Association for Behavior Analysis International

As many as eight percent of young children are highly aggressive, oppositional, impulsive, inattentive and difficult to parent or teach. Long-term studies show that such children are at high risk for developing conduct disorders that lead to school drop-out, delinquency, violence, and substance abuse. Because conduct disorders are the most expensive mental health disorder in this country, this is a problem of public health importance. Identifying these high risk children as early as possible in schools and helping teachers and parents work together to promote their social competence and self-regulation skills and reduce their aggression is key to preventing the development of conduct disorders. Dr. Carolyn Webster-Stratton will present an overview of her evidence-based prevention and treatment programs for teachers, parents and children including a review of research outcomes and video examples of the different programs.

Psychologists

Every marriage is its own little economy, a business of two with a finite number of resources that need to be allocated efficiently. In their book, Spousonomics, authors Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson apply bedrock economic principles to some of the most common conflicts in domestic life. Some examples include: Division of Labor (Or, Why You Should Do the Dishes): Exposing the fallacy of the 50/50 marriage split. Some people are better at, say, making school lunches, while others panic at the sight of a vacuum cleaner. Here’s a tip: Do what you’re “relatively” good at and “trade” the rest. Incentives (Or, Getting Your Spouse to Do What You Want): How getting your spouse to finally pay the bills on time is simply a matter of finding the right incentive. Trade-offs (Or, The Art of Getting Over It): The simple beauty of the cost-benefit analysis. Let’s break down that four-day trip to Cabo with your friends. Costs: A grumpy wife, $700 airfare, kids that miss you. Benefits: a savage tan, enough Don Julio to inflict permanent damage, uninterrupted sleep. Verdict? Supply and Demand (Or, How to Have More Sex): Talking your sex life to death, waiting until the kids are asleep and you’re both catatonic, not admitting that lingerie turns you on—all bad habits that raise costs and lower demand. The key to keeping your sex life hot is keeping it affordable.

The lecture will target a general audience and will specifically focus on translating concepts from behavior economics to areas of concern for everyday living and clinical practice. Specifically, clinicians will become familiar with the relevance of behavior economic concepts to interpersonal and family relationships. This introduction will provide an empirically based conceptual framework for clinicians to expand their practice.

• Recognize the relevance of behavior economic concepts to interpersonal and family relationships.

Behavior typically becomes more variable in the face of a drop in the value of a motivating outcome, such as food. Dr. Blaisdell will review converging lines of evidence for this relationship from studies in his lab. He will describe the negative relationship between found between the signaled probability of food and variability in behavior. This relationship is quite general: Observed in both temporal and spatial behavioral dimensions, in both rats and pigeons, and in both the operant chamber and in open-field settings. Behavioral variability is also greater under conditions involving smaller or delayed food rewards compared to larger or immediate rewards. Dr. Blaisdell will describe some manipulations of the response-outcome contingency that reveal interesting relationships between Pavlovian and instrumental processes. These data support a general conclusion that signaled outcome value is an important determinant of behavioral variability in a wide variety of conditioned behaviors.

basic researchers

Our understanding of the neural structures involved in processing reward-related information has its foundations on a rich animal literature and classical theories of learning. More recently, advances in methodological approaches, particularly neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have allowed for the extension of these investigations to the human brain and helped delineate a basic reward circuit in humans. Central to this circuit is the role of cortico-striatum loops connecting regions involved in cognitive control (prefrontal cortex) and motivational processes (striatum). In this talk, we will discuss how the human brain learns about rewards and creates reward representations, via conditioned reinforcers, that can influence behavior. Additionally, we will highlight how cognitive strategies can effectively control neural responses to reward elicited by conditioned reinforcers (e.g., cue paired with a drug reinforcer), and its potential application of helping attenuate maladaptive decision-making (e.g., drug seeking behaviors).

Practitioners and researchers who are interested in mechanisms controlling behavior; those interested in brain and behavior relations

• Recognize what fMRI findings have to offer the science of ABA.
• Idenitfy how the human brain learns about rewards and creates reward representations, via conditioned reinforcers, and how that can influence behavior

Neuroimaging techniques have led to significant advances in our understanding of the neurobiology of drug-taking and the treatment of drug addiction in humans. The presentation by Dr. Leonard Howell describes the utility of neuroimaging toward understanding the neurobiological basis of drug taking, and documents the close concordance that can be achieved among neuroimaging, neurochemical and behavioral endpoints. The study of drug interactions with dopamine and serotonin transporters in vivo has identified pharmacological mechanisms of action associated with the abuse liability of stimulants. Neuroimaging has identified the extended limbic system, including the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate, as important neuronal circuitry that underlies drug taking. The ability to conduct within-subject, longitudinal assessments of brain chemistry and neuronal function has enhanced our efforts to document long-term changes in dopamine D2 receptors, monoamine transporters, and prefrontal metabolism due to chronic drug exposure. Dysregulation of dopamine function and brain metabolic changes in areas involved in reward circuitry has been linked to drug-taking behavior, cognitive impairment and treatment response. Experimental designs employing neuroimaging should consider well-documented determinants of drug taking, including pharmacokinetic considerations, subject history and environmental variables. These integrative approaches should have important implications for understanding drug-taking behavior and the treatment of drug addiction.

We don't want this talk to be considered for C.E. credit, but there's no way to by-pass these fields. Please disregard anything to do with CEUs.

A Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) had previously been taught to use English count words ("one" through "sih" [six]) to label sets of one to six individual items (Pepperberg, 1994). He had also been taught to use the same count words to label the Arabic numerals 1 through 6. Without training, he inferred the relationship between the Arabic numerals and the sets of objects (Pepperberg, 2006b). In the present study, he was then trained to label vocally the Arabic numerals 7 and 8 ("sih-none," "eight," respectively) and to order these Arabic numerals with respect to the numeral 6. He subsequently inferred the ordinality of 7 and 8 with respect to the smaller numerals and he inferred use of the appropriate label for the cardinal values of seven and eight items. These data suggest that he constructed the cardinal meanings of "seven" ("sih-none") and "eight" from his knowledge of the cardinal meanings of one through six, together with the place of "seven" ("sih-none") and "eight" in the ordered count list.