Association for Behavior Analysis International

Kathleen A. O’Connell, Ph.D., RN, FAAN, FABMR is the Isabel Maitland Stewart Professor of Nursing Education at Teachers College Columbia University. She received her PhD in Psychology from the University of Kansas and did a Postdoctoral Fellowship in psychology at Purdue University. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research. In her research on health behavior in diabetes, smoking cessation, and overactive bladder syndrome, she has applied various theories, including value expectancy theory, self-regulation theory, reversal theory, the theory of self-control strength, Pavlovian theory, and Pavlovian instrumental transfer.

Although it seems obvious that operant learning processes are important in the acquisition of addictive behaviors like smoking, I report on the importance of Pavlovian processes in the extinction of smoking and in the acquisition of urinary urge incontinence. Context is important in the extinction of behaviors. After responses to conditioned stimuli have been extinguished in one context, responding resumes when the organism enters a different context. Our work using ecological momentary assessment techniques showed that resisting urges to smoke is context-dependent and that using the stimulus control strategy of staying away from available cigarettes functions as an extinction context that does little to prepare ex-smokers for when they inevitably encounter a context with available cigarettes. Pavlovian processes are also responsible for the acquisition of some behaviors that contribute to pathological conditions, including the phenomenon of key-in-the-lock incontinence, which is cue-stimulated urinary urgency and incontinence when arriving at the entrance to one’s home. I will report our research on the effect of conditioned stimuli on daytime urinary urgency and nocturia, including the effect of displaying urge-related and neutral stimuli during urodynamic assessment of bladder contractions and during functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brains of individuals with urge incontinence.

Researchers interested in Pavlovian processes in humans and researchers and clinicians interested in health behaviors.

Workplaces challenge reform efforts to improve productivity and outcomes. While not unique in this respect, academic workplaces, especially those in higher education, present special challenges in getting faculty members to accept needed reforms, given faculty members’ high expertise and academic-freedom-based independence. This presentation, data-based in part, summarizes insights from a three-year research-lab-supported project implementing successful behavior-based reforms at one unit of a multi-unit organization. The reforms raised the unit’s critical outcome, graduate passage of a licensing exam, well above the organization’s other units. Passing a licensing exam is the organization’s primary validated outcome, the statistics for which it confirms as reliable for accreditation purposes. Under the positive influence of the project’s organizational-management initiative, half of the unit’s faculty members volunteered to participate in the reforms, and their participation further induced reforms by non-participating faculty members in the same unit. The project eschewed managing by policy and mandate in favor of recognition reinforcement, supportive change context, participant control and choice, evidenced-based practices, and knowledge showcasing. The project focused participants on the behaviors that they wished to induce and on measuring those behaviors, while fostering team approaches within a unit culture that inoculated participants against adverse conditions imposed centrally across the organization.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Patricia Prelock, Ph.D., is Dean of the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Professor of Communication Sciences & Disorders, and Professor of Pediatrics in the College of Medicine at the University of Vermont. Dr. Prelock coordinates parent training programs designed for caregivers of children with ASD and has been awarded more than 11 million dollars in university, state and federal funding as a PI or Co-PI to develop innovations in interdisciplinary training supporting children and youth with neurodevelopmental disabilities and their families, to facilitate training in speech-language pathology, and to support her intervention work in ASD. She has over 178 publications and 523 peer-reviewed and invited presentations/keynotes in the areas of autism and other neurodevelopmental disabilities, collaboration, IPE, leadership, and language learning disabilities. Dr. Prelock received the University of Vermont’s Kroepsch-Maurice Excellence in Teaching Award in 2000, was named an ASHA Fellow in 2000 and a University of Vermont Scholar in 2003. In 2011, she was named the Cecil & Ida Green Honors Professor Visiting Scholar at Texas Christian University and in 2015 Dr. Prelock was named a Distinguished Alumna of the University of Pittsburgh. In 2016, she received the ASHA Honors of the Association and in 2017 she was named a Distinguished Alumna of Cardinal Mooney High School. Dr. Prelock is a Board-Certified Specialist in Child Language and was named a Fellow in the National Academies of Practice (NAP) in speech-language pathology in 2018.  She was the 2013 President for the American Speech-Language Hearing Association and is leading the development of the University of Vermont Integrative Health Program.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Dr. Dana Suskind is Co-Director of TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health, Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics, and the Director of the Pediatric Cochlear Implant Program at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the role of parents and caregivers in foundational brain development, with an overarching aim to narrow the achievement gap and prevent early cognitive disparities at a population level. Dr. Suskind will share the observations that led her to create the TMW Center for Early Learning + Public Health. The Center develops evidence-based interventions that enable parents, caregivers, practitioners, and researchers to harness the power of language to impact early cognitive disparities particularly among children born into poverty. Dr. Suskind will discuss the science that drives her research and share excerpts of TMW curricula and study results. Additionally, she will highlight the need for a public health approach to early learning as well as the TMW Center’s upcoming community-wide rollout that will utilize existing social and health infrastructures to disseminate our suite of interventions and critical public health information within a single US city.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.