Association for Behavior Analysis International

Being able to understand, verbalize, and distinguish felt experiences is a key component of psychological interventions. Until recently, there has been an absence of empirical research on the particular value of emotion differentiation on healthy and unhealthy outcomes. Dr. Kashdan will review research in clinical, social, and health psychology that offers insights into the transdiagnostic adaptive value of putting feelings into words. The ability to precisely describe and differentiate emotions has been recently shown to alter the association between negative emotions and emotion regulation difficulties as varied as binge drinking, aggression, neural reactivity to rejection, self-injurious behavior, and the severity of anxiety and depressive disorders. These findings shed light on how negative emotions and stressful experiences can be transformed by how people label and distinguish what they are feeling. Implications for the study of emotions and emotion regulation, and psychological treatment will be discussed.

Psychologists and behavior analysts.

Behavior analysts are frequently involved when a student's behavior becomes so severe that in-depth analysis and understanding are needed. However, there is considerably more research to guide the analysis for behavior problems than for academic problems. This presentation will provide a framework to analyze difficulties in reading at the small-group (tier 2) and individual (tier 3) levels. Data will be presented from three studies (n ~200 to 600) to demonstrate that targeting the academic intervention based on the function of the behavior was more effective at tier 2 than using a general evidence-based intervention. Moreover, data from 15 students with the most severe reading problems will be provided to support the framework at tier 3.

Where is the momentum of history taking us? What can demographic, economic, technological, environmental, and cultural trends tell us about our possible futures? What role might the science and practice of behavior analysis play in shaping that future? In this talk, Dr. Robert Gilman will address these questions from his perspective as a former astrophysicist who has spent the past 36 years exploring the possibilities for 21st century sustainable cultures. Central to this perspective is the idea that humanity is now involved in a cultural transformation as profound as the shift out of hunting and gathering and into agriculture and cities that happened roughly 5,000-10,000 years ago. The gracefulness of this transition depends on human behavior. Behavior analysts are uniquely equipped to steer global culture toward a future that is necessarily characterized by sustainability if they situate their science and practice in the context of a whole-systems understanding of our rapidly changing societal and natural environment. This talk is designed to provide that broad context, outlining important characteristics of a more sustainable future that can be promoted by all behavior analysts, regardless of whether their work explicitly focuses on issues of sustainability.

The training of police and military working dogs is rooted in 19th Century Europe. Dog breeds that originated as pastoral herding animals in the Old World, and in an old century, have become instruments of civil policing and military power in a global 21st Century community stitched together by satellites, airliners, and computers. The methods by which working dogs were trained 100 years ago reflected traditional coercive notions of education and behavioral management. It was taken as a given that a dog should be physically forced to perform, and that much of its performance could and should be motivated by discomfort- and stress-avoidance. In this form, working dog training developed for perhaps 75 years, influenced chiefly by European ethology, and relatively isolated from American psychology and behaviorism. In the late 20th Century, powerful methodologies founded in the obscure field of exotic animal training began to penetrate, first into dog obedience training and companion dog behavioral management, then into the methods used by participants in international working dog competitions such as IPO (International Prufungsordnung). However, until recently police and military working dog training has not reflected this influence. It is only in the past 15 years that "operant methodologies" have been integrated into the field, with consequences that are still unfolding today.

Those interested in learning about dog training for military working dogs and how this training has been impacted by broader changes taking place in applied animal behavior.

Visual Phonics is a tool that uses a combination of visual, tactile, kinesthetic, and auditory feedback to facilitate the development of phonemic awareness, reading, spelling, and speech production skills. The system consists of 45 hand movements and written symbols, which represent each phoneme and relate to how a sound is produced. Visual Phonics helps deaf, hard of hearing, hearing, and special needs individuals "see" or conceptualize the English sound system and relate it to print. This presentation summarizes the results from three studies collected in three states with various age groups of children. It demonstrates that given instruction from various phonics-based reading curricula supplemented by Visual Phonics, pre-school, kindergarten, and first-grade students who were d/Deaf or hard of hearing could demonstrate improvements in beginning reading skills and the acquired skills could be sustained after intervention. Furthermore, the acquisition of beginning reading skills did not appear to be related to degree of hearing loss. Implications for the use of Visual Phonics for other populations of students in reading, spelling, and speech production are provided.

Psychologists, behavior analysts, practitioners, and graduate students.

Habituation is a fundamental form of learning highly conserved throughout phylogeny and poorly understood mechanistically. In the years that Dr. Catharine Rankin's lab has studied habituation in C. elegans, they have developed an understanding of habituation and two neural circuits underlying behaviors that habituate. They have studies both associative and nonassociative aspects of habituation as well as both short- and long-term memory. They are now focusing on the genes underlying this learning in two different, but overlapping neural circuits using a novel high-throughput behavioral analysis system, the multi-worm tracker. The first response is startle response habituation to a mechanosensory tap to the substrate holding the worm; this response is mediated by five sensory neurons. The second is habituation of a withdrawal response following optogenetic activation of a pair of polymodal nociceptors (the ASH neurons) in the head of the worm. Through analyses of these two response systems, they have found that habituation is not a single phenomenon, but is made up of the integration of different subcomponents that show different patterns/kinetics of habituation and sensitization. The integration of these components leads to behavioral outcomes that are different depending on the nature of stimulation, and are highly adaptive for the worm.

Anyone who wants to understand or study the biological mechanisms underlying behavior.

This session is based on the book, 25 Biggest Mistakes Teachers Make and How to Avoid Them. The premise of the book is that teachers can avoid making mistakes by being made aware of the mistakes of others. In spite of teachers' best intentions and research encouraging best practices, teachers all over the world make mistakes when trying to control student behavior. The need for discipline and control in classrooms is universal. How teachers respond to that need, apparently, also is universal--as evidenced by translation of the book into several languages. Teachers have power--power that can be abused or used constructively. This session will examine what happens when teacher power runs rampant and anger and frustration reigns; also, the consequent effects of the teachers' mistreatment of students and why it happens. Academic trauma, defined as a result of a significant emotional event that is caused by an aversive academic experience usually involving a teacher, will be explored. The motives of teachers, who admitted to mistreating students, will be discussed to find out why they did what they did, possible psychosocial student outcomes, and recommendations for avoiding mistakes.

Highlighting the critical role of early diagnosis and intervention in attenuating the symptoms of autism, data will be presented on early diagnostic indicators obtained through eye-tracking-based behavioral assays that quantify social disabilities. Results generate "growth charts" of normative social engagement, and deviations from the norm are taken as early indicators of risk. The ultimate goal of this effort is to develop objectified and quantified tools for the detection of autism in infancy, tools that might be deployed in primary care and pediatricians’ offices. Both the science and the translational efforts described in this presentation set up a new challenge to ABA technologies. The natural platform for social and communication brain development in infants and toddlers is reciprocal interaction between children and their caregivers. In autism, this learning environment represents the instantiation of genetic vulnerabilities into atypical social and communication experiences, likely due to children’s attenuated social orienting and engagement behavior. The derailment of reciprocal social engagement appears to lead to the emergence of autism symptoms in the second year of life. How can we alter this process, within the confines of naturalistic mother-child social engagement, defines new challenges to ABA, indeed a new frontier.

Psychologists, behavior analysts, practitioners, and graduate students.