Association for Behavior Analysis International

Earth went from the beginning of human history until the 1800s A.D. before its population reached one billion. A mere 200 years later the world population has expanded to over 6 billion. As the global human population explodes to nearly 9 billion by 2050, the social and environmental impact will be vastand by some predictions, dire. What does this have to do with us? One common trait shared by each of the 9 billion people is that they will behave. They will act upon the world and change it, and also be changed by their actions. Who better to help understand and influence that change than behavior analysts? Our robust science, founded on basic principles and equipped with the knowledge of how to predict and control behavior, is critical in addressing the contingencies that operate in relationships, organizations, communities, societies, and in the world. Our findings and influence are already evident in remarkably varied and diverse domains across the globe and this conference will accentuate that considerable work.

The law of effect has been a fundamental principle of behaviour analysis since 1898, but is it true and is it helpful? I will review a series of recent results from animals that question this law, and suggest an alternative conception that may understand some troubling results, and may imply some changes in the application of behaviour analysis.

Skinners status is widely acknowledged as experimenter, engineer, and theorist. Equally important is his role as a visionary. He analyzed what behavioral science implied for ethical issues and raised concerns about social practices. In the explicit tradition of utopian thinkers, he dramatized these issues and concerns in his utopian novel, Walden II. This presentation presents a synopsis of these issues and concerns, linking their relevance to contemporary problems and quoting from his book in Skinners own voice.

A public health approach to parenting intervention offers communities an increasingly evidence-based suite of interventions for strengthening parenting skills at a whole of population level. As experience in the practical implementation of such a strategy develops, some of the special challenges begin to emerge. These include how to evaluate such whole of population interventions, dealing with ethnic diversity, managing program fidelity and program drift, and how to secure political and multiagency support. This presentation uses the experience of the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program to review the evidence that underpins the public health approach and discusses a range of professional issues that may influence the effectiveness of the approach.

Deficits in interpersonal or social competency is a core feature of children with autism. Interpersonal competency has been defined as specific, identifiable skills that form the basis of social interactions, such as the contextually appropriate application of motor, cognitive, and affective behaviors. The literature is replete with various applications of ABA-oriented social skills programs. However, many programs are limited to acquisition of isolated social behaviors, or small changes in such, without pervasive generalization and maintenance effects. As well, only recently have we started to address deficits in perspective taking and the autistic childs predictions and responses to how others behave in social contexts. This presentation will focus on interventions that have been empirically verified, and have shown the most promise in terms of generalization and maintenance of interpersonal competency for children with autism. These interventions focus on such behaviors as greetings, social initiation, perspective taking, and verbal interactions. Procedures to be discussed will include Naturalistic Teaching Strategies, Incidental Teaching, Video Modeling, and Photo Scheduling. The efficacy of these types of interventions for interpersonal competency will be discussed.

Applied behavior analysiss (ABA) pragmatic, natural science approach to discovering environmental variables that reliably influence socially significant behavior and to developing a technology that takes practical advantage of those discoveries offers humankind our best hope for solving many of our problems. Unfortunately, ABA has had limited impact on society. Using public education as the exemplar, this presentation will explore the question, If ABA is so wonderful, why dont we (society) make greater use of it? Improving the effectiveness of education is one of societys most important problems, and for more than four decades applied behavior analysis has provided powerful demonstrations of how it can promote learning in the classroom. In spite of this evidence, behavior analysis is, at best, a bit player in efforts to reform education. Dr. Heward will identify a dozen reasons why ABA is ideally suited to help improve education, review a somewhat longer list of reasons that work against the widespread adoption of behavioral approaches in education, and suggest some actions that practitioners and researchers can take to enhance and further ABAs contributions to effective education.

Psychology 106 (Psychology applied to daily living: Dealing with friends, alcohol, and sex) and its supporting structure are the product of analyzing literature on AIDS prevention, especially the work of Kelly and his associates (e.g., Kelly, 1995a, 1995b) and the Fishers (e.g. Fisher et al., 1996), and several years of our own research (Brigham, Gilbert, Donahoe, Thomas, & Zemke, 2002; Horn & Brigham, 1996; Lindemann, Brigham, Harbke, and Alexander, 2005). The resulting program has several critical features worth noting. First, as a graded one-credit course offered as an optional component of Introductory Psychology, it has both academic and experiential content. Second, the course involves small sections of approximately 20 students with instruction based on discussion and exercises with minimal lecture. Third, students actively and systematically collect data on their own behavior and evaluate the information in relation to their own goals and values. Fourth, teams of two junior-senior-level undergraduate peer instructors trained in both the course content and instructional procedures teach the sections. Finally, information on HIV/AIDS is presented within the context of an integrated conceptual framework for personal and sexual decision-making that also covers other STIs, sexual assault, and related issues. The features of the program have evolved as a function of experimental and qualitative research and continue to be assessed each time the class is taught. The results of several experiments assessing the effectiveness of the program show it reduces student high-risk sexual behavior, reduces student alcohol consumption and increases the numbers of students practicing abstinence. The American Association of Colleges and Universities has recognized the course as a model AIDS education and prevention program. Also, the course is currently taught at several other universities across the United States and we are working to introduce it at universities in South Africa.

Dementia is the largest single contributor to the cost of care in nursing homes today, and the prevalence of dementia continues to increase at a much greater rate than both the total population and the older population. Dementia is associated with a decline in reasoning, memory, and other cognitive functioning that often results in challenging or disruptive behaviors such as agitation, aggression, repetitive questioning, and wandering. This decline also impairs the ability of the person to carry out many activities of daily living. The physical environment and well-meaning caregivers can exacerbate these behavioral excesses and deficits. Nursing home staff often ignores independent behaviors, but respond to dependent behaviors with enabling responses. This presentation will describe a range of environmental redesign and staff training procedures that have been demonstrated to help people with dementia engage in life and re-acquire a number of daily living.