Association for Behavior Analysis International

Individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities are at increased risk for abuse, violence, and human trafficking. According to the Trafficking Victim Protection Act (TVPA), trafficking is the use of force, fraud, or coercion for commercial sex, or if the individual is under 18 years. Labor trafficking includes involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery. Individuals with disabilities may be targeted as they may be more isolated, be more easily manipulated and groomed or not be able to communicate what is occurring. Sometimes there are signs of abuse such as an increase in certain behaviors, difficulty at school, home or therapy and new behaviors not present prior. Considering that some children with disabilities are nonverbal they may not be able to communicate any abuse that may be occurring. It is vital to teach healthy and unhealthy relationships, appropriate and inappropriate touch, how to communicate an occurrence and who they should confide in. More research should be conducted with individuals with disabilities for identification, screening, and prevention. All clinics should include mandatory training for human trafficking and abuse prevention and identification. Collaboration with therapists and families is vital to increase training and reporting to reduce the rates of human trafficking in this population.

BCBAs, RBTs, anyone developing treatment plans and/or working with youth or those who may be at risk for abuse

Caregiver-mediated early interventions have demonstrated positive child and family outcomes for young children with, or at high likelihood of having, autism (Zwaigenbaum et al., 2015; Burrell & Borrego, 2012). Additionally, there is consensus that effective early intervention includes a caregiver component, including input in the development of treatment goals and priorities, identifying support for the family, and learning specific strategies to support their child’s development. However, many intervention providers working with children with autism and their families have limited training in how to partner with parents or how to coach them in the use of evidence-based intervention strategies. Recent research has identified key elements for caregiver coaching and engagement (e.g., Pellecchia et al., 2020). This presentation will examine the literature on effective coaching strategies and provide methods to increase caregiver partnership in the intervention process. The use of telehealth to deliver coaching will be examined.

In 1959 Noam Chomsky published a famously scathing review of Skinner’s 1957 book, Verbal Behavior. For the next 30 or so years, invoking the role of the child’s language environment in explaining acquisition was viewed positively only in limited clinical and restricted educational contexts, while the majority of legitimate child language researchers focused on children’s acquisition of rules and abstract patterns remote from their actual verbal behavior. However, the role of the child’s language environment was never fully ignored as a research topic, and in the last 30 years has regained legitimacy as an explanation for individual and group differences in rate and course of acquisition. Although some might take this as an affirmation of the claims in Verbal Behavior, child language researchers would vehemently reject that interpretation, noting, for example, the central role that must be attributed to infants’ innate social-pragmatic categories and their general cognitive capacities, which far transcend the learning mechanisms Skinner posited. This talk will summarize the findings supporting a role for variation in the child’s language environment in explaining aspects of language development, and argue that the polarizing dispute between Skinner and Chomsky retarded progress toward understanding how children’s innate socio-pragmatic skills and linguistic input interact to support language development.

Over 92,000 drug-related overdose deaths, the majority of which were due to opioids, were reported in the U.S. in 2020 (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/drug-overdose-data.htm). This increase in opioid-related overdose deaths occurred despite the availability of several effective treatment medications. Both positive and negative reinforcing effects of opioids may underlie the initiation of opioid use and development and maintenance of opioid use disorder (OUD). Some investigators suggest that the negative reinforcing effects of opioids become more prominent with repeated use. Evidence for this position will be presented using clinical data from a variety of sources. While both processes appear to be supported by the data, the relative contribution of positive and negative reinforcing effects in maintaining opioid use is unclear. Additional research should be conducted to directly address this issue because it has relevance for the development of more effective pharmacotherapeutic and behavioral treatment strategies for OUD.

Dr. Sandra Comer is Professor of Neurobiology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. She received her BS at Vanderbilt University and Ph.D. at the University of Michigan for her research on the effects of drugs using preclinical models. Dr. Comer is Director of the Opioid Laboratory in the Division on Substance Use Disorders and her current research focus is on the clinical testing of medications for treating opioid use disorder, methods to maximize the use of naloxone by opioid users, and evaluations of the comparative abuse liability of prescribed pain medications. Dr. Comer served as President of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, the longest standing scholarly society in the U.S. devoted to research on substance use disorders, and currently is the Public Policy Officer for CPDD. Dr. Comer is a member of the Expert Advisory Panel on Drug Dependence for the World Health Organization and has over 160 publications on substance use disorders.