Association for Behavior Analysis International

While music is integrated into almost all facets of life (e.g., adults soothe infants with song and teach children nursery rhymes as a mechanism to learn simple tasks and facts, jingles help transfer positive emotional effects to businesses and products, and a single melody may evoke powerful memories), there is little behavior analytic research exploring music as a behavior change mechanism or its effects on operant and respondent conditioning or derived responding. This review summarizes 21 studies published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) from 1968 to 2019 in which music is part of the independent or dependent variable. We further classified music within the four-term contingency: motivating operation (MO), antecedent, behavior, and consequence. The number of articles with music in the title, abstract, and/or keywords has increased in the past decade, indicating an acceleration of interest in this area. We suggest that music merits further attention by behavior analysts and that the JABA might appropriate outlet for this line of work.

It’s widely known that humans can learn through verbal behavior. Since the first Skinner’s conceptualization of verbal behavior, great number of studies had been conducted to analyze it in experimental settings. However, efforts still need to be made to fully understand how verbal behavior works in natural settings. This study tries to make a little step in that direction. Our purpose is to analyze verbal interaction patterns between client and clinician during psychological treatment. Thus, 16 sessions of psychological treatment were recorded. The client was an adult diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder; the clinician was a psychologist trained in behavior therapy. A coding system based on functional properties of verbal stimuli was used. Two trained observers coded the verbal behavior independently (k= 0.71-0.86). Using descriptive statistics of the data, we found that the frequency per hour of generalized discriminative stimuli (e.g. how are you feeling today?) diminished trough the treatment; or that instructions’ frequency increased after the fourth session. Sequential analysis allowed us to find positive correlations between client’s pro-therapeutic verbalizations (e.g. achievement or wellbeing verbalizations) and clinician’s reinforcement of this verbalizations. These results are useful to analyze the behavioral change processes that are set up during psychological treatment.

Crack use has become a severe health problem in Brazil, the country being reported among the largest crack markets in the world. Located in downtown São Paulo (Brazil most populated city) Crackland emerges as a public space where thousands of crack users living under extremely vulnerable conditions gather to consume crack openly in the streets. In this pilot study we evaluated the feasibility of incorporating Contingency Management (CM) to a public ambulatory treatment located in the heart of crackland to treat currently homeless crack users. Methods: After up to 6-month of inpatient treatment a total of eight participants received 12 weeks of housing, food and ambulatory treatment (control condition) and 12 participants received 12 weeks of housing, food, ambulatory treatment and vouchers contingent to cocaine abstinence (experimental condition). All treatment procedures were conducted by treatment staff. Results: Treatment staff found CM easy to understand, easy to apply and found that CM helped patients maintain abstinence. All participants found CM easy to understand, liked receiving CM and believed it helped them during treatment. Preliminary findings are also presented. Conclusion: CM was well assimilated by treatment staff and participants suggesting the feasibility of incorporating CM in public treatments for crack use disorders.

Caregivers of people with neurodevelopmental disabilities (NDDs) may experience greater psychological distress than other caregivers. Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) has been shown to increase psychological flexibility and decrease psychological distress for these caregivers. Limited research has measured a core component of ACT (committed actions; CAs), which could be crucial in understanding how ACT can improve life satisfaction. We asked caregivers (N=11) to self-monitor their frequency of CAs (related to their values) and send their weekly results one week before and four weeks after a group-based ACT-workshop (Lunsky et al., 2018). Caregivers also completed standard psychological measures of depression, anxiety, general stress, parenting stress, and values and CAs measures. Post-ACT, 10 of 11 caregivers demonstrated increases in CAs and the group average increased from 0 in baseline to 3.4 CAs per week. All self-report data indicated therapeutic trends, with scores on parenting stress general stress, and depression approaching statistical significance. One-month follow-up data is currently being analyzed. Additional workshops will be conducted to increase statistical power. Results may help inform how self-monitoring CAs impacts the frequency of CAs in relation to measures of psychological distress, CAs, and values.

Research shows that restricting/ denying access to items/activities often trigger disruptive behaviors for children with low frustration tolerance (Mace et al., 2011). Teaching tolerance to access restrictions requires time and resources that may not be available to all clinics and families, reflecting a significant need for briefer treatments. Delay and denial (DnD) tolerance training involving functional communication training (FCT) has been found to be effective in reducing disruptive behaviors in children with developmental disabilities. Research on the effectiveness of this treatment in outpatient clinics with typically developing children is limited. The current study utilized a brief (8 session) DnD tolerance treatment protocol with a typically developing child (4 yrs) in an outpatient clinic. Results revealed a significant reduction in disruptive behaviors and an increase in appropriate requesting and wait time. The current study extended the literature by demonstrating that the procedures utilized in previous studies can be modified to be more feasible for use in an outpatient clinic that serves an underrepresented population. Future research should focus on integrating formal preference assessments and developing relapse prevention plans that include other important settings of the child.

Historically, consultation training has emphasized acceptance of the consultee's belief system. In fact, consultees often have beliefs based on disproven or unproven information and ultimately cannot be providing best practices for the client. Rather than accepting their perspective, this presentation proposes that, in order to provide evidence-based-services for the client, we must correct misinformation and and bring the consultee to an awareness of best practices. Communication methods that emphasize nonconfrontational and respectful strategies will be presented.

Promoting physical activity is a crucial public health priority. Interventions that use applied behavior analytic procedures (ABA) such as contingency management and self-management have shown promise for facilitating physical activity. However, additional research is needed to advance innovation, particularly with respect to interventions that work through indirect-acting contingencies. Among these innovative models of behavior intervention, Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) has received increased attention and empirical support. Previous research has provided evidence that ACT can increase exercise but previous ACT studies have generally used group designs, which makes it difficult to carefully consider the effects of the intervention at the level of the individual participant, the level at which ACT trainers and therapists work. The present study evaluated a bilingual, five-week, one-on-one ACT-based coaching program for increasing exercise in bilingual international university students. After receiving the ACT intervention, all four participants increased their average daily steps, frequency of gym visits, and duration of gym visits significantly and gains maintained after intervention was terminated. The results of this study suggest that an ACT-based bilingual coaching program of moderate duration may be effective for increasing exercise in bilingual university students.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is commonly used at the individual level to treat anxiety disorders, depression, and other common psychopathology. An emerging application of ACT is at the larger group, even entire community level. This is a promising extension of ACT work because it has the potential to affect change at a larger level than psychologists or behavior analysts can do when working with only one person at a time. Promising applications have included sheltering women from violence, slowing the spread of the Ebola virus, and preventing gang violence in the country of Sierra Leone. At a broader scale, the Prosocial movement has attempted to combine ACT with principles form cultural anthropology to effect change across the globe. This poster will review such large-scale applications of ACT and make practical suggestions for how behavior analysts can make their own service delivery organizations more compassionate and values-oriented.