To ensure we offer contemporary continuing education opportunities, the CE credit associated with this video is no longer available, however, the video remains available for viewing.
Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) is evolving from clinical intervention into Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) at PLEA, a public sector, non-profit agency in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. PLEA’s School-Based Partial Hospital Program (SBPHP) serves a population of children and adolescents with diagnoses on the Autistic Spectrum. The SBPHP has grown over the past fifty years from a preschool started by parents desperately seeking services for their Autistic children to a program using principles of Applied Behavior Analysis in three main forms: Precision Teaching, Relational Frame Theory, and Acceptance and Commitment Training. ACT’s model of Psychological Flexibility as reflected in the ACT Matrix diagram has undergone progressive transformation from clinical to administrative functions. The “Prosocial” method, an approach integrating the ACT Matrix with the Core Design Principles of Successful Groups for which Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, also has been introduced at various levels within the organization (https://www.prosocial.world/). “Prosocial” is being broadly conceived as providing a platform for studying the evolutionary theory of multilevel selection. The impact of selection by consequences was discerned by B.F. Skinner not only for natural selection but also for operant conditioning of individual behavior as well as cultural evolution. In their recent book, Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: An Integrated Framework for Understanding, Predicting and Influencing Human Behavior, David Sloan Wilson and Steven C. Hayes elaborate Evolutionary Science as a multilevel process of variation, selection, and retention. The ACT Matrix will be used throughout this presentation to explicate this multilevel process of ACT evolving into OBM at PLEA.