schools and there have been no rigorous evaluations of their outputs, or the effects on students, teachers, or schools. If trauma-informed schools are to become more than a passing trend, we must work harder to describe the inputs, document the outputs, and explain the complex processes that link the two. In this presentation, I will summarize the core components of trauma-informed schools, identify key implementation factors thought to facilitate the adoption and maximize the impact of trauma-informed approaches, and review strategies to evaluate the impact of trauma-informed schools.

Educational practitioners and researchers.

Stacy Overstreet, Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychology at Tulane University.  Over the course of her career her research has focused on how sociological, cultural, familial, psychological, developmental, and biological processes influence and interact with one another over time to shape child adaptation to trauma.  Over the past ten years, she has translated that research to inform the implementation and evaluation of trauma-informed schools.  She has published several empirical and conceptual papers related to these areas and she was co-editor of a 2016 special issue on trauma-informed schools in the journal, School Mental Health.  Dr. Overstreet is a founding member of the New Orleans Trauma-Informed Schools Learning Collaborative.  Her work through the Collaborative includes a grant from the National Institute of Justice to determine whether a multi-component implementation strategy for trauma-informed schools improves school safety as well as a grant from the Department of Justice to develop and evaluate a Train the Trainer model for the implementation of trauma-informed schools.  

The talk will describe the properties of neurons in the brain’s reward systems and how their action contributes to economic decision-making. Each of several reward systems, including the dopamine neurons, striatum, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, play a unique role in these processes. The details of this function are currently being investigated using designs based on behavioral theories, such as animal learning theory, machine learning and economic utility theory.

Anyone interested in brain processes.

Wolfram Schultz is a graduate in medicine from the University of Heidelberg. After postdoctoral stays in Germany, USA and Sweden, and a faculty position in Switzerland, he works currently at the University of Cambridge. He combines behavioural, neurophysiological and neuroimaging techniques to investigate the neural mechanisms of rlearning, goal-directed behaviour and economic decision making. He uses behavioural concepts from animal learning theory and economic decision theories to study the neurophysiology and neuroimaging of reward and risk in individual neurons and in specific brain regions, including the dopamine system, striatum, orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala.