Association for Behavior Analysis International

An emerging convergence in the human sciences can guide the evolution of more caring societies. Biological and behavioral research has produced an integrated understanding of the biological and social conditions needed to ensure the successful development of children and adolescents. A growing body of experimental evidence has identified family, school, and community interventions that are capable of nurturing development from the prenatal period through adolescence. Increasingly research is turning to how these interventions can be widely and effectively implemented. At the same time, research in economics, political science, and sociology has delineated key features of the larger social context, including especially the recent evolution of corporate capitalism, that are more distal, but nonetheless critical influences on the wellbeing of young people. This converging understanding provides a framework for intentional efforts to evolve societies that have fewer psychological and behavioral disorders, less crime, less academic failure and much higher levels of prosociality. This session will focus on how we can organize the educational, nonprofit, for-profit, and governmental organizations to evolve cultural practices that achieve a society that sees to everyone’s wellbeing.

Psychologists, behavior analysts, graduate students, and anyone interested in

Don Baer was a master at viewing applied behavior analysis as a philosophy of life. This was exemplified in his writings, in the manner in which he mentored students, and in his discussion of its application to varied topics, some of which were well outside the common behavioral realm of investigation. His model has guided Dr. Judith R. Mathews’ clinical practice and opened her to looking beyond the strictly behavioral literature to learn from other disciplines. This paper will discuss practical applications of applied behavior analysis in the field of pediatrics. It will present unusual clinical cases, including, problems of attachment and parenting skills, and unique challenges in medical adherence, habit reversal, pain management, and feeding disorders. More recently, this curiosity for the intersection between ABA and other disciplines has led Dr. Mathews to investigate the field of public health, in terms of social determinants of health, community-based participatory research and global public health. In this context, applications of ABA in the field of public health will then be discussed. The paper will conclude with discussion of the difficulties that practitioners and public health providers face in conducting practical research and finally will propose ways to disseminate unique ideas in need of empirical validation.

ABA practitioners.

The quality of education is critical to producing knowledgeable citizens able to adapt to a changing world. Students’ education and cultural influences set the stage for their future professions, and as leaders or educators in an increasingly interconnected global community. By drawing upon their pioneering work in the area of education, panelists will provide comments regarding this theme of the Seminar on Leadership and Cultural Change. The seminar is designed to aid educational leaders to create new models of stewardship and open opportunities for innovation while adjusting to growing social upheaval, technological advances, and environmental concerns, as well as crises in the global economy, health, education, and environment. It will address how behavior analysis finds common ground with other sciences by investigating the behavior of leaders who influence organizations and society.

Psychologists, behavior analysts, graduate students, and anyone interested in creating new models of education through behavior analysis.

R. Kevin Grigsby, MSW, DSW, is senior director of leadership and talent development at the Association of American Medical Colleges. He served as vice dean for faculty and administrative affairs from 2000–09 at Penn State College of Medicine in Hershey, PA, where he continues to hold an academic appointment as clinical professor of psychiatry. Dr. Grigsby’s clinical experience includes a history of program planning, implementation, and evaluation in the area of innovative home- and community-based health and mental health services. His clinical practice experience has been primarily in underserved rural and inner city areas and includes perinatal intervention with substance-abusing women, mental-health service delivery to children and adolescents in shelter care, provision of home-based services to parents and children with HIV-related illnesses, and the use of advanced telecommunications technology in health services delivery. During the past decade, the focus of Dr. Grigsby’s work shifted to organizational development in academic health centers including developing a future-oriented perspective in academic leaders and the alignment of resources with missions. Dr. Grigsby remains active in promoting effective interpersonal communication within academic health centers and in implementing alternative conflict resolution/management strategies at the department and institutional levels. The use of teams and other nontraditional organizational models in higher education settings is another area of scholarship. As an expert on the use of teams in academic health centers, Dr. Grigsby has presented at regional and national conferences and has consulted with a number of academic health centers and professional organizations. He and his colleagues published an account of the use of teams to unify the clinical, academic, and research enterprises in an academic health center. This approach was instrumental in breaking down barriers that typically separate academic departments and resulted in reducing traditional barriers between employees and management, promoting faculty and staff participation in decision-making processes, and solving organizational problems that seemed to be intractable in the past. At the AAMC, he and his team offer programs to improve organizational and leadership performance at medical schools and academic medical centers, address the needs of women and underrepresented minorities at academic medical centers, and link individual professional development to improved organizational performance.

Intervention based in applied behavior analysis is widely recognized as a standard approach for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Following from research findings that intervention effects are more robust with younger children, the current best practice position is to provide intervention as soon as an ASD diagnosis can be made, and perhaps even earlier at the first reliable signs of characteristic deficits and excesses. Given that emerging technologies are aimed at identification of the disorder in infancy, the behavior analyst working with children with autism is likely to be faced with requests to work with infant children, a population that most behavior analysts are likely unfamiliar with. This symposium will address the following primary questions facing the practitioner considering working with infants and their caregivers: What is the current status of the evidence supporting early identification ASD-related deficits? How should the behavior analyst view the process of infant development, a concept most commonly described within other fields? What behavior analytic interventions have been investigated for this population, and for which infant and caregiver behaviors? And finally, what are some key ethical issues facing the behavior analyst working with infants and caregivers?

Behavior analysts working with young children, particularly those identified with or suspected of meeting criteria for autism spectrum disorder.

Behavioral intervention initiated early in childhood is associated with positive outcomes in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). As such, early identification of ASD-related behavioral deficits and excesses is viewed as central to achieving the best long-term intervention outcome, with the goal for treatment professionals being to intervene from the moment a diagnosis is confirmed. Current validated diagnostic procedures are based in observation of behavior and do not allow for diagnosis any earlier than 18 months of age. However, behavioral deficits indicative of high-risk status for ASD can be identified at 12 months of age, and technologies utilizing potential biomarkers in infants younger than 12 months are emerging. Therefore, ABA practitioners are likely to face demands to work with infant populations in the future. This presentation will provide a review of established and emerging technologies for identifying behavioral characteristics and biological associations of ASD, with a critical review of methods of identification for children younger than 12 months.

Previously defined by DSM IV-R as a "developmental disorder," DSM 5 now categorizes autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as a "Neurodevelopmental Disorder." Although evidence of specific neurological dysfunction is lacking, the developmental basis for behavioral development in autism is not. Behavioral Systems Theory provides a framework for understanding the development, prevention, and treatment of the constellations of behaviors that characterize ASD and explains how multiple factors, including neurological, historical, and current environmental ones lead to the emergence of patterns seen in individuals. This paper will outline the basic principles of development ininfancy as viewed from a behavior analytical perspective. It will focus on processes that produce typical development as well as the acquisition of the behavioral excesses and deficits characteristic of ASD. Among the key developmental concepts involved in understanding typical and atypical are skills learning, "hidden" skills and deficits, and behavioral cusps. Some of the crucial early hidden skills and deficits in infant development will be identified and the implications for early intensive behavioral intervention discussed.

In the U.S. alone, more than 1 million children are on record as having some form of autism or learning disability. This number continues to increase. Researchers have begun to recognize the enormous value of behavior analysis and early interventions in encouraging children to focus attention and shaping their early social behavior. Dr. Pelaez will present interventions with infants "at risk" of later developmental delays using specific forms of social reinforces like synchronized touch and cooing that increase infant's eye contact and gaze at mother's face. Infant massage provides the occasion for synchronized mother-infant interactions that include many of the social reinforcers outlined in this presentation. She will explain a procedure where a caregiver's vocal imitation and motherese speech increases infant vocalizations, smiles, and directs infant attention. In older infants, maternal social contingencies in the form of gestural expressions can work as signals (Sds) for the infant on when and how to respond toward an ambiguous object in the context of uncertainty--a phenomenon known as social referencing. In summary, these techniques developed for early interventions with infants have shown to be effective in improving their social behavior and explain early social learning phenomena as attachment, joint attention, and social referencing.

Applied behavior analysis has been demonstrated to be the most effective intervention for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Following recommendations for intervention for ASD as early as possible, means of identifying infants at risk for ASD are emerging. For example, researchers have determined that younger siblings of children with ASD are at a much higher risk of developing the disorder than the general population. Additionally, biologically based tests purported to identify infants at risk for developing ASD are becoming commercially available. As a result, behavior analysts working in the field of ASD education and treatment can anticipate an increase in requests for ABA interventions for infants. This presentation will outline some of the practical and ethical issues behavior analysts must address in providing services to at-risk infants and very young children. Topics include the competencies of the behavior analyst working with infants, working within the bounds of evidence-based practice, and the potentially multifaceted role the practitioner may need to serve for caregivers through the child's infancy and into early childhood.