Association for Behavior Analysis International

Michael Pettit is an associate professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, CA where he teaches in their unique Historical, Theoretical, and Critical Studies of Psychology program. He is the author of The Science of Deception (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and over a dozen articles on the history of the social and behavioral sciences.

The behavior of nonhuman animals continues to elicit considerable interest not only from scientists, but from a wide range of publics. This fascination means studies of animal behavior often have a double life, a source of a scientific knowledge while also providing edifying entertainment. For this reason, students of animal behavior have had to grapple with an array of (both wanted and unwanted) audiences for their research. In this talk, I will offer examples from the history of psychology, with a particular focus on the controversies over animal sexuality and cognition, to illustrate the ways in which scientific knowledge has been consumed and contested.

The audience includes those interested in the history and theory of psychology and the behavioral sciences.

This presentation will provide an overview of the origins of the present opioid crisis, now in its second decade, in the United States. This year alone it is estimated that approximately 50,000 lives will be lost to opioid overdose with innumerable others suffering other consequences of the disorder. Effective interventions must span the continuum from prevention (both through education and improved opioid prescribing practices), expansion of evidence-based treatment and increasing additional harm reduction approaches to decrease the health risks associated with opioid use and injection drug use. The basis for the use of pharmacotherapies for the treatment of opioid use disorder are grounded in the principles of behavioral pharmacology, and the empirical evidence for the efficacy of our pharmacological armamentarium will be reviewed. The utility of additional behavioral approaches to augment the effectiveness of pharmacotherapeutics will be discussed. Finally, innovative programs that are having significant impact on the crisis will be discussed.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students. 

Dr. Marguerite (Maggie) O’Haire is an internationally recognized Fulbright Scholar who is currently an Associate Professor of Human-Animal Interaction in the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue University. She earned her BA in Psychology from Vassar College in New York and her Ph.D. in Psychology from The University of Queensland in Australia. Her research program focuses on the unique and pervasive ways that humans interact with animals. From research with household pets to highly trained service animals, her findings have been instrumental in evaluating the value of the human-animal bond. She has received funding from three different NIH institutes to fund her human-animal interaction research, including an NICHD-funded trial of animal-assisted intervention for autism. In addition to her peer-reviewed publications and textbook chapters, her work has also been highlighted in over 1,000 media stories around the globe, including NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. For more information, see www.humananimalinteraction.org.

The field of human-animal interaction encompasses the unique and pervasive relationships between humans and animals. These relationships can influence human health, well-being, and development. An emerging body of research has begun to systematically evaluate these effects across a broad range of populations and settings. One population that has received growing attention is children with autism spectrum disorder. This talk will review the evidence base for this practice as well as provide concrete examples of research with various animal species, including guinea pigs in inclusion classroom settings and therapy dogs in a specialized psychiatric hospital program.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

The presentation will share research findings from psychology, neuroscience, and sociology to explain why roughly 15% of people are socially awkward. It will also review how awkward people view the complex social world, show how tailored behavioral activation components can help awkward people build their social skill, explore why awkwardness is associated with giftedness. The talk revolves around a welcome, counterintuitive message: the same characteristics that make people socially clumsy can be harnessed to produce remarkable achievements.

The talk should be useful for both researchers and practitioners with a social science Ph.D.

Arthur Glenberg is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a member of INICO at the Univeridad de Salamanca. He does basic research in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience with a focus on developing theories of embodied cognition in the areas of language, education, and social processes. In addition, he and his colleagues at ASU have developed an embodied reading comprehension intervention (EMBRACE) for English language learning children in the early elementary grades (see: http://resourcecenters2015.videohall.com/presentations/565.) His work has been funded by NIH, IES, and NSF. Dr. Glenberg has authored a textbook (in its third edition), an edited volume, and over 100 peer-reviewed articles. As of October 2018, these publications have been cited almost 20,000 times with an h-index of 61.

A basic principle of embodied cognition is that all cognitive processes depend on behavioral and neural systems of action (goal-directed behavior such as operant responding), perception, and emotion. I will illustrate this principle with demonstrations and data from fields of perception, developmental psychology, social psychology, and cognitive psychology. After developing the case for cognition being embodied, I will discuss applications in teaching reading comprehension, second language learning, physics, and mathematics. In each domain, substantial improvements in learning occur when the body is appropriately engaged.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Over the last decade cognitive neuroscientists have revealed the basic mechanisms of both operant and pavlovian conditioning in the mammalian brain. The dopaminergic neurons of the midbrain have been shown to compute a reward prediction error almost exactly as predicted by the psychologists of the 1970s had supposed. These signals implement a precise value computation in which reinforcement gives rise to a stored synaptic representation of the precise value of stimuli and actions. More recently, neuroeconomists have shown how these values are stored, accessed, and compared when humans and animals choose amongst actions. These new insights have validated many of the core tenets to learning theory, while broadly extending our notion of the response to include more representational mechanisms than had been previously supposed.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students. 

In observational studies, at least three possible explanations exist for the association of two variables x and y: 1) x is the cause of y (i.e., a model of the form x → y), 2) y is the cause of x (y → x), or 3) an unmeasured confounder u is present (x ← u → y). Statistical methods that identify which of the three explanatory models fits best would be a useful adjunct to use of theory alone. The present talk introduces one such statistical method, Direction Dependence Analysis (DDA; Wiedermann & von Eye, 2015; Wiedermann & Li, 2018). DDA assesses the relative plausibility of the three explanatory models using higher moment information of the variables (i.e., skewness and kurtosis). DDA will be discussed in the context of person-oriented (non-experimental) research. Extending DDA principles to so-called (linear) vector autoregressive models (VAR) can be used to empirically evaluate causal theories of multivariate intraindividual development (e.g., which of two longitudinally observed variables is more likely to be the explanatory variable and which one is more likely to reflect the outcome). An illustrative example is provided from a study on the development of experienced mood and alcohol consumption behavior. Specifically, DDA is used to answer questions concerning the causal direction of effect of subjective mood and alcohol consumption behavior from a person-oriented perspective, i.e., whether individual changes in mood are the cause of changes in alcohol consumption (i.e., mood → alcohol reflecting the so-called “tension reduction hypothesis“; Conger, 1956; Young, Oei & Knight, 199) or whether alcohol consumption patterns cause changes in perceived mood (i.e., alcohol → mood reflecting the “hedonic motive hypothesis”; Gendolla, 2000). In the present sample, DDA supported the “tension-reduction hypothesis” suggesting that experienced mood is more likely to cause alcohol intake than vice versa. Data requirements of DDA for best-practice applications are discussed and software implementations in R and SPSS are provided.

Researchers, practitioners, and graduate students interested in quantitative methods of causal inference.