Behaviour Analysis – Mental Health Matters

Who was B.F. Skinner?

Published on 06/20/2022 by Andrew Marshall3 Comments

Introduction

Burrhus Frederic Skinner (20 March 1904 to 18 August 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviourist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.

Skinner at the Harvard Psychology Department, c. 1950.

Considering free will to be an illusion, Skinner saw human action as dependent on consequences of previous actions, a theory he would articulate as the principle of reinforcement: If the consequences to an action are bad, there is a high chance the action will not be repeated; if the consequences are good, the probability of the action being repeated becomes stronger.

Skinner developed behaviour analysis, especially the philosophy of radical behaviourism, and founded the experimental analysis of behaviour, a school of experimental research psychology. He also used operant conditioning to strengthen behaviour, considering the rate of response to be the most effective measure of response strength. To study operant conditioning, he invented the operant conditioning chamber (aka the Skinner box), and to measure rate he invented the cumulative recorder. Using these tools, he and Charles Ferster produced Skinner’s most influential experimental work, outlined in their 1957 book Schedules of Reinforcement.

Skinner was a prolific author, publishing 21 books and 180 articles. He imagined the application of his ideas to the design of a human community in his 1948 utopian novel, Walden Two, while his analysis of human behaviour culminated in his 1958 work, Verbal Behaviour.

Skinner, John B. Watson and Ivan Pavlov, are considered to be the pioneers of modern behaviourism. Accordingly, a June 2002 survey listed Skinner as the most influential psychologist of the 20th century.

Biography

Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, to Grace and William Skinner, the latter of whom was a lawyer. Skinner became an atheist after a Christian teacher tried to assuage his fear of the hell that his grandmother described. His brother Edward, two and a half years younger, died at age 16 of a cerebral haemorrhage.

Skinner’s closest friend as a young boy was Raphael Miller, whom he called Doc because his father was a doctor. Doc and Skinner became friends due to their parents’ religiousness and both had an interest in contraptions and gadgets. They had set up a telegraph line between their houses to send messages to each other, although they had to call each other on the telephone due to the confusing messages sent back and forth. During one summer, Doc and Skinner started an elderberry business to gather berries and sell them door to door. They found that when they picked the ripe berries, the unripe ones came off the branches too, so they built a device that was able to separate them. The device was a bent piece of metal to form a trough. They would pour water down the trough into a bucket, and the ripe berries would sink into the bucket and the unripe ones would be pushed over the edge to be thrown away.

Education

Skinner attended Hamilton College in New York with the intention of becoming a writer. He found himself at a social disadvantage at the college because of his intellectual attitude. He was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity.

He wrote for the school paper, but, as an atheist, he was critical of the traditional mores of his college. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1926, he attended Harvard University, where he would later research and teach. While attending Harvard, a fellow student, Fred S. Keller, convinced Skinner that he could make an experimental science of the study of behaviour. This led Skinner to invent a prototype for the Skinner box and to join Keller in the creation of other tools for small experiments.

After graduation, Skinner unsuccessfully tried to write a novel while he lived with his parents, a period that he later called the “Dark Years”. He became disillusioned with his literary skills despite encouragement from the renowned poet Robert Frost, concluding that he had little world experience and no strong personal perspective from which to write. His encounter with John B. Watson’s behaviourism led him into graduate study in psychology and to the development of his own version of behaviourism.

Later Life

Skinner received a PhD from Harvard in 1931, and remained there as a researcher for some years. In 1936, he went to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis to teach. In 1945, he moved to Indiana University, where he was chair of the psychology department from 1946 to 1947, before returning to Harvard as a tenured professor in 1948. He remained at Harvard for the rest of his life. In 1973, Skinner was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto II.

In 1936, Skinner married Yvonne “Eve” Blue. The couple had two daughters, Julie (later Vargas) and Deborah (later Buzan; married Barry Buzan). Yvonne died in 1997, and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts,

Skinner’s public exposure had increased in the 1970s, he remained active even after his retirement in 1974, until his death. In 1989, Skinner was diagnosed with leukaemia and died on 18 August 1990, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ten days before his death, he was given the lifetime achievement award by the American Psychological Association and gave a talk concerning his work.

Contributions to Psychology

Behaviourism

Skinner referred to his approach to the study of behaviour as radical behaviourism, which originated in the early 1900s as a reaction to depth psychology and other traditional forms of psychology, which often had difficulty making predictions that could be tested experimentally. This philosophy of behavioural science assumes that behaviour is a consequence of environmental histories of reinforcement (refer to applied behaviour analysis). In his words:

The position can be stated as follows: what is felt or introspectively observed is not some nonphysical world of consciousness, mind, or mental life but the observer’s own body. This does not mean, as I shall show later, that introspection is a kind of psychological research, nor does it mean (and this is the heart of the argument) that what are felt or introspectively observed are the causes of the behavior. An organism behaves as it does because of its current structure, but most of this is out of reach of introspection. At the moment we must content ourselves, as the methodological behaviorist insists, with a person’s genetic and environment histories. What are introspectively observed are certain collateral products of those histories.… In this way we repair the major damage wrought by mentalism. When what a person does [is] attributed to what is going on inside him, investigation is brought to an end. Why explain the explanation? For twenty-five hundred years people have been preoccupied with feelings and mental life, but only recently has any interest been shown in a more precise analysis of the role of the environment. Ignorance of that role led in the first place to mental fictions, and it has been perpetuated by the explanatory practices to which they gave rise.

Foundations of Skinner’s Behaviourism

Skinner’s ideas about behaviourism were largely set forth in his first book, The Behaviour of Organisms (1938). Here, he gives a systematic description of the manner in which environmental variables control behaviour. He distinguished two sorts of behaviour which are controlled in different ways:

Respondent behaviours are elicited by stimuli, and may be modified through respondent conditioning, often called classical (or pavlovian) conditioning, in which a neutral stimulus is paired with an eliciting stimulus. Such behaviours may be measured by their latency or strength.
Operant behaviours are ’emitted’, meaning that initially they are not induced by any particular stimulus. They are strengthened through operant conditioning (aka instrumental conditioning), in which the occurrence of a response yields a reinforcer. Such behaviours may be measured by their rate.

Both of these sorts of behaviour had already been studied experimentally, most notably: respondents, by Ivan Pavlov; and operants, by Edward Thorndike. Skinner’s account differed in some ways from earlier ones, and was one of the first accounts to bring them under one roof.

The idea that behaviour is strengthened or weakened by its consequences raises several questions. Among the most commonly asked are these:

Operant responses are strengthened by reinforcement, but where do they come from in the first place?
Once it is in the organism’s repertoire, how is a response directed or controlled?
How can very complex and seemingly novel behaviours be explained?

1. Origin of Operant Behaviour

Skinner’s answer to the first question was very much like Darwin’s answer to the question of the origin of a ‘new’ bodily structure, namely, variation and selection. Similarly, the behaviour of an individual varies from moment to moment; a variation that is followed by reinforcement is strengthened and becomes prominent in that individual’s behavioural repertoire. Shaping was Skinner’s term for the gradual modification of behaviour by the reinforcement of desired variations. Skinner believed that ‘superstitious’ behaviour can arise when a response happens to be followed by reinforcement to which it is actually unrelated.

2. Control of operant Behaviour

The second question, “how is operant behaviour controlled?” arises because, to begin with, the behaviour is “emitted” without reference to any particular stimulus. Skinner answered this question by saying that a stimulus comes to control an operant if it is present when the response is reinforced and absent when it is not. For example, if lever-pressing only brings food when a light is on, a rat, or a child, will learn to press the lever only when the light is on. Skinner summarized this relationship by saying that a discriminative stimulus (e.g. light or sound) sets the occasion for the reinforcement (food) of the operant (lever-press). This three-term contingency (stimulus-response-reinforcer) is one of Skinner’s most important concepts, and sets his theory apart from theories that use only pair-wise associations.

3. Explaining Complex Behaviour

Most behaviour of humans cannot easily be described in terms of individual responses reinforced one by one, and Skinner devoted a great deal of effort to the problem of behavioural complexity. Some complex behaviour can be seen as a sequence of relatively simple responses, and here Skinner invoked the idea of “chaining”. Chaining is based on the fact, experimentally demonstrated, that a discriminative stimulus not only sets the occasion for subsequent behaviour, but it can also reinforce a behaviour that precedes it. That is, a discriminative stimulus is also a “conditioned reinforcer”. For example, the light that sets the occasion for lever pressing may also be used to reinforce “turning around” in the presence of a noise. This results in the sequence “noise – turn-around – light – press lever – food.” Much longer chains can be built by adding more stimuli and responses.

However, Skinner recognised that a great deal of behaviour, especially human behaviour, cannot be accounted for by gradual shaping or the construction of response sequences. Complex behaviour often appears suddenly in its final form, as when a person first finds his way to the elevator by following instructions given at the front desk. To account for such behaviour, Skinner introduced the concept of rule-governed behaviour. First, relatively simple behaviours come under the control of verbal stimuli: the child learns to “jump,” “open the book,” and so on. After a large number of responses come under such verbal control, a sequence of verbal stimuli can evoke an almost unlimited variety of complex responses.

Reinforcement

Reinforcement, a key concept of behaviourism, is the primary process that shapes and controls behaviour, and occurs in two ways: positive and negative. In The Behaviour of Organisms (1938), Skinner defines negative reinforcement to be synonymous with punishment, i.e. the presentation of an aversive stimulus. This definition would subsequently be re-defined in Science and Human Behaviour (1953).

In what has now become the standard set of definitions, positive reinforcement is the strengthening of behaviour by the occurrence of some event (e.g. praise after some behaviour is performed), whereas negative reinforcement is the strengthening of behaviour by the removal or avoidance of some aversive event (e.g. opening and raising an umbrella over your head on a rainy day is reinforced by the cessation of rain falling on you).

Both types of reinforcement strengthen behaviour, or increase the probability of a behaviour reoccurring; the difference being in whether the reinforcing event is something applied (positive reinforcement) or something removed or avoided (negative reinforcement). Punishment can be the application of an aversive stimulus/event (positive punishment or punishment by contingent stimulation) or the removal of a desirable stimulus (negative punishment or punishment by contingent withdrawal). Though punishment is often used to suppress behaviour, Skinner argued that this suppression is temporary and has a number of other, often unwanted, consequences. Extinction is the absence of a rewarding stimulus, which weakens behaviour.

Writing in 1981, Skinner pointed out that Darwinian natural selection is, like reinforced behaviour, “selection by consequences.” Though, as he said, natural selection has now “made its case,” he regretted that essentially the same process, “reinforcement”, was less widely accepted as underlying human behaviour.

Schedules of Reinforcement

Skinner recognised that behaviour is typically reinforced more than once, and, together with Charles Ferster, he did an extensive analysis of the various ways in which reinforcements could be arranged over time, calling it the schedules of reinforcement.

The most notable schedules of reinforcement studied by Skinner were continuous, interval (fixed or variable), and ratio (fixed or variable). All are methods used in operant conditioning.

Continuous reinforcement (CRF): each time a specific action is performed the subject receives a reinforcement. This method is effective when teaching a new behaviour because it quickly establishes an association between the target behaviour and the reinforcer.
Interval schedule: based on the time intervals between reinforcements.
- Fixed interval schedule (FI): A procedure in which reinforcements are presented at fixed time periods, provided that the appropriate response is made. This schedule yields a response rate that is low just after reinforcement and becomes rapid just before the next reinforcement is scheduled.
- Variable interval schedule (VI): A procedure in which behaviour is reinforced after scheduled but unpredictable time durations following the previous reinforcement. This schedule yields the most stable rate of responding, with the average frequency of reinforcement determining the frequency of response.
Ratio schedules: based on the ratio of responses to reinforcements.
- Fixed ratio schedule (FR): A procedure in which reinforcement is delivered after a specific number of responses have been made.
- Variable ratio schedule (VR): A procedure in which reinforcement comes after a number of responses that is randomised from one reinforcement to the next (e.g. slot machines). The lower the number of responses required, the higher the response rate tends to be. Variable ratio schedules tend to produce very rapid and steady responding rates in contrast with fixed ratio schedules where the frequency of response usually drops after the reinforcement occurs.

Token Economy

“Skinnerian” principles have been used to create token economies in a number of institutions, such as psychiatric hospitals. When participants behave in desirable ways, their behaviour is reinforced with tokens that can be changed for such items as candy, cigarettes, coffee, or the exclusive use of a radio or television set.

Verbal Behaviour

Challenged by Alfred North Whitehead during a casual discussion while at Harvard to provide an account of a randomly provided piece of verbal behaviour, Skinner set about attempting to extend his then-new functional, inductive approach to the complexity of human verbal behaviour. Developed over two decades, his work appeared in the book Verbal Behaviour. Although Noam Chomsky was highly critical of Verbal Behaviour, he conceded that Skinner’s “S-R psychology” was worth a review (behaviour analysts reject the “S-R” characterisation: operant conditioning involves the emission of a response which then becomes more or less likely depending upon its consequence).

Verbal Behaviour had an uncharacteristically cool reception, partly as a result of Chomsky’s review, partly because of Skinner’s failure to address or rebut any of Chomsky’s criticisms. Skinner’s peers may have been slow to adopt the ideas presented in Verbal Behaviour because of the absence of experimental evidence – unlike the empirical density that marked Skinner’s experimental work.

Scientific Inventions

Operant Conditioning Chamber

An operant conditioning chamber (also known as a “Skinner box”) is a laboratory apparatus used in the experimental analysis of animal behaviour. It was invented by Skinner while he was a graduate student at Harvard University. As used by Skinner, the box had a lever (for rats), or a disk in one wall (for pigeons). A press on this “manipulandum” could deliver food to the animal through an opening in the wall, and responses reinforced in this way increased in frequency. By controlling this reinforcement together with discriminative stimuli such as lights and tones, or punishments such as electric shocks, experimenters have used the operant box to study a wide variety of topics, including schedules of reinforcement, discriminative control, delayed response (“memory”), punishment, and so on. By channelling research in these directions, the operant conditioning chamber has had a huge influence on course of research in animal learning and its applications. It enabled great progress on problems that could be studied by measuring the rate, probability, or force of a simple, repeatable response. However, it discouraged the study of behavioural processes not easily conceptualised in such terms 0 spatial learning, in particular, which is now studied in quite different ways, for example, by the use of the water maze.

Cumulative Recorder

The cumulative recorder makes a pen-and-ink record of simple repeated responses. Skinner designed it for use with the operant chamber as a convenient way to record and view the rate of responses such as a lever press or a key peck. In this device, a sheet of paper gradually unrolls over a cylinder. Each response steps a small pen across the paper, starting at one edge; when the pen reaches the other edge, it quickly resets to the initial side. The slope of the resulting ink line graphically displays the rate of the response; for example, rapid responses yield a steeply sloping line on the paper, slow responding yields a line of low slope. The cumulative recorder was a key tool used by Skinner in his analysis of behaviour, and it was very widely adopted by other experimenters, gradually falling out of use with the advent of the laboratory computer and use of line graphs. Skinner’s major experimental exploration of response rates, presented in his book with Charles Ferster, Schedules of Reinforcement, is full of cumulative records produced by this device.

Air Crib

The air crib is an easily cleaned, temperature- and humidity-controlled box-bed intended to replace the standard infant crib. Skinner invented the device to help his wife cope with the day-to-day tasks of child rearing. It was designed to make early childcare simpler (by reducing laundry, diaper rash, cradle cap, etc.), while allowing the baby to be more mobile and comfortable, and less prone to cry. Reportedly it had some success in these goals.

The air crib was a controversial invention. It was popularly mischaracterized as a cruel pen, and it was often compared to Skinner’s operant conditioning chamber (aka the “Skinner box”). This association with laboratory animal experimentation discouraged its commercial success, though several companies attempted production.

In 2004 therapist Lauren Slater repeated unfounded rumours that Skinner had used his baby daughter in some of his experiments, and that she had subsequently committed suicide. His outraged daughter publicly accused Slater of giving new life to old lies about her and her father and of inventing new ones, and faulted her not making a good-faith effort to check her facts before publishing.

Teaching Machine

The teaching machine was a mechanical device whose purpose was to administer a curriculum of programmed learning. The machine embodies key elements of Skinner’s theory of learning and had important implications for education in general and classroom instruction in particular.

In one incarnation, the machine was a box that housed a list of questions that could be viewed one at a time through a small window. (see picture.) There was also a mechanism through which the learner could respond to each question. Upon delivering a correct answer, the learner would be rewarded.

Skinner advocated the use of teaching machines for a broad range of students (e.g., preschool aged to adult) and instructional purposes (e.g., reading and music). For example, one machine that he envisioned could teach rhythm. He wrote:

A relatively simple device supplies the necessary contingencies. The student taps a rhythmic pattern in unison with the device. “Unison” is specified very loosely at first (the student can be a little early or late at each tap) but the specifications are slowly sharpened. The process is repeated for various speeds and patterns. In another arrangement, the student echoes rhythmic patterns sounded by the machine, though not in unison, and again the specifications for an accurate reproduction are progressively sharpened. Rhythmic patterns can also be brought under the control of a printed score.

The instructional potential of the teaching machine stemmed from several factors: it provided automatic, immediate and regular reinforcement without the use of aversive control; the material presented was coherent, yet varied and novel; the pace of learning could be adjusted to suit the individual. As a result, students were interested, attentive, and learned efficiently by producing the desired behaviour, “learning by doing.”

Teaching machines, though perhaps rudimentary, were not rigid instruments of instruction. They could be adjusted and improved based upon the students’ performance. For example, if a student made many incorrect responses, the machine could be reprogrammed to provide less advanced prompts or questions – the idea being that students acquire behaviours most efficiently if they make few errors. Multiple-choice formats were not well-suited for teaching machines because they tended to increase student mistakes, and the contingencies of reinforcement were relatively uncontrolled.

Not only useful in teaching explicit skills, machines could also promote the development of a repertoire of behaviours that Skinner called self-management. Effective self-management means attending to stimuli appropriate to a task, avoiding distractions, reducing the opportunity of reward for competing behaviours, and so on. For example, machines encourage students to pay attention before receiving a reward. Skinner contrasted this with the common classroom practice of initially capturing students’ attention (e.g. with a lively video) and delivering a reward (e.g. entertainment) before the students have actually performed any relevant behaviour. This practice fails to reinforce correct behaviour and actually counters the development of self-management.

Skinner pioneered the use of teaching machines in the classroom, especially at the primary level. Today computers run software that performs similar teaching tasks, and there has been a resurgence of interest in the topic related to the development of adaptive learning systems.

Pigeon-Guided Missile

During World War II, the US Navy required a weapon effective against surface ships, such as the German Bismarck class battleships. Although missile and TV technology existed, the size of the primitive guidance systems available rendered automatic guidance impractical. To solve this problem, Skinner initiated Project Pigeon, which was intended to provide a simple and effective guidance system. This system divided the nose cone of a missile into three compartments, with a pigeon placed in each. Lenses projected an image of distant objects onto a screen in front of each bird. Thus, when the missile was launched from an aircraft within sight of an enemy ship, an image of the ship would appear on the screen. The screen was hinged, such that pecks at the image of the ship would guide the missile toward the ship.

Despite an effective demonstration, the project was abandoned, and eventually more conventional solutions, such as those based on radar, became available. Skinner complained that “our problem was no one would take us seriously.”

Verbal Summator

Early in his career Skinner became interested in “latent speech” and experimented with a device he called the verbal summator. This device can be thought of as an auditory version of the Rorschach inkblots. When using the device, human participants listened to incomprehensible auditory “garbage” but often read meaning into what they heard. Thus, as with the Rorschach blots, the device was intended to yield overt behaviour that projected subconscious thoughts. Skinner’s interest in projective testing was brief, but he later used observations with the summator in creating his theory of verbal behaviour. The device also led other researchers to invent new tests such as the tautophone test, the auditory apperception test, and the Azzageddi test.

Influence on Teaching

Along with psychology, education has also been influenced by Skinner’s views, which are extensively presented in his book The Technology of Teaching, as well as reflected in Fred S. Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction and Ogden R. Lindsley’s Precision Teaching.

Skinner argued that education has two major purposes:

To teach repertoires of both verbal and nonverbal behaviour; and
To interest students in learning.

He recommended bringing students’ behaviour under appropriate control by providing reinforcement only in the presence of stimuli relevant to the learning task. Because he believed that human behaviour can be affected by small consequences, something as simple as “the opportunity to move forward after completing one stage of an activity” can be an effective reinforcer. Skinner was convinced that, to learn, a student must engage in behaviour, and not just passively receive information.

Skinner believed that effective teaching must be based on positive reinforcement which is, he argued, more effective at changing and establishing behaviour than punishment. He suggested that the main thing people learn from being punished is how to avoid punishment. For example, if a child is forced to practice playing an instrument, the child comes to associate practicing with punishment and thus develops feelings of dreadfulness and wishes to avoid practicing the instrument. This view had obvious implications for the then widespread practice of rote learning and punitive discipline in education. The use of educational activities as punishment may induce rebellious behaviour such as vandalism or absence.

Because teachers are primarily responsible for modifying student behavior, Skinner argued that teachers must learn effective ways of teaching. In The Technology of Teaching (1968), Skinner has a chapter on why teachers fail. He says that teachers have not been given an in-depth understanding of teaching and learning. Without knowing the science underpinning teaching, teachers fall back on procedures that work poorly or not at all, such as:

Using aversive techniques (which produce escape and avoidance and undesirable emotional effects);
Relying on telling and explaining (“Unfortunately, a student does not learn simply when he is shown or told.”);
Failing to adapt learning tasks to the student’s current level; and
Failing to provide positive reinforcement frequently enough.

Skinner suggests that any age-appropriate skill can be taught. The steps are

Clearly specify the action or performance the student is to learn.
Break down the task into small achievable steps, going from simple to complex.
Let the student perform each step, reinforcing correct actions.
Adjust so that the student is always successful until finally the goal is reached.
Shift to intermittent reinforcement to maintain the student’s performance.

Contributions to Social Theory

Skinner is popularly known mainly for his books Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity, (for which he made the cover of Time magazine). The former describes a fictional “experimental community” in 1940s United States. The productivity and happiness of citizens in this community is far greater than in the outside world because the residents practice scientific social planning and use operant conditioning in raising their children.

Walden Two, like Thoreau’s Walden, champions a lifestyle that does not support war, or foster competition and social strife. It encourages a lifestyle of minimal consumption, rich social relationships, personal happiness, satisfying work, and leisure. In 1967, Kat Kinkade and others founded the Twin Oaks Community, using Walden Two as a blueprint. The community still exists and continues to use the Planner-Manager system and other aspects of the community described in Skinner’s book, though behaviour modification is not a community practice.

In Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner suggests that a technology of behaviour could help to make a better society. We would, however, have to accept that an autonomous agent is not the driving force of our actions. Skinner offers alternatives to punishment, and challenges his readers to use science and modern technology to construct a better society.

Political Views

Skinner’s political writings emphasized his hopes that an effective and human science of behavioural control – a technology of human behaviour – could help with problems as yet unsolved and often aggravated by advances in technology such as the atomic bomb. Indeed, one of Skinner’s goals was to prevent humanity from destroying itself. He saw political activity as the use of aversive or non-aversive means to control a population. Skinner favoured the use of positive reinforcement as a means of control, citing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Emile: or, On Education as an example of literature that “did not fear the power of positive reinforcement.”

Skinner’s book, Walden Two, presents a vision of a decentralised, localised society, which applies a practical, scientific approach and behavioural expertise to deal peacefully with social problems (For example, his views led him to oppose corporal punishment in schools, and he wrote a letter to the California Senate that helped lead it to a ban on spanking). Skinner’s utopia is both a thought experiment and a rhetorical piece. In Walden Two, Skinner answers the problem that exists in many utopian novels – “What is the Good Life?” The book’s answer is a life of friendship, health, art, a healthy balance between work and leisure, a minimum of unpleasantness, and a feeling that one has made worthwhile contributions to a society in which resources are ensured, in part, by minimizing consumption.

If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers. (Skinner, Walden Two, 1948, p.xi).

Skinner described his novel as “my New Atlantis”, in reference to Bacon’s utopia.

When Milton’s Satan falls from heaven, he ends in hell. And what does he say to reassure himself? ‘Here, at least, we shall be free.’ And that, I think, is the fate of the old-fashioned liberal. He’s going to be free, but he’s going to find himself in hell. (Skinner, from William F. Buckley Jr, On the Firing Line, p.87).

“‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon” Experiment

One of Skinner’s experiments examined the formation of superstition in one of his favourite experimental animals, the pigeon. Skinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon “at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behavior.” He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they had been performing as it was delivered, and that they subsequently continued to perform these same actions.

One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a ‘tossing’ response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return.

Skinner suggested that the pigeons behaved as if they were influencing the automatic mechanism with their “rituals”, and that this experiment shed light on human behaviour:

The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one’s fortune at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if she were controlling it by twisting and turning her arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing—or, more strictly speaking, did something else.

Modern behavioural psychologists have disputed Skinner’s “superstition” explanation for the behaviours he recorded. Subsequent research (e.g. Staddon and Simmelhag, 1971), while finding similar behaviour, failed to find support for Skinner’s “adventitious reinforcement” explanation for it. By looking at the timing of different behaviours within the interval, Staddon and Simmelhag were able to distinguish two classes of behaviour: the terminal response, which occurred in anticipation of food, and interim responses, that occurred earlier in the interfood interval and were rarely contiguous with food. Terminal responses seem to reflect classical (as opposed to operant) conditioning, rather than adventitious reinforcement, guided by a process like that observed in 1968 by Brown and Jenkins in their “autoshaping” procedures. The causation of interim activities (such as the schedule-induced polydipsia seen in a similar situation with rats) also cannot be traced to adventitious reinforcement and its details are still obscure (Staddon, 1977).

Criticism

Noam Chomsky

American linguist Noam Chomsky published a review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour in the linguistics journal Language in 1959. Chomsky argued that Skinner’s attempt to use behaviourism to explain human language amounted to little more than word games. Conditioned responses could not account for a child’s ability to create or understand an infinite variety of novel sentences. Chomsky’s review has been credited with launching the cognitive revolution in psychology and other disciplines. Skinner, who rarely responded directly to critics, never formally replied to Chomsky’s critique, but endorsed Kenneth MacCorquodale’s 1972 reply.

I read half a dozen pages, saw that it missed the point of my book, and went no further. […] My reasons, I am afraid, show a lack of character. In the first place I should have had to read the review, and I found its tone distasteful. It was not really a review of my book but of what Chomsky took, erroneously, to be my position.

Many academics in the 1960s believed that Skinner’s silence on the question meant Chomsky’s criticism had been justified. But MacCorquodale points out that Chomsky’s criticism did not focus on Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour, but rather attacked a confusion of ideas from behavioural psychology. MacCorquodale also regretted Chomsky’s aggressive tone. Furthermore, Chomsky had aimed at delivering a definitive refutation of Skinner by citing dozens of animal instinct and animal learning studies. On the one hand, he argued that the studies on animal instinct proved that animal behaviour is innate, and therefore Skinner was mistaken. On the other, Chomsky’s opinion of the studies on learning was that one cannot draw an analogy from animal studies to human behaviour – or, that research on animal instinct refutes research on animal learning.

Chomsky also reviewed Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity, using the same basic motives as his Verbal Behaviour review. Among Chomsky’s criticisms were that Skinner’s laboratory work could not be extended to humans, that when it was extended to humans it represented “scientistic” behaviour attempting to emulate science but which was not scientific, that Skinner was not a scientist because he rejected the hypothetico-deductive model of theory testing, and that Skinner had no science of behaviour.

Psychodynamic Psychology

Skinner has been repeatedly criticized for his supposed animosity towards Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, and psychodynamic psychology. Some have argued, however, that Skinner shared several of Freud’s assumptions, and that he was influenced by Freudian points of view in more than one field, among them the analysis of defence mechanisms, such as repression. To study such phenomena, Skinner even designed his own projective test, the “verbal summator” described above.

J.E.R. Staddon

As understood by Skinner, ascribing dignity to individuals involves giving them credit for their actions. To say “Skinner is brilliant” means that Skinner is an originating force. If Skinner’s determinist theory is right, he is merely the focus of his environment. He is not an originating force and he had no choice in saying the things he said or doing the things he did. Skinner’s environment and genetics both allowed and compelled him to write his book. Similarly, the environment and genetic potentials of the advocates of freedom and dignity cause them to resist the reality that their own activities are deterministically grounded. J.E.R. Staddon has argued the compatibilist position; Skinner’s determinism is not in any way contradictory to traditional notions of reward and punishment, as he believed.

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Who was Joseph Wolpe?

Published on 04/09/2022 by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

Joseph Wolpe (20 April 1915 to 4 December 1997 in Los Angeles) was a South African psychiatrist and one of the most influential figures in behaviour therapy.

Wolpe grew up in South Africa, attending Parktown Boys’ High School and obtaining his MD from the University of the Witwatersrand.

In 1956, Wolpe was awarded a Ford Fellowship and spent a year at Stanford University in the Center for Behavioral Sciences, subsequently returning to South Africa but permanently moving to the United States in 1960 when he accepted a position at the University of Virginia.

In 1965, Wolpe accepted a position at Temple University.

One of the most influential experiences in Wolpe’s life was when he enlisted in the South African army as a medical officer. Wolpe was entrusted to treat soldiers who were diagnosed with what was then called “war neurosis” but today is known as post traumatic stress disorder. The mainstream treatment of the time for soldiers was based on psychoanalytic theory, and involved exploring the trauma while taking a hypnotic agent – so-called narcotherapy. It was believed that having the soldiers talk about their repressed experiences openly would effectively cure their neurosis. However, this was not the case. It was this lack of successful treatment outcomes that forced Wolpe, once a dedicated follower of Freud, to question psychoanalytic therapy and search for more effective treatment options. Wolpe is most well known for his reciprocal inhibition techniques, particularly systematic desensitisation, which revolutionised behavioural therapy. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Wolpe as the 53rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, an impressive accomplishment accentuated by the fact that Wolpe was a psychiatrist.

Reciprocal Inhibition

In Wolpe’s search for a more effective way in treating anxiety he developed different reciprocal inhibition techniques, utilising assertiveness training. Reciprocal inhibition can be defined as anxiety being inhibited by a feeling or response that is not compatible with the feeling of anxiety. Wolpe first started using eating as a response to inhibited anxiety in the laboratory cats. He would offer them food while presenting a conditioned fear stimulus. After his experiments in the laboratory he applied reciprocal inhibition to his clients in the form of assertiveness training. The idea behind assertiveness training was that you could not be angry or aggressive while simultaneously assertive at same time. Importantly, Wolpe believed that these techniques would lessen the anxiety producing association. Assertiveness training proved especially useful for clients who had anxiety about social situations. However, assertiveness training did have a potential flaw in the sense that it could not be applied to other kinds of phobias. Wolpe’s use of reciprocal inhibition led to his discovery of systematic desensitisation. He believed that facing your fears did not always result in overcoming them but rather lead to frustration. According to Wolpe, the key to overcoming fears was “by degrees”.

Systematic Desensitisation

Systematic desensitisation is what Wolpe is most famous for. Systematic desensitisation is when the client is exposed to the anxiety-producing stimulus at a low level, and once no anxiety is present a stronger version of the anxiety-producing stimulus is given. This continues until the individual client no longer feels any anxiety towards the stimulus. There are three main steps in using systematic desensitization, following development of a proper case formulation or what Wolpe originally called, “behaviour analysis“. The first step is to teach the client relaxation techniques.

Wolpe received the idea of relaxation from Edmund Jacobson, modifying his muscle relaxation techniques to take less time. Wolpe’s rationale was that one cannot be both relaxed and anxious at the same time. The second step is for the client and the therapist to create a hierarchy of anxieties. The therapist normally has the client make a list of all the things that produce anxiety in all its different forms. Then together, with the therapist, the client makes a hierarchy, starting with what produces the lowest level of anxiety to what produces the most anxiety. Next is to have the client be fully relaxed while imaging the anxiety producing stimulus. Depending on what their reaction is, whether they feel no anxiety or a great amount of anxiety, the stimulus will then be changed to a stronger or weaker one. Systematic desensitisation, though successful, has flaws as well. The patient may give misleading hierarchies, have trouble relaxing, or not be able to adequately imagine the scenarios. Despite this possible flaw, it seems to be most successful.

Achievements

Wolpe’s effect on behavioural therapy is long-lasting and extensive. He received many awards for his work in behavioural science. His awards included the American Psychological Associations Distinguished Scientific Award, the Psi Chi Distinguished Member Award, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Behaviour Therapy, where he was the second president. In addition to these awards, Wolpe’s alma mater, University of Witwatersrand, awarded him an honorary doctor of science degree in 1986. Furthermore, Wolpe was a prolific writer, some of his most famous books include, The Practice of Behaviour Therapy and Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition. Joseph Wolpe’s dedication to psychology is clear in his involvement in the psychology community, a month before his death he was attending conferences and giving lectures at Pepperdine University even though he was retired. Moreover, his theories have lasted well beyond his death.

Wolpe developed the Subjective Units of Disturbance Scale (SUDS) for assessing the level of subjective discomfort or psychological pain. He also created the Subjective Anxiety Scale (SAS) and the Fear Survey Plan that are used in behaviour research and therapy.

Wolpe died in 1997 of mesothelioma.

What is Functional Analysis (Psychology)?

Published on 03/30/2022 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Functional analysis in behavioural psychology is the application of the laws of operant and respondent conditioning to establish the relationships between stimuli and responses.

To establish the function of operant behaviour, one typically examines the “four-term contingency”: first by identifying the motivating operations (EO or AO), then identifying the antecedent or trigger of the behaviour, identifying the behaviour itself as it has been operationalised, and identifying the consequence of the behaviour which continues to maintain it.

Functional assessment in behaviour analysis employs principles derived from the natural science of behaviour analysis to determine the “reason”, purpose, or motivation for a behaviour. The most robust form of functional assessment is functional analysis, which involves the direct manipulation, using some experimental design (e.g. a multielement design or a reversal design) of various antecedent and consequent events and measurement of their effects on the behaviour of interest; this is the only method of functional assessment that allows for demonstration of clear cause of behaviour.

Applications in Clinical Psychology

Functional analysis and consequence analysis are commonly used in certain types of psychotherapy to better understand, and in some cases change, behaviour. It is particularly common in behavioural therapies such as behavioural activation, although it is also part of Aaron Beck’s cognitive therapy. In addition, functional analysis modified into a behaviour chain analysis is often used in dialectical behaviour therapy.

There are several advantages to using functional analysis over traditional assessment methods. Firstly, behavioural observation is more reliable than traditional self-report methods. This is because observing the individual from an objective stand point in their regular environment allows the observer to observe both the antecedent and the consequence of the problem behaviour. Secondly, functional analysis is advantageous as it allows for the development of behavioural interventions, either antecedent control or consequence control, specifically designed to reduce a problem behaviour. Thirdly, functional analysis is advantageous for interventions for young children or developmentally delayed children with problem behaviours, who may not be able to answer self-report questions about the reasons for their actions.

Despite these benefits, functional analysis also has some disadvantages. The first that no standard methods for determining function have been determined and meta-analysis shows that different methodologies appear to bias results toward particular functions as well as not effective in improving outcomes. Second, Gresham and colleagues (2004) in a meta-analytic review of JABA articles found that functional assessment did not produce greater effect sizes compared to simple contingency management programmes. However, Gresham et al. combined the three types of functional assessment, of which descriptive assessment and indirect assessment have been reliably found to produce results with limited validity Third, although functional assessment has been conducted with a variety host of populations much of the current functional assessment research has been limited to children with developmental disabilities.

Professional Organisations

The Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) also has an interest group in behaviour analysis, which focuses on the use of behaviour analysis in the school setting including functional analysis.

Doctoral level behaviour analysts who are psychologists belong to the American Psychological Association’s division 25 – Behaviour analysis. APA offers a diplomate in behavioural psychology and school psychology both of which focus on the use of functional analysis in the school setting.

The World Association for Behaviour Analysis offers a certification for clinical behaviour therapy and behavioural consultation, which covers functional analysis.

The UK Society for Behaviour Analysis also provides a forum for behaviour analysts for accreditation, professional development, continuing education and networking, and serves as an advocate body in public debate on issues relating to behaviour analysis. The UK-SBA promotes the ethical and effective application of the principles of behaviour and learning to a wide range of areas including education, rehabilitation and health care, business and the community and is committed to maintaining the availability of high-quality evidence-based professional behaviour analysis practice in the UK. The society also promotes and supports the academic field of behaviour analysis with in the UK both in terms of university-based training and research, and theoretical develop.

What is the Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies?

Published on 12/02/2021 by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

The Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) was founded in 1966.

Its headquarters are in New York City and its membership includes researchers, psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, social workers, marriage and family therapists, nurses, and other mental-health practitioners and students. These members support, use, and/or disseminate behavioural and cognitive approaches.

Brief History

ABCT was founded in 1966 under the name Association for Advancement of Behavioural Therapies (AABT) by 10 behaviourists who were dissatisfied with the prevailing Freudian/psychoanalytic model (Its founding members include: John Paul Brady, Joseph Cautela, Edward Dengrove, Cyril Franks, Martin Gittelman, Leonard Krasner, Arnold Lazarus, Andrew Salter, Dorothy Susskind, and Joseph Wolpe). The Freudian/psychoanalytic model refers to the Id, Ego, and Superego within each individual as they interpret and interact with the world and those around them. Although the ABCT was not established until 1966, its history begins in the early 1900s with the birth of the behaviourist movement, which was brought about by Pavlov, Watson, Skinner, Thorndike, Hull, Mowrer, and others – scientists who, concerned primarily with observable behaviour, were beginning to experiment with conditioning and learning theory. By the 1950s, two entities – Hans Eysenck’s research group (which included one of AABT’s founders Cyril Franks) at the University of London Institute of Psychiatry, and Joseph Wolpe’s research group (which included another of AABT’s founders, Arnold Lazarus) in South Africa – were conducting important studies that would establish behaviour therapy as a science based on principles of learning. In complete opposition to the psychoanalytic model, “The seminal significance of behaviour therapy was the commitment to apply the principles and procedures of experimental psychology to clinical problems, to rigorously evaluate the effects of therapy, and to ensure that clinical practice was guided by such objective evaluation”.

The first president of the association was Cyril Franks, who also founded the organisation’s flagship journal Behaviour Therapy and was the first editor of the Association for Advancement of Behavioural Therapies Newsletter. The first annual meeting of the association took place in 1967, in Washington, DC, concurrent with the American Psychological Association’s meeting.

An article in the November 1967 issue of the Newsletter, entitled “Behaviour Therapy and Not Behaviour Therapies” (Wilson & Evans, 1967), influenced the association’s first name change from Association for Advancement of Behavioural Therapies to Association for Advancement of Behaviour Therapy because, as the authors argued, “the various techniques of behaviour therapy all derive from learning theory and should not be misinterpreted as different kinds of behaviour therapy…”. This issue remains a debate in the field and within the organization, particularly with the emergence of the term “cognitive behavioural therapies.” This resulted in yet another name change in 2005 to the Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies.

The Association for Advancement of Behavioural Therapies/Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies has been at the forefront of the professional, legal, social, and ethical controversies and dissemination efforts that have accompanied the field’s evolution. The 1970s was perhaps the most “explosive” and controversial decade for the field of behaviour therapy, as it suffered from an overall negative public image and received numerous attacks from the press regarding behaviour modification and its possible unethical uses. In Gerald Davison’s (AABT’s 8th president) public “Statement on Behaviour Modification from the AABT”, he asserted that “it is a serious mistake … to equate behaviour therapy with the use of electric shocks applied to the extremities…” and “a major contribution of behaviour therapy has been a profound commitment to full description of procedures and careful evaluation of their effects”. From this point, AABT became instrumental in enacting legislative guidelines that protected human research subjects, and they also became active in efforts to educate the public.

Mission Statement

The ABCT is an interdisciplinary organisation committed to the advancement of a scientific approach to the understanding and amelioration of problems of the human condition. These aims are achieved through the investigation and application of behavioural, cognitive, prevention, and treatment. While primarily an interest group, ABCT is also active in:

Encouraging the development, study, and dissemination of scientific approaches to behavioural health.
Promoting the utilisation, expansion, and dissemination of behavioural, cognitive, and other empirically derived practices.
Facilitating professional development, interaction, and networking among members.

Professional Activities

Through its membership, publications, convention and education committees, the ABCT conducts a variety of activities to support and disseminate the behavioural and cognitive therapies. The organization produces two quarterly journals, Behaviour Therapy (research-based) and Cognitive and Behavioural Practice (treatment focused), as well as its house periodical, the Behaviour Therapist (eight times per year). The association’s convention is held annually in November. ABCT also produces fact sheets, an assessment series, and training and archival videotapes. The association maintains a website on which can be found a “Find-a-Therapist” search engine and information about behavioural and cognitive therapies. The organisation provides its members with an online clinical directory, over 30 special interest groups, a list serve, a job bank, and an awards and recognition programme. Other offerings available on the website include sample course syllabi, listings of grants available, and a broad range of offerings of interest to mental health researchers.

Mental Health Professionals

The training of mental health professionals has also been a significant priority for the association. Along with its annual meeting, AABT created an “ad hoc review mechanism” in the 1970s through the 1980s whereby a state could receive a review of a behaviour therapy programme. This led to the yearly publication of a widely used resource, “The Directory of Training Programmes”. With growing concerns over quality control and standardisation of practice, the certification of behaviour therapists also became an issue in the 1970s. This debate led to the development of a Diplomate in behaviour therapy at APA and for those behavioural therapy practices from a more radical behavioural perspective, the development of certification in behaviour analysis at the master level.

An ongoing debate within the association concerns what many consider to be a movement away from basic behavioural science as the field has attempted to advance and integrate more and more “new” therapies/specialisations, particularly the addition of cognitive theory and its variety of techniques. John Forsyth, in his special issue of Behaviour Therapy] entitled “Thirty Years of Behaviour Therapy: Promises Kept, Promises Unfulfilled”, summarised this opposition as follows:

“(a) cognition is not behaviour, (b) behaviour principles and theory cannot account for events occurring within the skin, and most important, (c) we therefore need a unique conceptual system to account for how thinking, feeling, and other private events relate to overt human action”.

The field’s desire to maintain its scientific foundations and yet continue to advance and grow, was reflected in its most recent discussion about adding the word “cognitive” to the name of the association.

Many notable scholars have served as president of the association, including Joseph Wolpe, Arnold Lazarus, Nathan Azrin, Steven C. Hayes, and David Barlow. The current executive director of the ABCT is Mary Jane Eimer, CAE. For a wealth of historical specifics (governing bodies, lists of editors, past presidents, award winners, SIGs, and conventions from the past 40 years) see ABCT’s 40th anniversary issue of the Behaviour Therapist.

About Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies

Cognitive and behavioural therapists help people learn to actively cope with, confront, reformulate, and/or change the maladaptive cognitions, behaviours, and symptoms that limit their ability to function, cause emotional distress, and accompany the wide range of mental health disorders. Goal-oriented, time-limited, research-based, and focused on the present, the cognitive and behavioural approach is collaborative. This approach values feedback from the client, and encourages the client to play an active role in setting goals and the overall course and pace of treatment. Importantly, behavioural interventions are characterized by a “direct focus on observable behaviour”. Practitioners teach clients concrete skills and exercises – from breathing retraining, to keeping thought records to behavioural rehearsal – to practice at home and in sessions, with the overall goal of optimal functioning and the ability to engage in life fully.

Because cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is based on broad principles of human learning and adaptation, it can be used to accomplish a wide variety of goals. CBT has been applied to issues ranging from depression and anxiety, to the improvement of the quality of parenting, relationships, and personal effectiveness.

Numerous scientific studies and research have documented the helpfulness of CBT programmes for a wide range of concerns throughout the lifespan. These concerns include children’s behaviour problems, health promotion, weight management, pain management, sexual dysfunction, stress, violence and victimisation, serious mental illness, relationship issues, academic problems, substance abuse, bipolar disorder, developmental disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, social phobia, school refusal and school phobia, hair pulling (trichotillomania) and much more. Cognitive-behavioural treatments are subject randomised controlled trials and “have been subjected to more rigorous evaluation using randomised controlled trials than any of the other psychological therapies”. There is discussion of using technology to determine diagnosis and host interventions according to research done by W. Edward Craighead. This would be done using “genetic analysis” and “neuroimaging” to create more individualised treatment plans.

Special Interest Groups

The ABCT has more than 40 special interest groups for its members. These include groups for issues involving African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and other ethnic groups such as children and adolescents; couples; gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people; students; military personnel; and the criminal justice system. The ABCT works within these groups to overcome addictive behaviours and mental illnesses that may cause negativity in these groups life. A group that the ABCT has supported well is the special interest group of the criminal justice system. The ABCT helps provide the prison system with knowledge of how to more humanely treat those who committed crimes and give people the proper care and attention to become great citizens.

What is the Behaviour Analysis of Child Development?

Published on 12/01/2021 by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

The behavioural analysis of child development originates from John B. Watson’s behaviourism.

Brief History

In 1948, Sidney Bijou took a position as associate professor of psychology at the University of Washington and served as director of the university’s Institute of Child Development. Under his leadership, the Institute added a child development clinic and nursery school classrooms where they conducted research that would later accumulate into the are that would be called “Behaviour Analysis of Child Development”. Skinner’s behavioural approach and Kantor’s interbehavioural approach were adopted in Bijou and Baer’s model. They created a three-stage model of development (basic, foundational, and societal). Bijou and Baer looked at these socially determined stages, as opposed to organising behaviour into change points or cusps (behavioural cusp). In the behavioural model, development is considered a behavioural change. It is dependent on the kind of stimulus and the person’s behavioural and learning function. Behaviour analysis in child development takes a mechanistic, contextual, and pragmatic approach.

From its inception, the behavioural model has focused on prediction and control of the developmental process. The model focuses on the analysis of a behaviour and then synthesizes the action to support the original behaviour. The model was changed after Richard J. Herrnstein studied the matching law of choice behaviour developed by studying of reinforcement in the natural environment. More recently, the model has focused more on behaviour over time and the way that behavioural responses become repetitive. it has become concerned with how behaviour is selected over time and forms into stable patterns of responding. A detailed history of this model was written by Pelaez. In 1995, Henry D. Schlinger, Jr. provided the first behaviour analytic text since Bijou and Baer comprehensively showed how behaviour analysis – a natural science approach to human behaviour – could be used to understand existing research in child development. In addition, the quantitative behavioural developmental model by Commons and Miller is the first behavioural theory and research to address notion similar to stage.

Research Methods

The methods used to analyse behaviour in child development are based on several types of measurements. Single-subject research with a longitudinal study follow-up is a commonly-used approach. Current research is focused on integrating single-subject designs through meta-analysis to determine the effect sizes of behavioural factors in development. Lag sequential analysis has become popular for tracking the stream of behaviour during observations. Group designs are increasingly being used. Model construction research involves latent growth modelling to determine developmental trajectories and structural equation modelling. Rasch analysis is now widely used to show sequentially within a developmental trajectory.

A recent methodological change in the behavioural analytic theory is the use of observational methods combined with lag sequential analysis can determine reinforcement in the natural setting.

Quantitative Behavioural Development

The model of hierarchical complexity is a quantitative analytic theory of development. This model offers an explanation for why certain tasks are acquired earlier than others through developmental sequences and gives an explanation of the biological, cultural, organisational, and individual principles of performance. It quantifies the order of hierarchical complexity of a task based on explicit and mathematical measurements of behaviour.

Research

Contingencies, Uncertainty, and Attachment

The behavioural model of attachment recognises the role of uncertainty in an infant and the child’s limited communication abilities. Contingent relationships are instrumental in the behaviour analytic theory, because much emphasis is put on those actions that produce parents’ responses.

The importance of contingency appears to be highlighted in other developmental theories, but the behavioural model recognises that contingency must be determined by two factors:

The efficiency of the action; and
That efficiency compared to other tasks that the infant might perform at that point.

Both infants and adults function in their environments by understanding these contingent relationships. Research has shown that contingent relationships lead to emotionally satisfying relationships.

Since 1961, behavioural research has shown that there is relationship between the parents’ responses to separation from the infant and outcomes of a “stranger situation.”. In a study done in 2000, six infants participated in a classic reversal design (refer to single-subject research) study that assessed infant approach rate to a stranger. If attention was based on stranger avoidance, the infant avoided the stranger. If attention was placed on infant approach, the infant approached the stranger.

Recent meta-analytic studies of this model of attachment based on contingency found a moderate effect of contingency on attachment, which increased to a large effect size when the quality of reinforcement was considered. Other research on contingency highlights its effect on the development of both pro-social and anti-social behaviour. These effects can also be furthered by training parents to become more sensitive to children’s behaviours, Meta-analytic research supports the notion that attachment is operant-based learning.

An infant’s sensitivity to contingencies can be affected by biological factors and environment changes. Studies show that being placed in erratic environments with few contingencies may cause a child to have conduct problems and may lead to depression (see Behavioural Development and Depression below). Research continues to look at the effects of learning-based attachment on moral development. Some studies have shown that erratic use of contingencies by parents early in life can produce devastating long-term effects for the child.

Motor Development

Since Watson developed the theory of behaviourism, behaviour analysts have held that motor development represents a conditioning process. This holds that crawling, climbing, and walking displayed by infants represents conditioning of biologically innate reflexes. In this case, the reflex of stepping is the respondent behaviour and these reflexes are environmentally conditioned through experience and practice. This position was criticised by maturation theorists. They believed that the stepping reflex for infants actually disappeared over time and was not “continuous”. By working with a slightly different theoretical model, while still using operant conditioning, Esther Thelen was able to show that children’s stepping reflex disappears as a function of increased physical weight. However, when infants were placed in water, that same stepping reflex returned. This offered a model for the continuity of the stepping reflex and the progressive stimulation model for behaviour analysts.

Infants deprived of physical stimulation or the opportunity to respond were found to have delayed motor development. Under conditions of extra stimulation, the motor behaviour of these children rapidly improved. Some research has shown that the use of a treadmill can be beneficial to children with motor delays including Down syndrome and cerebral palsy. Research on opportunity to respond and the building of motor development continues today.

The behavioural development model of motor activity has produced a number of techniques, including operant-based biofeedback to facilitate development with success. Some of the stimulation methods such as operant-based biofeedback have been applied as treatment to children with cerebral palsy and even spinal injury successfully. Brucker’s group demonstrated that specific operant conditioning-based biofeedback procedures can be effective in establishing more efficient use of remaining and surviving central nervous system cells after injury or after birth complications (like cerebral palsy). While such methods are not a cure and gains tend to be in the moderate range, they do show ability to enhance functioning.

Imitation and Verbal Behavior

Behaviourists have studied verbal behaviour since the 1920s. E.A. Esper (1920) studied associative models of language, which has evolved into the current language interventions of matrix training and recombinative generalisation. Skinner (1957) created a comprehensive taxonomy of language for speakers. Baer, along with Zettle and Haynes (1989), provided a developmental analysis of rule-governed behaviour for the listener. and for the listener Zettle and Hayes (1989) with Don Baer providing a developmental analysis of rule-governed behaviour. According to Skinner, language learning depends on environmental variables, which can be mastered by a child through imitation, practice, and selective reinforcement including automatic reinforcement.

B.F. Skinner was one of the first psychologists to take the role of imitation in verbal behaviour as a serious mechanism for acquisition. He identified echoic behaviour as one of his basic verbal operants, postulating that verbal behaviour was learned by an infant from a verbal community. Skinner’s account takes verbal behaviour beyond an intra-individual process to an inter-individual process. He defined verbal behaviour as “behaviour reinforced through the mediation of others”. Noam Chomsky refuted Skinner’s assumptions.

In the behavioural model, the child is prepared to contact the contingencies to “join” the listener and speaker. At the very core, verbal episodes involve the rotation of the roles as speaker and listener. These kinds of exchanges are called conversational units and have been the focus of research at Columbia’s communication disorders department.

Conversational units is a measure of socialisation because they consist of verbal interactions in which the exchange is reinforced by both the speaker and the listener. H.C. Chu (1998) demonstrated contextual conditions for inducing and expanding conversational units between children with autism and non-handicapped siblings in two separate experiments. The acquisition of conversational units and the expansion of verbal behaviour decrease incidences of physical “aggression” in the Chu study and several other reviews suggest similar effects. The joining of the listener and speaker progresses from listener speaker rotations with others as a likely precedent for the three major components of speaker-as-own listener – say so correspondence, self-talk conversational units, and naming.

Development of Self

Robert Kohelenberg and Mavis Tsai (1991) created a behaviour analytic model accounting for the development of one’s “self”. Their model proposes that verbal processes can be used to form a stable sense of who we are through behavioural processes such as stimulus control. Kohlenberg and Tsai developed functional analytic psychotherapy to treat psychopathological disorders arising from the frequent invalidations of a child’s statements such that “I” does not emerge. Other behaviour analytic models for personality disorders exist. They trace out the complex biological-environmental interaction for the development of avoidant and borderline personality disorders. They focus on Reinforcement sensitivity theory, which states that some individuals are more or less sensitive to reinforcement than others. Nelson-Grey views problematic response classes as being maintained by reinforcing consequences or through rule governance.

Socialisation

Over the last few decades, studies have supported the idea that contingent use of reinforcement and punishment over extended periods of time lead to the development of both pro-social and anti-social behaviours. However research has shown that reinforcement is more effective than punishment when teaching behaviour to a child. It has also been shown that modelling is more effective than “preaching” in developing pro-social behaviour in children. Rewards have also been closely studied in relation to the development of social behaviours in children. The building of self-control, empathy, and cooperation has all implicated rewards as a successful tactic, while sharing has been strongly linked with reinforcement.

The development of social skills in children is largely affected in that classroom setting by both teachers and peers. Reinforcement and punishment play major roles here as well. Peers frequently reinforce each other’s behaviour. One of the major areas that teachers and peers influence is sex-typed behaviour, while peers also largely influence modes of initiating interaction, and aggression. Peers are more likely to punish cross-gender play while at the same time reinforcing play specific to gender. Some studies found that teachers were more likely to reinforce dependent behaviour in females.

Behavioural principles have also been researched in emerging peer groups, focusing on status. Research shows that it takes different social skills to enter groups than it does to maintain or build one’s status in groups. Research also suggests that neglected children are the least interactive and aversive, yet remain relatively unknown in groups. Children suffering from social problems do see an improvement in social skills after behaviour therapy and behaviour modification (refer to applied behaviour analysis). Modelling has been successfully used to increase participation by shy and withdrawn children. Shaping of socially desirable behaviour through positive reinforcement seems to have some of the most positive effects in children experiencing social problems.

In the development of anti-social behaviour, aetiological models for anti-social behaviour show considerable correlation with negative reinforcement and response matching (refer to matching law). Escape conditioning, through the use of coercive behaviour, has a powerful effect on the development and use of future anti-social tactics. The use of anti-social tactics during conflicts can be negatively reinforced and eventually seen as functional for the child in moment to moment interactions. Anti-social behaviours will also develop in children when imitation is reinforced by social approval. If approval is not given by teachers or parents, it can often be given by peers. An example of this is swearing. Imitating a parent, brother, peer, or a character on TV, a child may engage in the anti-social behaviour of swearing. Upon saying it they may be reinforced by those around them which will lead to an increase in the anti-social behaviour. The role of stimulus control has also been extensively explored in the development of anti-social behaviour. Recent behavioural focus in the study of anti-social behaviour has been a focus on rule-governed behaviour. While correspondence for saying and doing has long been an interest for behaviour analysts in normal development and typical socialisation, recent conceptualisations have been built around families that actively train children in anti-social rules, as well as children who fail to develop rule control.

Developmental Depression with Origins in Childhood

Behavioural theory of depression was outlined by Charles Ferster. A later revision was provided by Peter Lewisohn and Hyman Hops. Hops continued the work on the role of negative reinforcement in maintaining depression with Anthony Biglan. Additional factors such as the role of loss of contingent relations through extinction and punishment were taken from early work of Martin Seligman. The most recent summary and conceptual revisions of the behavioural model was provided by Johnathan Kanter. The standard model is that depression has multiple paths to develop. It can be generated by five basic processes, including: lack or loss of positive reinforcement, direct positive or negative reinforcement for depressive behaviour, lack of rule-governed behaviour or too much rule-governed behaviour, and/or too much environmental punishment. For children, some of these variables could set the pattern for lifelong problems. For example, a child whose depressive behaviour functions for negative reinforcement by stopping fighting between parents could develop a lifelong pattern of depressive behaviour in the case of conflicts. Two paths that are particularly important are:

Lack or loss of reinforcement because of missing necessary skills at a developmental cusp point; or
The failure to develop adequate rule-governed behaviour.

For the latter, the child could develop a pattern of always choosing the short-term small immediate reward (i.e. escaping studying for a test) at the expense of the long-term larger reward (passing courses in middle school). The treatment approach that emerged from this research is called behavioural activation.

In addition, use of positive reinforcement has been shown to improve symptoms of depression in children. Reinforcement has also been shown to improve the self-concept in children with depression comorbid with learning difficulties. Rawson and Tabb (1993) used reinforcement with 99 students (90 males and 9 females) aged from 8 to 12 with behaviour disorders in a residential treatment program and showed significant reduction in depression symptoms compared to the control group.

Cognitive Behaviour

As children get older, direct control of contingencies is modified by the presence of rule-governed behaviour. Rules serve as an establishing operation and set a motivational stage as well as a discrimintative stage for behaviour. While the size of the effects on intellectual development are less clear, it appears that stimulation does have a facilitative effect on intellectual ability. However, it is important to be sure not to confuse the enhancing effect with the initial causal effect. Some data exists to show that children with developmental delays take more learning trials to acquire in material.

Learned Units and Developmental Retardation

Behaviour analysts have spent considerable time measuring learning in both the classroom and at home. In these settings, the role of a lack of stimulation has often been evidenced in the development of mild and moderate mental retardation. Recent work has focused on a model of “developmental retardation,”. an area that emphasizes cumulative environmental effects and their role in developmental delays. To measure these developmental delays, subjects are given the opportunity to respond, defined as the instructional antecedent, and success is signified by the appropriate response and/or fluency in responses. Consequently, the learned unit is identified by the opportunity to respond in addition to given reinforcement.

One study employed this model by comparing students’ time of instruction was in affluent schools to time of instruction in lower income schools. Results showed that lower income schools displayed approximately 15 minutes less instruction than more affluent schools due to disruptions in classroom management and behaviour management. Altogether, these disruptions culminated into two years worth of lost instructional time by grade 10. The goal of behaviour analytic research is to provide methods for reducing the overall number of children who fall into the retardation range of development by behavioural engineering.

Hart and Risely (1995, 1999) have completed extensive research on this topic as well. These researchers measured the rates of parent communication with children of the ages of 2-4 years and correlated this information with the IQ scores of the children at age 9. Their analyses revealed that higher parental communication with younger children was positively correlated with higher IQ in older children, even after controlling for race, class, and socio-economic status. Additionally, they concluded a significant change in IQ scores required intervention with at-risk children for approximately 40 hours per week.

Class Formation

The formation of class-like behaviour has also been a significant aspect in the behavioural analysis of development. This research has provided multiple explanations to the development and formation of class-like behaviour, including primary stimulus generalisation, an analysis of abstraction, relational frame theory, stimulus class analysis (sometimes referred to as recombinative generalisation), stimulus equivalence, and response class analysis. Multiple processes for class-like formation provide behaviour analysts with relatively pragmatic explanations for common issues of novelty and generalisation.

Responses are organised based upon the particular form needed to fit the current environmental challenges as well as the functional consequences. An example of large response classes lies in contingency adduction, which is an area that needs much further research, especially with a focus on how large classes of concepts shift. For example, as Piaget observed, individuals have a tendency at the pre-operational stage to have limits in their ability to preserve information. While children’s training in the development of conservation skills has been generally successful, complications have been noted. Behaviour analysts argue that this is largely due to the number of tool skills that need to be developed and integrated. Contingency adduction offers a process by which such skills can be synthesized and which shows why it deserves further attention, particularly by early childhood interventionists.

Autism

Ferster (1961) was the first researcher to posit a behaviour analytic theory for autism. Ferster’s model saw autism as a by-product of social interactions between parent and child. Ferster presented an analysis of how a variety of contingencies of reinforcement between parent and child during early childhood might establish and strengthen a repertoire of behaviours typically seen in children diagnosed with autism. A similar model was proposed by Drash and Tutor (1993), who developed the contingency-shaped or behavioural incompatibility theory of autism. They identified at least six reinforcement paradigms that may contribute to significant deficiencies in verbal behaviour typically characteristic of children diagnosed as autistic. They proposed that each of these paradigms may also create a repertoire of avoidance responses that could contribute to the establishment of a repertoire of behaviour that would be incompatible with the acquisition of age-appropriate verbal behaviour. More recent models attribute autism to neurological and sensory models that are overly worked and subsequently produce the autistic repertoire. Lovaas and Smith (1989) proposed that children with autism have a mismatch between their nervous systems and the environment, while Bijou and Ghezzi (1999) proposed a behavioural interference theory. However, both the environmental mismatch model and the inference model were recently reviewed, and new evidence shows support for the notion that the development of autistic behaviours are due to escape and avoidance of certain types of sensory stimuli. However, most behavioural models of autism remain largely speculative due to limited research efforts.

Role in Education

One of the largest impacts of behaviour analysis of child development is its role in the field of education. In 1968, Siegfried Englemann used operant conditioning techniques in a combination with rule learning to produce the direct instruction curriculum. In addition, Fred S. Keller used similar techniques to develop programmed instruction. B.F. Skinner developed a programmed instruction curriculum for teaching handwriting. One of Skinner’s students, Ogden Lindsley, developed a standardized semilogrithmic chart, the “Standard Behaviour Chart,” now “Standard Celeration Chart,” used to record frequencies of behaviour, and to allow direct visual comparisons of both frequencies and changes in those frequencies (termed “celeration”). The use of this charting tool for analysis of instructional effects or other environmental variables through the direct measurement of learner performance has become known as precision teaching.

Behaviour analysts with a focus on behavioural development form the basis of a movement called positive behaviour support (PBS). PBS has focused on building safe schools.

In education, there are many different kinds of learning that are implemented to improve skills needed for interactions later in life. Examples of this differential learning include social and language skills. According to the NWREL (Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory), too much interaction with technology will hinder a child’s social interactions with others due to its potential to become an addiction and subsequently lead to anti-social behaviour. In terms of language development, children will start to learn and know about 5-20 different words by 18 months old.

Critiques of Behavioural Approach and New Developments

Behaviour analytic theories have been criticized for their focus on the explanation of the acquisition of relatively simple behaviour (i.e. the behaviour of nonhuman species, of infants, and of individuals who are intellectually disabled or autistic) rather than of complex behaviour. Michael Commons continued behaviour analysis’s rejection of mentalism and the substitution of a task analysis of the particular skills to be learned. In his new model, Commons has created a behaviour analytic model of more complex behaviour in line with more contemporary quantitative behaviour analytic models called the model of hierarchical complexity. Commons constructed the model of hierarchical complexity of tasks and their corresponding stages of performance using just three main axioms.

In the study of development, recent work has been generated regarding the combination of behaviour analytic views with dynamical systems theory. The added benefit of this approach is its portrayal of how small patterns of changes in behaviour in terms of principles and mechanisms over time can produce substantial changes in development.

Current research in behaviour analysis attempts to extend the patterns learned in childhood and to determine their impact on adult development.

Professional Organisations

The Association for Behaviour Analysis International has a special interest group for the behaviour analysis of child development.

Doctoral level behaviour analysts who are psychologists belong to American Psychological Association’s division 25: behaviour analysis.

The World Association for Behaviour Analysis has a certification in behaviour therapy. The exam draws questions on behavioural theories of child development as well as behavioural theories of child psychopathology.

What is Single-Subject Research?

Published on 12/01/2021 by Andrew Marshall2 Comments

Introduction

Single-subject research is a group of research methods that are used extensively in the experimental analysis of behaviour and applied behaviour analysis with both human and non-human participants. Principal methods in this type of research are: A-B-A-B designs, Multi-element designs, Multiple Baseline designs, Repeated acquisition designs, Brief experimental designs and Combined designs.

These methods form the heart of the data collection and analytic code of behaviour analysis. Behaviour analysis is data driven, inductive, and disinclined to hypothetico-deductive methods.

Experimental Questions

Experimental questions are decisive in determining the nature of the experimental design to be selected. There are four basic types of experimental questions: demonstration, comparison, parametric, and component. A demonstration is “Does A cause or influence B?”. A comparison is “Does A1 or A2 cause or influence B more?”. A parametric question is “How much of A will cause how much change or influence on B?”. A component question is “Which part of A{1,2,3} – A1 or A2 or A3… – causes or influences B?” where A is composed of parts that can be separated and tested.

The A-B-A-B design is useful for demonstration questions.

A-B-A-B

A-B

An AB design is a two-part or phase design composed of a baseline (“A” phase) with no changes and a treatment or intervention (“B”) phase. If there is a change then the treatment may be said to have had an effect. However, it is subject to many possible competing hypotheses, making strong conclusions difficult. Variants on the AB design introduce ways to control for the competing hypotheses to allow for stronger conclusions.

Reversal or A-B-A

The reversal design is the most powerful of the single-subject research designs showing a strong reversal from baseline (“A”) to treatment (“B”) and back again. If the variable returns to baseline measure without a treatment then resumes its effects when reapplied, the researcher can have greater confidence in the efficacy of that treatment. However, many interventions cannot be reversed, some for ethical reasons (e.g. involving self-injurious behaviour, smoking) and some for practical reasons (they cannot be unlearned, like a skill).

Further ethics notes: It may be unethical to end an experiment on a baseline measure if the treatment is self-sustaining and highly beneficial and/or related to health. Control condition participants may also deserve the benefits of research once all data has been collected. It is a researcher’s ethical duty to maximise benefits and to ensure that all participants have access to those benefits when possible.

A-B-C

The A-B-C design is a variant that allows for the extension of research questions around component, parametric and comparative questions.

Multi-element

Multi-element designs sometimes referred to as alternating-treatment designs are used in order to ascertain the comparative effect of two treatments. Two treatments are alternated in rapid succession and correlated changes are plotted on a graph to facilitate comparison.

Multiple Baseline

The multiple baseline design was first reported in 1960 as used in basic operant research. It was applied in the late 1960s to human experiments in response to practical and ethical issues that arose in withdrawing apparently successful treatments from human subjects. In it two or more (often three) behaviours, people or settings are plotted in a staggered graph where a change is made to one, but not the other two, and then to the second, but not the third behaviour, person or setting. Differential changes that occur to each behaviour, person or in each setting help to strengthen what is essentially an AB design with its problematic competing hypotheses.

Repeated Acquisition

In addition to multiple baseline designs, a way to deal with problematic reversibility is the use of repeated acquisitions.

Brief

A designed favoured by applied settings researchers where logistical challenges, time and other limits make research difficult are variants of multi-element and A-B-A-B type designs.

Combined

The combined design has arisen from a need to obtain answers to more complex research questions. Combining two or more single-case designs, such as A-B-A-B and multiple baseline, may produce such answers.

Multiple-Probe

Popular in Verbal Behaviour research, the multiple-probe research design has elements of the other research designs.

Changing-Criterion

In a changing-criterion research design a criterion for reinforcement is changed across the experiment to demonstrate a functional relation between the reinforcement and the behaviour.

What is the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour?

Published on 12/01/2021 by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

The Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour was founded in 1957 by a group of researchers in the field of behaviourism.

Background

It publishes the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour and the Journal of Applied Behaviour Analysis.

The Certificate of Incorporation (dated 29 October 1957) of the society states that:

The purpose and objects of this corporation shall be to encourage, foster, and promote the advancement of the science of experimental analysis of behavior; the promotion of research in the said science and the increase and diffusion of knowledge of the said science by the conduct of a program of education by meetings, conferences and symposia, and by the publication of journals, papers, periodicals and reports.

The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour was established to meet the needs of those who were attracted to the behaviour-analytic approach but were unhappy with the lack of a journal specialising in that rapidly growing area. As described on its inside front page ever since, the journal is “primarily for the original publication of experiments relevant to the behaviour of individual organisms.” It started as a quarterly in 1958 but has appeared bimonthly since 1964. The initial Board of Editors also served as the first Board of Directors of the society.

Journal

In 1968, the society established the Journal of Applied Behaviour Analysis for “the original publication of reports of experimental research involving applications of the experimental analysis of behaviour to problems of social importance.”

It appears quarterly.

What is the Association for Behaviour Analysis International?

Published on 12/01/2021 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

The Association for Behaviour Analysis International (ABAI) is a professional association of psychologists, educators, and practitioners whose scholarship and practice derive from the work of B.F. Skinner.

ABAI organises conferences in the US and abroad, publishes journals, and offers accreditation programs for behaviour analysis training programmes. As of March 2021, ABAI has 97 regional associate chapters both in the United States and abroad, many of which offer their own annual conferences. As of 2019, ABAI had over 9,000 members and membership in its affiliate chapters was greater than 28,000.

Refer to Clinical Behaviour Analysis, Applied Behaviour Analysis, and Licensed Behaviour Analyst.

Brief History

The Association for Behaviour Analysis International (ABAI) was founded in 1974 as the MidWestern Association for Behaviour Analysis (MABA) to serve as an interdisciplinary group of professionals, paraprofessionals, and students. Behaviour analysis was well-represented in the Midwest of the US, but many behaviour analysts were disappointed with the level of support their relatively new field received at the existing psychology conferences. Gerald Mertens and Israel Goldiamond organised the first two-day conference, which was held at the University of Chicago, and speakers included, Sidney Bijou, James Dinsmoor, Roger Ulrich and Goldiamond.

MABA’s first headquarters were located on the campus of Western Michigan University (WMU) in Kalamazoo, Michigan. By 1977, the annual conference was extended four days and included 550 events, and MABA had grown to 1,190 members from 42 states and five foreign countries.

In 1978, MABA began publishing its first journal, The Behaviour Analyst (renamed Perspectives in Behavioural Science in 2018), and in 1979, the organisation changed its name to the Association for Behaviour Analysis (ABA), subsequently adopting the name Association for Behaviour Analysis International (ABAI). In 2001, it sponsored its first international meeting in Venice, Italy.

Association for Behaviour Analysis (ABA) began offering APA credits for the first time in 1994, at their 20th Annual Convention in Atlanta, GA. While the BACB solidified itself in the field, ABA offered its first BACB credits in 2000 at their 26th Annual Convention in Washington, DC.

Activities

Conferences

ABAI organises conferences related to the theory and practice of behaviour analysis. In addition to the annual conference, which is held at a location in the US or Canada, every other year, ABAI hosts an international conference. The association also holds an annual autism conference and has hosted several single-track conferences on topics of special interest to behaviour analysts, such as theory and philosophy, climate change, behavioural economics, and education.

Many conference sessions offer approved continuing education credits (CEUs) for practitioners who wish to maintain their professional certification. Among the organisations that approve ABAI presentations for CEU credit are the American Psychological Association, the National Association of School Psychologists, and the Behaviour Analyst Certification Board.

Accreditation Programme

ABAI operates an accreditation programme for universities offering master’s and doctoral degrees in behaviour analysis. Degree programs that achieve ABAI accreditation meet the organization’s standards of training and will satisfy the Behaviour Analyst Certification Board requirements to achieve certification as a behaviour analyst.

Society for the Advancement of Behaviour Analysis

ABAI is supported by the Society for the Advancement of Behaviour Analysis (SABA), a 501(c)(3) organisation that accepts tax-exempt charitable contributions. SABA maintains a number of funds to support research in child development, international development, public awareness of behavioural science, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. SABA also provides grants to support student research, student travel to the annual ABAI conference, and graduate research focused on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Position Statements

As of 2021, ABAI had released six policy statements on: right to effective behavioural treatment (1989), student’s right to effective education (1990), facilitated communication (1995), restraint and seclusion (2010), sexual harassment (2019), and commitment to equity (2020).

Awards

SABA administers an awards programme at the annual convention of ABAI that recognises distinguished service to behaviour analysis, scientific translation, international dissemination of behaviour analysis, effective presentation of behaviour analysis in the mass media, and enduring programmatic contributions to behaviour analysis. Past recipients of the award for distinguished service to behaviour analysis include Sidney Bijou, James Dinsmoor, A. Charles Catania, Jack Michael and Murray Sidman.

Journals

The Association of Applied Behaviour Analysis International publishes six peer-reviewed journals.

Perspectives on Behaviour Science, is ABAI’s first journal, published from 1978-2017 as The Behaviour Analyst. It is a semiannual journal publishing articles on theoretical, experimental, and applied topics in behaviour analysis, including literature reviews, re-interpretations of published data, and articles on behaviourism as a philosophy.
The Analysis of Verbal Behaviour is a collection of experiments and theoretical papers regarding verbal behaviour and applied behaviour analysis.
Behaviour Analysis in Practice is a peer-reviewed journal that includes articles on how to efficiently practice applied behaviour analysis.
The Psychological Record includes articles concerning behavioural analysis, behavioural science, and behaviour theory. It was founded in 1937 by Jacob Robert Kantor. Its first experimental area editor was B.F. Skinner. After being published most recently at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, the journal was adopted as an official publication of ABAI. The Psychological Record publishes empirical and conceptual articles related to the field of behaviour analysis, behaviour science, and behaviour theory.
Behaviour and Social Issues, is an interdisciplinary journal publishing articles analysing human social behaviour, particularly with regard to understanding and influencing significant social problems such as social justice, human rights, and sustainability.
Education and Treatment of Children.

What is Applied Behaviour Analysis?

Published on 11/04/2021 by Andrew Marshall7 Comments

Introduction

Applied behaviour analysis (ABA), also called behavioural engineering, is a scientific technique concerned with applying empirical approaches based upon the principles of respondent and operant conditioning to change behaviour of social significance. It is the applied form of behaviour analysis; the other two forms are radical behaviourism (or the philosophy of the science) and the experimental analysis of behaviour (or basic experimental research).

The name applied behaviour analysis has replaced behaviour modification because the latter approach suggested attempting to change behaviour without clarifying the relevant behaviour-environment interactions. In contrast, ABA changes behaviour by first assessing the functional relationship between a targeted behaviour and the environment. Further, the approach often seeks to develop socially acceptable alternatives for aberrant behaviours.

ABA has been utilised in a range of areas, including applied animal behaviour, schoolwide positive behaviour support, classroom instruction, structured and naturalistic early behavioural interventions for autism, paediatric feeding therapy, rehabilitation of brain injury, dementia, fitness training, substance abuse, phobias, tics, and organisational behaviour management.

ABA is considered to be controversial by some within the autism rights movement due to a perception that it emphasizes indistinguishability instead of acceptance and a history of, in some embodiments of ABA and its predecessors, the use of aversives such as electric shocks.

Definition

ABA is an applied science devoted to developing procedures which will produce observable changes in behaviour. It is to be distinguished from the experimental analysis of behaviour, which focuses on basic experimental research, but it uses principles developed by such research, in particular operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Behaviour analysis adopts the viewpoint of radical behaviourism, treating thoughts, emotions, and other covert activity as behaviour that is subject to the same rules as overt responses. This represents a shift away from methodological behaviourism, which restricts behaviour-change procedures to behaviours that are overt, and was the conceptual underpinning of behaviour modification.

Behaviour analysts also emphasize that the science of behaviour must be a natural science as opposed to a social science. As such, behaviour analysts focus on the observable relationship of behaviour with the environment, including antecedents and consequences, without resort to “hypothetical constructs”.

Brief History

The beginnings of ABA can be traced back to Teodoro Ayllon and Jack Michael’s study “The psychiatric nurse as a behavioural engineer” (1959) that they published in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour (JEAB). Ayllon and Michael were training the staff and nurses at a psychiatric hospital how to use a token economy based on the principles of operant conditioning for patients with schizophrenia and intellectual disability, which led to researchers at the University of Kansas to start the Journal of Applied Behaviour Analysis (JABA) in 1968.

A group of faculty and researchers at the University of Washington, including Donald Baer, Sidney W. Bijou, Bill Hopkins, Jay Birnbrauer, Todd Risley, and Montrose Wolf, applied the principles of behaviour analysis to instruct developmentally disabled children, manage the behaviour of children and adolescents in juvenile detention centres, and organise employees who required proper structure and management in businesses, among other situations. In 1968, Baer, Bijou, Risley, Birnbrauer, Wolf, and James Sherman joined the Department of Human Development and Family Life at the University of Kansas, where they founded the Journal of Applied Behaviour Analysis.

Notable graduate students from the University of Washington include Robert Wahler, James Sherman, and Ivar Lovaas. Lovaas established the UCLA Young Autism Project while teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1965, Lovaas published a series of articles that outlined his system for coding observed behaviours, described a pioneering investigation of the antecedents and consequences that maintained a problem behaviour, and relied upon the methods of errorless learning that was initially devised by Charles Ferster to teach nonverbal children to speak. Lovaas also described how to use social (secondary) reinforcers, teach children to imitate, and what interventions (including electric shocks) may be used to reduce aggression and life-threatening self-injury.

In 1987, Lovaas published the study, “Behavioural treatment and normal educational and intellectual functioning in young autistic children”. The experimental group in this study received an average of 40 hours per week in a 1:1 teaching setting at a table using errorless discrete trial training (DTT). The treatment is done at home with parents involved in every aspect of treatment, and the curriculum is highly individualised with a heavy emphasis on teaching eye contact, fine and gross motor imitation, and language. The use of aversives and reinforcement, were used to motivate learning and reduce non-desired behaviours. The outcome of this study indicated 47% of the experimental group (9/19) went on to lose their autism diagnosis and were described as indistinguishable from their typical adolescent peers. This included passing regular education without assistance and making and maintaining friends. These gains were maintained as reported in the 1993 study, “Long-term outcome for children with autism who received early intensive behavioural treatment”. Lovaas’ work went on to be recognised by the US Surgeon General in 1999, and his research were replicated in university and private settings. The “Lovaas Method” went on to become known as early intensive behavioural intervention (EIBI), or 30 to 40 hours per week of DTT.

The original Lovaas method focused heavily on the use of aversives; utilising shocks, beating children, ignoring children, withholding food, etc. Using shocks, ignoring children, withholding food and toys, and spraying children with water are still used today and considered ethical by the Behaviour Analyst Certification Board (BACB). Another criticism of the Lovaas Method is Lovaas’s connection with gay conversion therapy, using his own behaviour modification techniques seen in ABA in The Feminine Boy project. Similarities in gay conversion therapy to making boys indistinguishable from their heterosexual peers have been drawn with Lovaas’ belief that ABA makes “autistic children indistinguishable from their normal friends.” He infamously said “‘[Y]ou start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child…they are not people in the psychological sense”.

Over the years, “behaviour analysis” gradually superseded “behaviour modification”; that is, from simply trying to alter problematic behaviour, behaviour analysts sought to understand the function of that behaviour, what antecedents promote and maintain it, and how it can be replaced by successful behaviour. This analysis is based on careful initial assessment of a behaviour’s function and a testing of methods that produce changes in behaviour.

While ABA seems to be intrinsically linked to autism intervention, it is also used in a broad range of other situations. Recent notable areas of research in JABA include autism, classroom instruction with typically developing students, paediatric feeding therapy, and substance-use disorders. Other applications of ABA include applied animal behaviour, consumer behaviour analysis, behavioural medicine, behavioural neuroscience, clinical behaviour analysis, forensic behaviour analysis, increasing job safety and performance, schoolwide positive behaviour support, and contact desensitisation for phobias.

Characteristics

Baer, Wolf, and Risley’s 1968 article is still used as the standard description of ABA. It lists the following seven characteristics of ABA.

Applied: ABA focuses on the social significance of the behaviour studied. For example, a non-applied researcher may study eating behaviour because this research helps to clarify metabolic processes, whereas the applied researcher may study eating behaviour in individuals who eat too little or too much, trying to change such behaviour so that it is more acceptable to the persons involved.
Behavioural: ABA is pragmatic; it asks how it is possible to get an individual to do something effectively. To answer this question, the behaviour itself must be objectively measured. Verbal descriptions are treated as behaviour in themselves, and not as substitutes for the behaviour described.
Analytic: Behaviour analysis is successful when the analyst understands and can manipulate the events that control a target behaviour. This may be relatively easy to do in the lab, where a researcher is able to arrange the relevant events, but it is not always easy, or ethical, in an applied situation. Baer et al. outline two methods that may be used in applied settings to demonstrate control while maintaining ethical standards. These are the reversal design and the multiple baseline design. In the reversal design, the experimenter first measures the behaviour of choice, introduces an intervention, and then measures the behaviour again. Then, the intervention is removed, or reduced, and the behaviour is measured yet again. The intervention is effective to the extent that the behaviour changes and then changes back in response to these manipulations. The multiple baseline method may be used for behaviours that seem irreversible. Here, several behaviours are measured and then the intervention is applied to each in turn. The effectiveness of the intervention is revealed by changes in just the behaviour to which the intervention is being applied.
Technological: The description of analytic research must be clear and detailed, so that any competent researcher can repeat it accurately. Cooper et al. describe a good way to check this: Have a person trained in applied behaviour analysis read the description and then act out the procedure in detail. If the person makes any mistakes or has to ask any questions then the description needs improvement.
Conceptually Systematic: Behaviour analysis should not simply produce a list of effective interventions. Rather, to the extent possible, these methods should be grounded in behavioural principles. This is aided by the use of theoretically meaningful terms, such as “secondary reinforcement” or “errorless discrimination” where appropriate.
Effective: Though analytic methods should be theoretically grounded, they must be effective. If an intervention does not produce a large enough effect for practical use, then the analysis has failed
Generality: Behaviour analysts should aim for interventions that are generally applicable; the methods should work in different environments, apply to more than one specific behaviour, and have long-lasting effects.

Other proposed Characteristics

In 2005, Heward et al. suggested that the following five characteristics should be added:

Accountable: To be accountable means that ABA must be able to demonstrate that its methods are effective. This requires the repeatedly measuring the effect of interventions (success, failure or no effect at all), and, if necessary, making changes that improve their effectiveness.
Public: The methods, results, and theoretical analyses of ABA must be published and open to scrutiny. There are no hidden treatments or mystical, metaphysical explanations.
Doable: To be generally useful, interventions should be available to a variety of individuals, who might be teachers, parents, therapists, or even those who wish to modify their own behaviour. With proper planning and training, many interventions can be applied by almost anyone willing to invest the effort.
Empowering: ABA provides tools that give the practitioner feedback on the results of interventions. These allow clinicians to assess their skill level and build confidence in their effectiveness.
Optimistic: According to several leading authors, behaviour analysts have cause to be optimistic that their efforts are socially worthwhile, for the following reasons:
- The behaviours impacted by behaviour analysis are largely determined by learning and controlled by manipulable aspects of the environment.
- Practitioners can improve performance by direct and continuous measurements.
- As a practitioner uses behavioural techniques with positive outcomes, they become more confident of future success.
- The literature provides many examples of success in teaching individuals considered previously unteachable.

Concepts

Behaviour

Behaviour refers to the movement of some part of an organism that changes some aspect of the environment. Often, the term behaviour refers to a class of responses that share physical dimensions or functions, and in that case a response is a single instance of that behaviour. If a group of responses have the same function, this group may be called a response class. Repertoire refers to the various responses available to an individual; the term may refer to responses that are relevant to a particular situation, or it may refer to everything a person can do.

Operant Conditioning

Operant behaviour is the so-called “voluntary” behaviour that is sensitive to, or controlled by its consequences. Specifically, operant conditioning refers to the three-term contingency that uses stimulus control, in particular an antecedent contingency called the discriminative stimulus (SD) that influences the strengthening or weakening of behaviour through such consequences as reinforcement or punishment. The term is used quite generally, from reaching for a candy bar, to turning up the heat to escape an aversive chill, to studying for an exam to get good grades.

Respondent (Classical) Conditioning

Respondent (classical) conditioning is based on innate stimulus-response relationships called reflexes. In his famous experiments with dogs, Pavlov usually used the salivary reflex, namely salivation (unconditioned response) following the taste of food (unconditioned stimulus). Pairing a neutral stimulus, for example a bell (conditioned stimulus) with food caused the dog to elicit salivation (conditioned response). Thus, in classical conditioning, the conditioned stimulus becomes a signal for a biologically significant consequence. Note that in respondent conditioning, unlike operant conditioning, the response does not produce a reinforcer or punisher (e.g. the dog does not get food because it salivates).

Reinforcement

Reinforcement is the key element in operant conditioning and in most behaviour change programmes. It is the process by which behaviour is strengthened. If a behaviour is followed closely in time by a stimulus and this results in an increase in the future frequency of that behaviour, then the stimulus is a positive reinforcer. If the removal of an event serves as a reinforcer, this is termed negative reinforcement. There are multiple schedules of reinforcement that affect the future probability of behaviour.

Punishment

Punishment is a process by which a consequence immediately follows a behaviour which decreases the future frequency of that behaviour. As with reinforcement, a stimulus can be added (positive punishment) or removed (negative punishment). Broadly, there are three types of punishment: presentation of aversive stimuli (e.g. pain), response cost (removal of desirable stimuli as in monetary fines), and restriction of freedom (as in a ‘time out’). Punishment in practice can often result in unwanted side effects. Some other potential unwanted effects include resentment over being punished, attempts to escape the punishment, expression of pain and negative emotions associated with it, and recognition by the punished individual between the punishment and the person delivering it.

Extinction

Extinction is the technical term to describe the procedure of withholding/discontinuing reinforcement of a previously reinforced behaviour, resulting in the decrease of that behaviour. The behaviour is then set to be extinguished (Cooper et al.). Extinction procedures are often preferred over punishment procedures, as many punishment procedures are deemed unethical and in many states prohibited. Nonetheless, extinction procedures must be implemented with utmost care by professionals, as they are generally associated with extinction bursts. An extinction burst is the temporary increase in the frequency, intensity, and/or duration of the behaviour targeted for extinction. Other characteristics of an extinction burst include an extinction-produced aggression – the occurrence of an emotional response to an extinction procedure often manifested as aggression; and b) extinction-induced response variability – the occurrence of novel behaviours that did not typically occur prior to the extinction procedure. These novel behaviours are a core component of shaping procedures.

Discriminated Operant and Three-Term Contingency

In addition to a relation being made between behaviour and its consequences, operant conditioning also establishes relations between antecedent conditions and behaviours. This differs from the S-R formulations (If-A-then-B), and replaces it with an AB-because-of-C formulation. In other words, the relation between a behaviour (B) and its context (A) is because of consequences (C), more specifically, this relationship between AB because of C indicates that the relationship is established by prior consequences that have occurred in similar contexts. This antecedent-behaviour-consequence contingency is termed the three-term contingency. A behaviour which occurs more frequently in the presence of an antecedent condition than in its absence is called a discriminated operant. The antecedent stimulus is called a discriminative stimulus (SD). The fact that the discriminated operant occurs only in the presence of the discriminative stimulus is an illustration of stimulus control. More recently behaviour analysts have been focusing on conditions that occur prior to the circumstances for the current behaviour of concern that increased the likelihood of the behaviour occurring or not occurring. These conditions have been referred to variously as “Setting Event”, “Establishing Operations”, and “Motivating Operations” by various researchers in their publications.

Verbal Behaviour

B.F. Skinner’s classification system of behaviour analysis has been applied to treatment of a host of communication disorders. Skinner’s system includes:

Tact: A verbal response evoked by a non-verbal antecedent and maintained by generalised conditioned reinforcement.
Mand: Behaviour under control of motivating operations maintained by a characteristic reinforcer.
Intraverbals: Verbal behaviour for which the relevant antecedent stimulus was other verbal behaviour, but which does not share the response topography of that prior verbal stimulus (e.g. responding to another speaker’s question).
Autoclitic: Secondary verbal behaviour which alters the effect of primary verbal behaviour on the listener. Examples involve quantification, grammar, and qualifying statements (e.g. the differential effects of “I think…” vs. “I know…”)

Skinner’s use of behavioural techniques was famously critiqued by the linguist Noam Chomsky through an extensive breakdown of how Skinner’s view of language as behavioural simply can not explain the complexity of human language. This suggests that while behaviourist techniques can teach language, it is a very poor measure to explain language fundamentals. Considering Chomsky’s critiques, it may be more appropriate to teach language through a Speech language pathologist instead of a behaviourist.

For an assessment of verbal behaviour from Skinner’s system, refer to Assessment of Basic Language and Learning Skills.

Measuring Behaviour

When measuring behaviour, there are both dimensions of behaviour and quantifiable measures of behaviour. In applied behaviour analysis, the quantifiable measures are a derivative of the dimensions. These dimensions are repeatability, temporal extent, and temporal locus.

Repeatability

Response classes occur repeatedly throughout time – i.e. how many times the behaviour occurs.

Count is the number of occurrences in behaviour.
Rate/frequency is the number of instances of behaviour per unit of time.
Celeration is the measure of how the rate changes over time.

Temporal Extent

This dimension indicates that each instance of behaviour occupies some amount of time – i.e. how long the behaviour occurs.

Duration is the period of time over which the behaviour occurs.

Temporal Locus

Each instance of behaviour occurs at a specific point in time – i.e. when the behaviour occurs.

Response latency is the measure of elapsed time between the onset of a stimulus and the initiation of the response.
Inter-response time is the amount of time that occurs between two consecutive instances of a response class.

Derivative Measures

Derivative measures are unrelated to specific dimensions:

Percentage is the ratio formed by combining the same dimensional quantities.
Trials-to-criterion are the number of response opportunities needed to achieve a predetermined level of performance.

Analysing Behaviour Change

Experimental Control

In applied behaviour analysis, all experiments should include the following:

At least one participant.
At least one behaviour (dependent variable).
At least one setting.
A system for measuring the behaviour and ongoing visual analysis of data.
At least one treatment or intervention condition.
Manipulations of the independent variable so that its effects on the dependent variable may be quantitatively or qualitatively analysed.
An intervention that will benefit the participant in some way.

Methodologies Developed through ABA Research

Task Analysis

Task analysis is a process in which a task is analysed into its component parts so that those parts can be taught through the use of chaining: forward chaining, backward chaining and total task presentation. Task analysis has been used in organizational behaviour management, a behaviour analytic approach to changing the behaviours of members of an organization (e.g. factories, offices, or hospitals). Behavioural scripts often emerge from a task analysis. Bergan conducted a task analysis of the behavioural consultation relationship and Thomas Kratochwill developed a training program based on teaching Bergan’s skills. A similar approach was used for the development of microskills training for counsellors. Ivey would later call this “behaviourist” phase a very productive one and the skills-based approach came to dominate counselor training during 1970-1990. Task analysis was also used in determining the skills needed to access a career. In education, Englemann (1968) used task analysis as part of the methods to design the Direct Instruction curriculum.

Chaining

The skill to be learned is broken down into small units for easy learning. For example, a person learning to brush teeth independently may start with learning to unscrew the toothpaste cap. Once they have learned this, the next step may be squeezing the tube, etc.

For problem behaviour, chains can also be analysed and the chain can be disrupted to prevent the problem behaviour. Some behaviour therapies, such as dialectical behaviour therapy, make extensive use of behaviour chain analysis, but is not philosophically behaviour analytic.

Prompting

A prompt is a cue that is used to encourage a desired response from an individual. Prompts are often categorised into a prompt hierarchy from most intrusive to least intrusive, although there is some controversy about what is considered most intrusive, those that are physically intrusive or those that are hardest prompt to fade (e.g. verbal). In order to minimise errors and ensure a high level of success during learning, prompts are given in a most-to-least sequence and faded systematically. During this process, prompts are faded as quickly as possible so that the learner does not come to depend on them and eventually behaves appropriately without prompting.

Types of prompts Prompters might use any or all of the following to suggest the desired response:

Vocal prompts: Words or other vocalisations.
Visual prompts: A visual cue or picture.
Gestural prompts: A physical gesture.
Positional prompt: e.g. the target item is placed close to the individual.
Modelling: Modelling the desired response. This type of prompt is best suited for individuals who learn through imitation and can attend to a model.
Physical prompts: Physically manipulating the individual to produce the desired response. There are many degrees of physical prompts, from quite intrusive (e.g. the teacher places a hand on the learner’s hand) to minimally intrusive (e.g. a slight tap).

This is not an exhaustive list of prompts; the nature, number, and order of prompts are chosen to be the most effective for a particular individual.

Fading

The overall goal is for an individual to eventually not need prompts. As an individual gains mastery of a skill at a particular prompt level, the prompt is faded to a less intrusive prompt. This ensures that the individual does not become overly dependent on a particular prompt when learning a new behaviour or skill.

Thinning a Reinforcement Schedule

Thinning is often confused with fading. Fading refers to a prompt being removed, where thinning refers to an increase in the time or number of responses required between reinforcements. Periodic thinning that produces a 30% decrease in reinforcement has been suggested as an efficient way to thin. Schedule thinning is often an important and neglected issue in contingency management and token economy systems, especially when these are developed by unqualified practitioners (refer to professional practice of behaviour analysis).

Generalisation

Generalisation is the expansion of a student’s performance ability beyond the initial conditions set for acquisition of a skill. Generalisation can occur across people, places, and materials used for teaching. For example, once a skill is learned in one setting, with a particular instructor, and with specific materials, the skill is taught in more general settings with more variation from the initial acquisition phase. For example, if a student has successfully mastered learning colours at the table, the teacher may take the student around the house or school and generalise the skill in these more natural environments with other materials. Behaviour analysts have spent considerable amount of time studying factors that lead to generalisation.

Shaping

Shaping involves gradually modifying the existing behaviour into the desired behaviour. If the student engages with a dog by hitting it, then they could have their behaviour shaped by reinforcing interactions in which they touch the dog more gently. Over many interactions, successful shaping would replace the hitting behaviour with patting or other gentler behaviour. Shaping is based on a behaviour analyst’s thorough knowledge of operant conditioning principles and extinction. Recent efforts to teach shaping have used simulated computer tasks.

One teaching technique found to be effective with some students, particularly children, is the use of video modelling (the use of taped sequences as exemplars of behaviour). It can be used by therapists to assist in the acquisition of both verbal and motor responses, in some cases for long chains of behaviour.

Interventions Based on an FBA

Critical to behaviour analytic interventions is the concept of a systematic behavioural case formulation with a functional behavioural assessment or analysis at the core. This approach should apply a behaviour analytic theory of change (see Behavioural change theories). This formulation should include a thorough functional assessment, a skills assessment, a sequential analysis (behaviour chain analysis), an ecological assessment, a look at existing evidenced-based behavioural models for the problem behaviour (such as Fordyce’s model of chronic pain) and then a treatment plan based on how environmental factors influence behaviour. Some argue that behaviour analytic case formulation can be improved with an assessment of rules and rule-governed behaviour. Some of the interventions that result from this type of conceptualisation involve training specific communication skills to replace the problem behaviours as well as specific setting, antecedent, behaviour, and consequence strategies.

Use in the Treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders

ABA-based techniques are often used to teach adaptive behaviours or to diminish behaviours associated with autism, so much that ABA itself is often mistakenly considered to be synonymous with therapy for autism. According to a paper from 2007, it was considered to be an effective “intervention for challenging behaviours” by the American Academy of Paediatrics. A 2018 Cochrane review of five studies that compared treatment vs. control showed that ABA may be effective for some autistic children. However, the quality of the evidence was weak; the number of subjects in the studies was small, and only one study randomised subjects into control and treatment groups. ABA for autism may be limited by diagnostic severity and IQ.

Efficacy

Recent reviews of the efficacy of ABA-based techniques in autism include:

A 2007 clinical report of the American Academy of Paediatrics concluded that the benefit of ABA-based interventions in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) “has been well documented” and that “children who receive early intensive behavioural treatment have been shown to make substantial, sustained gains in IQ, language, academic performance, and adaptive behaviour as well as some measures of social behaviour”.
Researchers from the MIND Institute published an evidence-based review of comprehensive treatment approaches in 2008. On the basis of “the strength of the findings from the four best-designed, controlled studies”, they were of the opinion that one ABA-based approach (the Lovaas technique created by Ole Ivar Løvaas) is “well-established” for improving intellectual performance of young children with ASD.
A 2009 review of psycho-educational interventions for children with autism whose mean age was six years or less at intake found that five high-quality (“Level 1” or “Level 2”) studies assessed ABA-based treatments. On the basis of these and other studies, the author concluded that ABA is “well-established” and is “demonstrated effective in enhancing global functioning in pre-school children with autism when treatment is intensive and carried out by trained therapists”. However, the review committee also concluded that “there is a great need for more knowledge about which interventions are most effective”.
A 2009 paper included a descriptive analysis, an effect size analysis, and a meta-analysis of 13 reports published from 1987 to 2007 of early intensive behavioural intervention (EIBI, a form of ABA-based treatment with origins in the Lovaas technique) for autism. It determined that EIBI’s effect sizes were “generally positive” for IQ, adaptive behaviour, expressive language, and receptive language. The paper did note limitations of its findings including the lack of published comparisons between EIBI and other “empirically validated treatment programmes”.
In a 2009 systematic review of 11 studies published from 1987 to 2007, the researchers wrote “there is strong evidence that EIBI is effective for some, but not all, children with autism spectrum disorders, and there is wide variability in response to treatment”. Furthermore, any improvements are likely to be greatest in the first year of intervention.
A 2009 meta-analysis of nine studies published from 1987 to 2007 concluded that EIBI has a “large” effect on full-scale intelligence and a “moderate” effect on adaptive behaviour in autistic children.
A 2009 systematic review and meta-analysis by Spreckley and Boyd of four small-n 2000-2007 studies (involving a total of 76 children) came to different conclusions than the aforementioned reviews. Spreckley and Boyd reported that applied behaviour intervention (ABI), another name for EIBI, did not significantly improve outcomes compared with standard care of preschool children with ASD in the areas of cognitive outcome, expressive language, receptive language, and adaptive behaviour. In a letter to the editor, however, authors of the four studies meta-analysed claimed that Spreckley and Boyd had misinterpreted one study comparing two forms of ABI with each other as a comparison of ABI with standard care, which erroneously decreased the observed efficacy of ABI. Furthermore, the four studies’ authors raised the possibility that Spreckley and Boyd had excluded some other studies unnecessarily, and that including such studies could have led to a more favourable evaluation of ABI. Spreckley, Boyd, and the four studies’ authors did agree that large multi-site randomised trials are needed to improve the understanding of ABA’s efficacy in autism.
In 2011, investigators from Vanderbilt University under contract with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality performed a comprehensive review of the scientific literature on ABA-based and other therapies for autism spectrum disorders; the ABA-based therapies included the UCLA/Lovaas method and the Early Start Denver Model (the latter developed by Sally Rogers and Geraldine Dawson). They concluded that “both approaches were associated with … improvements in cognitive performance, language skills, and adaptive behaviour skills”. However, they also concluded that “the strength of evidence … is low”, “many children continue to display prominent areas of impairment”, “subgroups may account for a majority of the change”, there is “little evidence of practical effectiveness or feasibility beyond research studies”, and the published studies “used small samples, different treatment approaches and duration, and different outcome measurements”.
A 2019 review article concluded ABA proponents have utilised predominantly non-verbal and neurologically different, children who are not recognised under this paradigm to have their own thought processes, basic needs, preferences, style of learning, and psychological and emotional needs, for their experiment. This also indicates a missing voice of children and nonverbal people who cannot express their view on ABA.
A preliminary study indicates that there might be a publication bias against single-subject research studies that show that ABA is ineffective. Publication bias could lead to exaggerated estimates of intervention effects observed by single-subject studies.

Opposition to the Use in Treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder

The Autistic Community

The value of eliminating autistic behaviours is disputed by proponents of neurodiversity, who claim that it forces autistics to mask their true personalities on behalf of a narrow conception of normality. Autism advocates contend that it is cruel to try to make autistic people “normal” without consideration for how this may affect their well-being. Instead, these critics advocate for increased social acceptance of harmless autistic traits and therapies focused on improving quality of life. Julia Bascom of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) has said, “ASAN’s objection is fundamentally an ethical one. The stated end goal of ABA is an autistic child who is ‘indistinguishable from their peers’ – an autistic child who can pass as neurotypical. We don’t think that’s an acceptable goal. The end goal of all services, supports, interventions, and therapies an autistic child receives should be to support them in growing up into an autistic adult who is happy, healthy, and living a self-determined life.” A recent study examined perspectives of autistic adults that received ABA as children and found that the overwhelming majority reported that “behaviourist methods create painful lived experiences”, that ABA led to the “erosion of the true actualising self”, and that they felt they had a “lack of self-agency within interpersonal experiences.”

Professional Concerns

Professionals against ABA have voiced concerns over it’s evolution from Radical behaviourism. Radical behaviourism when applied views the individual as nothing more than a stimulus-response, that all of their experience can be reduced to a set of behavioural functions and manipulated through operant conditioning which only addresses “the surface level” and may only temporarily subdue aggressive behaviour under the guise that it is addressed because the subject appears content. Other concerns have focused on the “ideological zealotry” surrounding it, where ABA journals and websites have claimed that it “cures” autism and is “the only evidence based autism therapy” which has restricted access to other therapies that are also evidence based like TEACCH. The rhetoric surrounding the virtues of ABA has concerning effects including parents and professionals that claim that ABA “cured” their child’s autism, like one parent who “…claims that ABA had saved her children’s lives, likening it to chemotherapy as a treatment for cancer.”

Researchers have critiqued the leniency of the ABA ethical code, discussing how it does not restrict or clarify the “appropriate use of aversives”, it does not require competency so ABA therapists are “not required to take even a single class on autism, brain function or child development” , and its view of the client as the parent so requiring “client consent” only requires parental consent, not the person receiving services. Similarly, because the parent is seen as the client, the goals that are set under the ethical code are according to the client’s needs, which means focusing on changing autistic behaviours for the benefit of the parent and not the child is considered ethical.

Besides ethics, scientists also have concerns over the methodological issues rampant through the evidence that ABA claims supports the therapy. Early ABA research regularly employed poor methodology, including the initial study by Lovaas that supposedly supported the use of the therapy. The study by Lovaas used a self-selected sample of autistic children with high IQ and many early and present studies also employed this poor sampling with a lack of randomization, researcher-selected samples, samples pulled from researchers’ own clinics, and funding by ABA organizations with a clear conflict of interest for proving ABA is effective. Another concern is that ABA research only measures behaviour as a means of success, which has led to a lack of qualitative research about autistic experiences of ABA, a lack of research examining the internal effects of ABA and a lack of research for autistic children who are non-speaking or have comorbid intellectual disabilities (which is concerning considering this is one of the major populations that intensive ABA focuses on). Research is also lacking about whether ABA is effective long-term and very little longitudinal outcomes have been studied.

Use of Aversives

Some embodiments of applied behaviour analysis as devised by Ole Ivar Lovaas used aversives such as electric shocks to modify undesirable behaviour in their initial use in the 1970s, as well as slapping and shouting in the landmark 1987 study. Over time the use of aversives lessened and in 2012 their use was described as being inconsistent with contemporary practice. However, aversives have continued to be used in some ABA programs. In comments made in 2014 to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a clinician who previously worked at the Judge Rotenberg Educational Centre claimed that “all textbooks used for thorough training of applied behaviour analysts include an overview of the principles of punishment, including the use of electrical stimulation.” In 2020, the FDA banned the use of electrical stimulation devices used for self-injurious or aggressive behaviour and asserted that “Evidence indicates a number of significant psychological and physical risks are associated with the use of these devices, including worsening of underlying symptoms, depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, pain, burns and tissue damage.”

Major Journals

Applied behaviour analysts publish in many journals. Some examples of “core” behaviour analytic journals are:

Journal of Applied Behaviour Analysis.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour.
Behaviour Analysis: Research and Practice.
The Behaviour Analyst Today.
Perspectives on Behaviour Science (formerly The Behaviour Analyst until 2018).
The Psychological Record.
The Journal of Speech-Language Pathology and Applied Behaviour Analysis.
Journal of Early and Intensive Behaviour Interventions.
The International Journal of Behavioural Consultation and Therapy.
The Journal of Behavioural Assessment and Intervention in Children.
The Behavioural Development Bulletin.
Behaviour and Social Issues.
Journal of Behaviour Analysis of Sports, Health, Fitness, and Behavioural Medicine.
Journal of Behaviour Analysis of Offender and Victim: Treatment and Prevention.
Behavioural Health and Medicine.
Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
Behaviour Therapy.
Behaviour and Philosophy.

On This Day … 18 August

Published on 08/18/202108/15/2021 by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

People (Deaths)

1990 – B.F. Skinner, American psychologist and philosopher, invented the Skinner box (b. 1904).

B.F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner (20 March 1904 to 08 August 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviourist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974.

Education and Later Life

Skinner attended Hamilton College in New York with the intention of becoming a writer. He wrote for the school paper, but, as an atheist, he was critical of the traditional mores of his college. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts in English literature in 1926, he attended Harvard University, where he would later research and teach. While attending Harvard, a fellow student, Fred S. Keller, convinced Skinner that he could make an experimental science of the study of behaviour. This led Skinner to invent a prototype for the Skinner box and to join Keller in the creation of other tools for small experiments.

Contributions to Psychology

Behaviourism

Foundations of Skinner’s Behaviourism

Respondent behaviours are elicited by stimuli, and may be modified through respondent conditioning, often called classical (or pavlovian) conditioning, in which a neutral stimulus is paired with an eliciting stimulus. Such behaviours may be measured by their latency or strength.
Operant behaviours are ’emitted’, meaning that initially they are not induced by any particular stimulus. They are strengthened through operant conditioning (aka instrumental conditioning), in which the occurrence of a response yields a reinforcer. Such behaviours may be measured by their rate.

The idea that behaviour is strengthened or weakened by its consequences raises several questions. Among the most commonly asked are these:

Operant responses are strengthened by reinforcement, but where do they come from in the first place?
Once it is in the organism’s repertoire, how is a response directed or controlled?
How can very complex and seemingly novel behaviours be explained?

Origin of Operant Behaviour	Skinner’s answer to the first question was very much like Darwin’s answer to the question of the origin of a ‘new’ bodily structure, namely, variation and selection. Similarly, the behaviour of an individual varies from moment to moment; a variation that is followed by reinforcement is strengthened and becomes prominent in that individual’s behavioural repertoire. Shaping was Skinner’s term for the gradual modification of behaviour by the reinforcement of desired variations. Skinner believed that ‘superstitious’ behaviour can arise when a response happens to be followed by reinforcement to which it is actually unrelated. This can be seen, for example, with lucky socks that athletes wear. If they wear a pair of socks once and they win, but do not wear them for the next game and they lose, this reinforces the wearing of the lucky socks during games. The more it happens, the stronger the superstition will become.
Control of Operant Behaviour	The second question, “how is operant behaviour controlled?” arises because, to begin with, the behaviour is “emitted” without reference to any particular stimulus. Skinner answered this question by saying that a stimulus comes to control an operant if it is present when the response is reinforced and absent when it is not. For example, if lever-pressing only brings food when a light is on, a rat, or a child, will learn to press the lever only when the light is on. Skinner summarized this relationship by saying that a discriminative stimulus (e.g. light or sound) sets the occasion for the reinforcement (food) of the operant (lever-press). This three-term contingency (stimulus-response-reinforcer) is one of Skinner’s most important concepts, and sets his theory apart from theories that use only pair-wise associations.
Explaining Complex Behaviour	Most behaviour of humans cannot easily be described in terms of individual responses reinforced one by one, and Skinner devoted a great deal of effort to the problem of behavioural complexity. Some complex behaviour can be seen as a sequence of relatively simple responses, and here Skinner invoked the idea of “chaining”. Chaining is based on the fact, experimentally demonstrated, that a discriminative stimulus not only sets the occasion for subsequent behaviour, but it can also reinforce a behaviour that precedes it. That is, a discriminative stimulus is also a “conditioned reinforcer”. For example, the light that sets the occasion for lever pressing may also be used to reinforce “turning around” in the presence of a noise. This results in the sequence “noise – turn-around – light – press lever – food.” Much longer chains can be built by adding more stimuli and responses.

Operant Conditioning Chamber

An operant conditioning chamber (also known as a “Skinner box”) is a laboratory apparatus used in the experimental analysis of animal behaviour. It was invented by Skinner while he was a graduate student at Harvard University. As used by Skinner, the box had a lever (for rats), or a disk in one wall (for pigeons). A press on this “manipulandum” could deliver food to the animal through an opening in the wall, and responses reinforced in this way increased in frequency. By controlling this reinforcement together with discriminative stimuli such as lights and tones, or punishments such as electric shocks, experimenters have used the operant box to study a wide variety of topics, including schedules of reinforcement, discriminative control, delayed response (“memory”), punishment, and so on. By channelling research in these directions, the operant conditioning chamber has had a huge influence on course of research in animal learning and its applications. It enabled great progress on problems that could be studied by measuring the rate, probability, or force of a simple, repeatable response. However, it discouraged the study of behavioural processes not easily conceptualized in such terms – spatial learning, in particular, which is now studied in quite different ways, for example, by the use of the water maze.

Introduction

Biography

Education

Later Life

Contributions to Psychology

Behaviourism

Foundations of Skinner’s Behaviourism

1. Origin of Operant Behaviour

2. Control of operant Behaviour

3. Explaining Complex Behaviour

Reinforcement

Schedules of Reinforcement

Token Economy

Verbal Behaviour

Scientific Inventions

Operant Conditioning Chamber

Cumulative Recorder

Air Crib

Teaching Machine

Pigeon-Guided Missile

Verbal Summator

Influence on Teaching

Contributions to Social Theory

Political Views

“‘Superstition’ in the Pigeon” Experiment

Criticism

Noam Chomsky

Psychodynamic Psychology

J.E.R. Staddon

Introduction

Reciprocal Inhibition

Systematic Desensitisation

Achievements

Introduction

Applications in Clinical Psychology

Professional Organisations

Introduction

Brief History

Mission Statement

Professional Activities

Mental Health Professionals

About Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies

Special Interest Groups

Introduction

Brief History

Research Methods

Quantitative Behavioural Development

Research

Contingencies, Uncertainty, and Attachment

Motor Development

Imitation and Verbal Behavior

Development of Self

Socialisation

Anti-Social Behaviour

Developmental Depression with Origins in Childhood

Cognitive Behaviour

Learned Units and Developmental Retardation

Class Formation

Autism

Role in Education

Critiques of Behavioural Approach and New Developments

Professional Organisations

Introduction

Experimental Questions

A-B-A-B

A-B

Reversal or A-B-A

A-B-C

Multi-element

Multiple Baseline

Repeated Acquisition

Brief

Combined

Multiple-Probe

Changing-Criterion

Introduction

Background

Journal

Introduction

Brief History