Association for Behavior Analysis International

The continuously growing number of children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, the severity of this disability, and the high cost for its treatment call for interventions that are comprehensive, most effective, and efficient. Applied Behavior Analysis has provided a basis upon which various types of therapeutic programs that meet those criteria have been developed. This symposium approaches the issue of optimal outcomes in treatment from three perspectives: (a) a meta-analytic effort to assess degree of effectiveness of behavior analytic approaches across all major areas of child development, (b) an empirical attempt to assess the effectiveness of a model, that is both naturalistic and systemic, in producing high levels of appropriate responding across a wide array of variables including variables for which treatment was not provided, and (c) a pilot study that assesses effectiveness in terms of the collateral effects that behavior analytic teaching may have on problem behavior. In conclusion, this symposium aims to investigate ways in which maximum effects in the treatment of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder may be obtained using minimum resources.

Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder is widely used, very effective, and the most-widely studied type of intervention. Nevertheless, findings are not consistent regarding the degree of its effectiveness. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to investigate the effectiveness of such programs for children with Autism. For the purpose of the present analysis, 24 studies met inclusion criteria and were analyzed. Effectiveness was evaluated in terms of three domains pertaining to child-related variables: a) performance on verbal and nonverbal intelligence measures, b) receptive and expressive language, and c) adaptive behavior. The findings indicated that EIBI programs are moderately to highly effective bringing significant benefits for children with ASD in the aforementioned areas. Specifically, they were very effective in improving intellectual abilities (g=0.773), communication (g=0.720) and social skills (g=0.750); moderately effective in improving adaptive behavior (g= 0.524), expressive (g= 0.455) and receptive language (g=0.488), and non-verbal IQ (g= 0.541); and least effective in improving daily-living skills (g=0.199). Keywords: effectiveness, Early-Intensive-Behavioral Intervention, meta-analysis

The notable increase in the number of people diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder accentuates the need for substantially-researched therapeutic services for them and their families. There are several studies, which bring to the fore the importance of early intervention and of parental active involvement in their childs therapy. The present study, through the use of a multiple baseline design across response categories, aims to assess the effectiveness of a therapeutic model that encompasses behavior analytic naturalistic procedures (e.g., incidental teaching) used in conjunction with a systemic understanding of the parent-child relationship. Four male pre-schoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder and their mothers and fathers were the participants in this study. The effectiveness of the treatment procedure was demonstrated by considerable improvements in child-related, parent-related, and parent-child relational variables for all the participants. Treatment effects generalized across several parameters and maintained through time. Those findings may attribute considerably to the childs progress and the familys wellbeing. Keywords: parent training, systemic-naturalistic behavior analytic model.

Providing sexual education for youth with Autism is very important as it attributes to setting a foundation for social, physical, and emotional development. Yet, sexual education is a rather neglected area probably because of misconceptions about the sexual needs of people in the Spectrum. ?he purpose of this study was twofold: (a) to assess the effectiveness of behavior analytic procedures, such as prompting, and reinforcement contingencies in acquiring appropriate sexual behavior and (b) to examine the effects of improved sexual behavior in decreasing problem behavior. It is anticipated that the 13-year-old participant with Autism will demonstrate improvement in a number of areas including appreciation of privacy, changes occurring in puberty, and self-satisfaction. Those changes are anticipated to produce a collateral reduction in behavior problems. These preliminary findings may be useful in designing short-term individualized treatment plans aiming to improve the sexual behavior of youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Such improvements may result in simultaneous decreases of problem behavior and of stigmatization often associated with inappropriate sexual behavior. Keywords: sexual education, puberty