Association for Behavior Analysis International

Behavior analysts who are Board Certified now have Guidelines for Responsible Conduct that clearly define our ethical responsibilities to our clients, students, colleagues, society, and to the field of behavior analysis itself.Remaining to be codified, however, are a set of values statements that represent the best our field has to offer those individuals we serve. Often, the services we provide involve life-saving behavioral procedures. Because we are now in constant competition with other professions who work hard to sell their "values" (almost in lieu of an effective technology of behavior change), I believe it is critical that we address our own values. In a recent survey of leaders in ABA we found that the question, "What values are important for our field?" yielded a diverse range of responses from "empiricism" to "logic" to "induction" and "save the world through BF Skinner" none of which are likely to appeal to consumers.In this presentation I will attempt to offer some guidelines for the development of a set of values statements for behavior analysis that will appeal to advocates and consumers in autism, education, rehabilitation, and community treatment.

Failures of self-control and social cooperation may both be described in terms of hyperbolic discounting: failures of self-control as due to discounting by delay of reinforcement -- failures of social cooperation as due to discounting by social distance. Moreover, both self-control and social cooperation may be seen as choice of distributed rewards over individual rewards: self-control as choice of rewards distributed in time -- social cooperation as choice of rewards distributed over social space. An experiment is described in which reinforcement history and reward magnitudes were balanced; under these conditions normal people learned self-control but not social cooperation. It is speculated that addicts behave towards their own future selves as normal people behave towards other people (relatively distant from them on a social scale). That is, for an addict, the problem of self-control is the same as the (usually much more difficult) problem of social cooperation.

Mindfulness is often described as paying attention to present-moment experience in a nonjudgmental or accepting way. It originates in Eastern spiritual traditions and has been adapted in a variety of ways for inclusion in several interventions that are now widely available in mental health settings. These interventions include acceptance and commitment therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, and mindfulness-based stress reduction, among others. Although empirical support for these interventions is increasing rapidly, the assessment of mindfulness has received much less attention. Assessing mindfulness is critically important for understanding its relationships with other psychological variables and for investigating the processes by which mindfulness training leads to desirable outcomes. To date, most attempts to assess mindfulness use self-report methods. This talk will review the available mindfulness questionnaires and describe empirical studies of these instruments that examine components of mindfulness and their relationships to variables important to mental health. Implications for teaching mindfulness skills and for exploring the processes by which mindfulness training achieves beneficial effects will be discussed.

In this presentation, Dr. Kameenui, Commissioner for the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER), will discuss the statutory mission and requirements of the NCSER, its operation in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), and its current activities. He will also explore the status and place of special education research in educational research writ large, and comment on the appropriate theoretical, historical, and conceptual evidentiary framework for special education research. Finally, he will describe a set of organizing principles for explicating, enhancing, and expanding special education research in the context of current federal and state initiatives, and discuss research topics that are of current importance to NCSER and IES.

The purpose of this session will be to describe how behavior analytic principles are being applied to the organizational implementation of school-wide behavior support practices and systems. Emphasis will be on a blueprint for establishing district/state level leadership teams and directing the development of action plans that emphasize building implementation capacity for coordination, coaching/facilitation, training, and evaluation. Efforts to establish durable use and controlled expansion of behavior analytic principles and practices will be summarized.

Recent research has found marked individual differences in patterns of rhesus monkey biobehavioral development throughout the life span. Approximately 20% of monkeys growing up in naturalistic settings consistently display unusually fearful and anxious-like behavioral reactions to novel, mildly stressful social situations throughout development; another 5-10% are likely to exhibit impulsive and/or inappropriately aggressive responses under similar circumstances. These distinctive behavioral patterns and their biological correlates appear early in life and remain remarkably stable from infancy to adulthood. Both genetic and experiential mechanisms are implicated not only in the expression of these patterns but also in their transmission across successive generations of monkeys. For example, a specific polymorphism in the serotonin transporter gene is associated with deficits in infant neurobehavioral functioning and in juvenile and adolescent control of aggression and serotonin metabolism in monkeys who experienced insecure early attachments but not in monkeys who developed secure attachment relationships with their mothers during infancy (maternal buffering). Moreover, because the attachment style of a monkey mother is typically copied by her daughters when they grow up and become mothers themselves, similar buffering is likely to occur for the next generation of infants carrying that specific polymorphism.

In 1990, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay entitled The End of History? By that title, he raised the question of whether the final form of government had evolved, namely, Western liberal democracy. Although not as widely agreed upon, an argument can be made that our understanding of the fundamental processes that shape behavior is also approaching its final form. Our understanding of the reinforcement process and of its implications for stimulus control is quite advanced at the behavioral level of analysis. We have identified the conditions required for reinforcement and the processes that occur during stimulus discrimination and generalization. What remains for experimental analysis is an understanding of the biological processes that underlie these behavioral findings, but these are tasks for neuroscience not behavior analysis. Of course, many important unresolved problems remainfor example, reconciling the relations observed between molar-defined variables (reinforcement rate and response rate) with the molecular accounts advocated by Skinner. However, these problems will likely be addressed through interpretation rather than experimental analysis. Much more demanding tasks remain such as understanding complex human behavior, most notably verbal behavior. But these too are primarily subjects for interpretation, not experimental analysis. If it is indeed the end of the experimental analysis of behavior, it is not because we have failed but because we have succeeded. It is now time to move on to other matters whose understanding is informed by the fruits of the experimental analysis of behavior.

Everywhere you look nowadays all kinds of scientists and psychologists are prominently represented in the media, either writing books for the general public, articles in popular magazines, and op-ed pieces in major newspapers, or their research is featured in news articles. Except for behavior analysts. With rare exceptions behavior analysts are simply not part of the public debate about human behavior, despite the fact that behavior analysis represents essentially the only approach that can offer ultimate explanations of adaptive behavior based on decades of sound experimental research. In fact, many psychologists, scientists and science writers often take pot shots at behaviorism. In 1974, in the Introduction to About Behaviorism, Skinner wrote, Unfortunately, very little is known about this analysis outside the field. Its most active investigators seldom make any effort to explain themselves to nonspecialists. As a result, few people are familiar with the scientific underpinnings of the most cogent statement of the behavioristic position. Thirty years later, not much has changed. In this address, I take behavior analysts to task for our almost total lack of representation in both scientific and popular discussions of behavior and suggest that we begin to take steps to redress this situation. These include conducting basic research on topics that can be made interesting to the educated public; (re) establishing a public or media relations office within the Association for Behavior Analysis and/or the regional associations; writing articles, commentaries, book reviews, and letters to the editors in popular journals, magazines and newspapers; and writing books for the popular press. No behavior analysts have stepped up to fill the public relations void left when Skinner died, and, maybe not coincidentally, behaviorism, at least in the scientific and public perception, seems to have died with him. In this era of increasingly popular evolutionary and neurological explanations of human adaptive behavior, it is time to reassert our expertise.

The experimental analysis of human behavior presents a range of methodological and substantive problems focusing upon research settings that usually require trade-offs between ecological richness and precision of environmental control. An approach to the study of more complete repertoires of behavior and the methodological rationale for combining the conceptual framework of experimental analysis with the naturalistic goals of ethological observation can be seen to have originated with the first JEAB monograph by J.D. Findley in 1962. The procedural approach involved primates in preparation for spaceflight experiments living continuously in research chambers and obtaining all their sustenance as components of a scheduled program. Extensions to human studies followed the animal pretest flights of NASAs Project Mercury and the commitment to a human presence in extraterrestrial environments. Over the past several decades, a range of investigative initiatives including the experimental analysis of motivational processes, work productivity, and drug-behavior interactions, among others have used the continuously programmed environment approach as a point of departure. Studies of confined microsocieties in preparation for long-duration exploration spaceflight missions beyond Earth orbit present new challenges and opportunities for the experimental analysis of human behavior.

Extinction is the most direct method for reducing the frequency of behavior. Nevertheless, the procedure is prone to misapplication, may produce undesirable effects, and can be difficult to implement. This presentation will consider some limitations associated with the use of extinction and will suggest alternative strategies.