Association for Behavior Analysis International

The purpose of this preliminary study was to examine the effects of noncontingent reinforcement (NCR) procedure to reduce annoying telephone calls for a 95-year-old female with dementia. The mother’s calls could frustrate her family members because the contents of the callings were usually grumbling and complaining. At first, a functional assessment interview was implemented for one of her daughters. As a result, the function, or maintain factor, of the annoying calls was presumed to be social attention from four blood relatives of her family. Then, the assessment-based NCR procedure, in which all blood relatives hanged up briefly (in ten minutes) all mother’s calls, and made a short and unexpected visit or phone frequently, was conducted. Results indicated decreases in annoying telephone calls during implementing NCR. Moreover, in her family members, the degree of satisfaction for these procedures and results were very high. These results suggest that a functional assessment and the assessment-based NCR procedure delivered with non-professional family members improve so-called BPSD (a behavioral and psychological symptom of dementia) “positively”.

Behavior analytic approaches to solve the behavioral problems in children has been gradually accepted and used in Japanese schools and hospitals. To measure the current state of knowledge of behavior principles in those places, short version of the Knowledge of Behavioral Principles as Applied to Children (KBPAC) was conducted. Participants were caregivers, medical staffs, nurse students, and teachers in junior high schools, primary schools, and kindergartens. Only the nurse students were tested the KBPAC in before and after a lecture on behavior analysis. The short version of KBPAC contains 25-items of multiple-choice instrument. The results showed that the score in medical staffs was higher than that in other groups, and the lecture on behavior analysis to nurse students increased the score. These results indicate that the knowledge of behavior principles (1) is still low in homes and schools, (2) relatively high in medical stuffs, and (3) can be increased at least in nurse students.

Telehealth is an effective way of conducting functional assessments that can be used with families who live in remote areas. The current study’s goal was to evaluate the accuracy of contingency space analysis (CSA) applied to structured descriptive assessments (SDA) of parent-child interactions at identifying the function of problem behavior compared to an experimental functional analysis (FA). Four male children with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their parents participated. Assessments were conducted within participants’ homes with parents serving as interventionists with coaching from remote behavior therapists using videoconferencing. The percentage of intervals with child problem behavior across motivating operation contexts was calculated for the SDA, and the conditional probability of various parent-delivered consequences given the presence and absence of problem behavior were calculated for the CSA. Percentage agreement for each descriptive assessment was calculated by taking the number of agreements with functions identified by the FA divided by the number of agreements plus errors of omission. Agreement with the FA was 67% and 83% for the SDA and CSA, respectively. CSA coding of telehealth videos may be an efficient technique of remotely identifying potential functions of children’s problem behavior when implementing an experimental FA might not be an option.