Association for Behavior Analysis International

According to conventional histories of psychiatry, the arrival of Thorazine in asylum medicine in 1955 kicked off a "psychopharmacological revolution." Yet, since 1955, the disability rate due to mental illness in the United States has risen more than six-fold. Moreover, this epidemic of disabling mental illness has accelerated since 1987, when Prozac, the first of the "second-generation" drugs arrived on the market. A review of the long-term outcomes literature for psychiatric medications reveals why this is so. The "medical model" paradigm of care, which emphasizes continual use of psychiatric medications, is a failed paradigm, and needs to be dramatically rethought.

Bullying among children and youth is an issue of increasing concern to educators, practitioners, health care professionals, policy makers, parents and others. In this session, Dr. Snyder will present data on the nature and prevalence of bullying among children and youth and will describe research-based efforts to prevent and reduce bullying in schools. Using recent published data, as well as findings from the national database for the Olweus Bullying Questionnaire (containing over 500,000 surveys from schoolchildren in grades 3-12), Dr. Snyder will describe the prevalence of bullying among children and note age and gender differences in its occurrence. She also will highlight data describing children's feelings and attitudes about bullying and their views about how peers and teachers react to bullying. Finally, Dr. Snyder will describe the internationally recognized Olweus Bullying Prevention Program and describe its research basis.

Associative learning theory in psychology has traditionally posited that animals and humans learn to associate between observed events in order to predict future outcomes and optimize control. However, in many cases the task to be learned has more structure than just the co-occurrence of stimuli. Even if its components are observed, this structure is latent and the animal needs to extract it from its experience via inference. In this talk I will present work in which we have begun to explore how animals and humans learn latent structures and use these to improve reinforcement learning.

This presentation will highlight the problems found by animal welfare professionals working in animal shelter situations when faced with identification of potential aggression and other behavior requiring treatment, or faced with arranging adoptions that are stable and benefit both the animal and its new owner. Following the introduction of the problems, Dr. Weiss will outline two programs she's developed that are in use by the ASPCA and available to animal shelters across the country-the ASPCA's SAFER (Safety Assessment For Evaluating Rehoming) canine aggression assessment tool, and the ASPCA's Meet Your Match, which includes Canine-ality, Puppy-ality and Feline-ality and matches dogs, puppies and cats to pet parents based on science rather than speculation. Shelters using the ASPCA's Meet Your Match report reduced return rates, better customer service and increased adoptions; and the use of this science-based methodology also helps them to better highlight the animals they have available for adoption.

The cognitive revolution of the 1950s was allegedly necessary because behaviorist methodologies would never be sufficient to explain “real thinking,” the kind that humans do. To explain real thinking, the argument went, we need to ascribe representations of the environment, which are transformed by rule-governed computational processes. Now, in the face of challenges to computationalism and representationalism from proponents of dynamical modeling, cognitive scientists have begun repeating the very same arguments: although dynamical models may be fine for explaining certain things (like motor control), they can never explain real thinking. In this talk, I face this challenge directly and show, with a series of examples, that dynamical models can explain real, representation-hungry thinking, and they do so without invoking mental representations.

Theoretical analyses of the development of numerical representations suggest that playing linear number board games, akin to Chutes and Ladders, should enhance young children's numerical knowledge. Consistent with this prediction, playing such a game for roughly 1 hour increases low-income, urban preschoolers' proficiency on a diverse set of numerical tasks: numerical magnitude comparison, number line estimation, counting, and numeral identification. The gains remain present 9 weeks later and are equally strong for African-American and Caucasian children. Playing an identical game, except for the squares varying in color rather than number (akin to Candy Land), does not improve performance on any measure. Moreover, preschoolers' amount of home experience playing number board games is positively correlated with their numerical knowledge, whereas their experience playing card games and video games is not. Consistent with the hypothesis that children are acquiring a mental number line, playing linear board games leads to greater learning than playing circular games. Thus, playing linear, numerical board games with children from low-income backgrounds appears to increase their numerical knowledge and helps them start school on a more equal footing with classmate from more affluent backgrounds.

Humans and laboratory rats alike depend upon social interactions not only for reproduction, but also for healthy mental and physical development. Dr. Neisewander's laboratory has investigated how social interactions can have both positive and negative influences on drug abuse-related behaviors in rats. They have found that first time experience with cocaine or nicotine is more rewarding in adolescent rats when experienced with another rat than when experienced alone. Also when adolescent rats experience nicotine for the first time, they exhibit an increase in plasma corticosterone if they are alone but not if they are with another rat. Because corticosterone levels normally increase in response to stress, the results suggest that social interaction during initial drug experience may counter the stressful effects of the drug, thereby increasing reward strength and perhaps increasing vulnerability to drug abuse. In contrast, social interaction introduced as part of environmental enrichment after a drug habit has been established in rats attenuates drug-seeking behavior as well as withdrawal-induced elevations of corticosterone and brain activation that occurs upon exposure to drug-associated stimuli. The implications of these findings with regard to understanding drug dependence and the development of treatments for substance abuse will be discussed.