Association for Behavior Analysis International

This invited panel is sponsored by ABAI’s new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Board; it represents the first of an annual series of program events highlighting topics identified as central to success in DEI achievements. After a brief review of the Board’s activities this year by Carol Pilgrim, the panel discussion will focus on the critical issue of recruitment efforts in DEI. Dr. Jomella Watson-Thompson will address recruitment strategies and challenges within practice and field settings, Dr. Sarah Bloom will discuss recruitment of university students, and Dr. Mike Perone will speak to recruitment practices targeting university faculty and administrators. Time for questions and comments from the audience will be included to allow for sharing relevant experiences and lessons learned. Future panels in the DEI series will target themes including retaining individuals once recruited, mentoring programs, inclusion and equity strategies at the organization level, inclusion and equity strategies at the individual level, and others.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Dr. Jomella Watson-Thompson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Behavioral Science, and the Director of the Center for Service Learning at the University of Kansas. She is also an Associate Director with the Center for Community Health and Development. She attained a Ph.D. in Behavioral Psychology and a Masters of Urban Planning from the University of Kansas. She applies behavioral science methods and interventions to improve how communities address issues related to community health and development. Her research has focused on behavioral-community approaches to neighborhood development, substance abuse prevention, and youth and community violence prevention. Dr. Thompson supports community-engaged scholarship using participatory approaches to address social determinants or factors that may contribute to disparities, particularly for marginalized groups and communities. She has researched the effects of community-based processes and behavioral-community interventions to promote mobilization and change in communities. Dr. Thompson has co-authored articles on community capacity-building, youth development, and prevention and received numerous federal, state and local funding awards. She is as an Associate Editor with Behavior and Social Issues. Dr. Thompson has extensive experience providing training, technical support and evaluation for coalitions and community-based initiatives.

This symposium gathers elements of what has been learned so far in a variety of areas of behavioral inquiry about the spread of the novel coronavirus and the effects of COVID-19. Because many of the phrases in our new lexicon—“social distancing,” “flattening the curve”—are calls to emit a particular set of behaviors (hand-washing, mask wearing) and to avoid others (proximity to others, face touching), with reinforcers conditional on group behavior (reduction in cases reported), behavior analysts are well suited to help inform our global responses. Papers in this symposium will cover diverse and interlocking topics: (1) how the pandemic has affected service delivery, and how behavior analysts can use telehealth ethically and effectively; (2) the necessity of looking beyond the proximal influences on mortality, such as pre-existing conditions and age, to those of harmful contextual conditions of disadvantaged populations; (3) behavioral economic methods to study social isolation decisions amidst different public health messages; and (4) the importance of behavior-based safety protocols that take into account current contingencies and limitations of training systems. The discussant will provide comments on each paper and highlight the links among them.

In the wake of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, ABA providers have been recognized as essential workers who are not subject to emergency shelter-at-home directives. This recognition has challenged behavior analysts to redesign treatment models to minimize the spread of the virus while also minimizing disruption to medically necessary services. As a result of federal and state guidance to insurance carriers to authorize telehealth for services that would otherwise be authorized for in-person treatment, ABA providers have had the option to shift their in-person models to telehealth, and behavior technicians are, for the first time, permitted to deliver 1:1 ABA remotely. The adoption of a telehealth model by both providers and families has been met with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success. The decision by some providers to continue home-based services or keep centers open has sparked discussions about ethics and revealed the need for clear guidance. As experts in shaping behavior, ABA providers have a critical role to play in minimizing spread of the virus by identifying, disseminating, and implementing best practices. With the integration of health and safety protocols into center-based practices and an effort to maintain telehealth options, ABA providers will be positioned to apply the lessons of COVID-19 to future events and preserve access to ABA in times of crisis.

The linchpin of COVID-19 mitigation has been social distancing (staying at least 2 m away from others, refraining from large gatherings). This tactic places human behavior squarely in the center of slowing the spread. Unfortunately, the rapid nature of this virus made proper behavioral analysis of social distancing nearly impossible for several reasons: 1) Acquiring steady-state responding is long and arduous. 2) Employing proper within-subject design considerations requires extended baselines for some individuals, reversals of policy potentially placing the public at substantial health risk, or manipulating experimental policies in rapid alternation. 3) Direct observation of social distancing is difficult, infeasible, and potentially unethical. However, contemporary behavioral economic research has generated hypothetical decision tasks to safely and swiftly assess behavior that is difficult to observe, risky, and/or ethically-challenging to study via prototypical operant methods. Backed by decades of operant study, behavioral economists evolved delay discounting and operant demand methods to safely proxy public health crises such as safe sexual practices, the opioid epidemic, and illicit drug trade. Rigorous validation methods suggest participant responses on such tasks significantly relate to actual/overt human responses. Toward this end, we adapted behavioral economic methods to safely surveil how a crowdsourced sample of adults would make social isolation decisions amidst different public health messages. Results suggest small but significant effects in favor of strategic messaging. Translated to potential population-level outcomes, these small effects have the potential to prevent the spread of infectious disease to a large portion of the population, and thereby help save lives.

Appropriate application of hygiene focused behaviors is the essential component that can make a change in today’s uncertain environment, where we suffer from the risks of COVID-19 infection and often feel powerless. Behavior Based Safety (B-BS) seems to be the only evidence-based method that ensures both high levels of production and high frequency and accuracy of prevention behavior. However, some aspects of the classic BBS process do not seem suitable for the current needs: presentations to managers, trade unions and workers, the constitution of a management team, the establishment and activities of a project group plus the training of observers and safety leaders take months before the start and further weeks before achieving a significant growth, indicating an acceptable success. Unlike the usual BBS processes, these long times and rituals would result in a huge risk for the infection to spread. Hence, late successes in terms of behavior would not be as successful in terms of results. A B-BS protocol that specifically focuses on COVID-19 situation has been developed in order to: a) be largely prepared in advance, b) allow the start of the process in just 4 days, c) provide an accurate measurement through bi-daily observations and, d) get the ultra-rapid ascent of the performance curves within 10 days from the start of the process. The protocol does not only focus on the appropriate implementation of the health requirements determined by companies and hospitals, but it also highlights the importance of when such behaviors actually need to be adopted in order to guarantee safety to individuals. Furthermore, through the adoption of specific checklist as templates and the daily/weekly supervision by a single skilled Behavior Analyst, it is possible to comply with all the scientific principles of BBS but transferred to new intervention technologies. Some insights will also be presented on whether to develop a superordinate system to verify the correct application of the protocol and its results, suitable by public institutions, downstream of a consensus conference of the scientific community on the guidelines to be suggested.

The first book-length treatment of RFT was published almost 20 years ago in 2001. In recent years, a number of conceptual advances have been made in the theory that have implications for its application in both educational and clinical domains. The first of these is the emergence of a type of periodic table for conceptualizing derived relational responding, known as the multi-dimensional, multi-level framework (the MDML). The presentation will explain how this framework provides opportunities for conceptualizing and remediating the core skills required for basic and advanced language and cognition in educational contexts. The second of these is a recent extension to the MDML framework, called the hyper-dimensional, multi-level framework (the HDML), that incorporates the orienting and evoking functions of stimuli that participate in derived relations. The presentation will explore how this recent extension connects basic research in RFT to clinical behavior analysis. Overall, the case will be made that although RFT should be seen as a work in progress, the theory continues to offer insights that will potentially improve functional-analytic methods for assessing and treating behavioral problems.

Behavior analysts with an interest in development and clinical behavior analysis.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Chrish is a Feldenkrais® practitioner (1998) who works with people of all ages and backgrounds, using movement as a primary tool for improving self-awareness, posture, thinking, voice, and overall health and wellness.  Chrish is also an actor, producer and director. She is passionate about using her diverse skills and background to help people find their optimal selves, innate dignity and composure. Chrish has been teaching the Feldenkrais Method® across the world for over 21 years in places such as the U.S., Ghana, Morocco, France, and Nepal.  During her teaching of the Feldenkrais Method, Chrish offers her students an enriching experience consisting of mental and physical improvement through natural, easy, and pleasurable ways of moving, using the brain’s amazing capacity to reorganize the body. In addition to working with performing artists and business executives alike, Chrish specializes in working with children with disabilities and trauma, and is a graduate of the Anat Baniel Neuromovement® Method for Children. Her studies with Ruthy Alon (Movement Intelligence) have also informed her work in many ways. Chrish has served three terms on the national Board of Directors of the Feldenkrais Guild® of North America and has chaired numerous annual Feldenkrais Method® conferences in North America.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students.

Miranda Morris, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist in private practice in Bethesda, MD. She treats a broad range of difficulties and specializes in trauma and anxiety. Miranda is a Peer Reviewed ACT Trainer and the founder of DC ACT, a organization with two primary objectives: 1) the dissemination of contextual behavioral therapies in the DC region and beyond, 2) the provision of support and training opportunities for aspiring ACT trainers. Miranda conducts regular workshops in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and related contextual behavioral therapies including Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP) and Clinical RFT. She currently serves on the Executive Board of the the Association of Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS) and is President Emeritus of the the Mid Atlantic Chapter of ACBS (MAC-ACBS).

The Wright Brothers first powered flight by a human lasted 12 seconds in 1903. A year later—using processes of variation, testing in the real world, and selection—the Wright brothers had an airplane that flew for 90 minutes—an improvement of 450 times. Today, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner—my favorite aircraft with nearly 3 million air miles between American, United and the deceased Pan Am in my life—can fly straight up during takeoff and fly from New York to Sydney non-stop. The aircraft improved a million times over since the first powered flight, and a result of continuous variation, testing and selection.

Applied Behavior Analysis, as conceived by Don Baer, Mont Wolf, and Todd Risley, was a technical methodology to achieve greater good that philosophers of many stripes posited. The contingencies of reinforcement on behavior analysts, determine how well and thoughtful the behavioral technology gets selected to achieve the vision conceived my dissertation advisors.

Reading through the older Journals of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA), it is clear that many of the second-generation grad students, like me, were thinking and testing ABA for improving all manner social and behavioral ills. If you flip through those JABA’s, you can find all sorts of studies that could have been turned into commercial, real-world products and services that could have made an enormous beneficial change in our precious blue water and green jewel in space and for its inhabitants. That said, most of the contingencies, were and still are, for publications and grants, rather than real-world change. Outside of that, today, the major employment is for behavioral specialists working with children with Autism or other disorders.

Only a few ABA “products” are true large-scale enterprises, one of those being the PAX Good Behavior Game® and Triple P Parenting both touching millions of people. Both PAX GBG and Triple P have deep roots in the original science, but are both sold, trained, and supported around the world to very diverse customers.

My talk is about how to build the First Carbon Based Valley of behavioral scientists (mimicking the Silicon Valley) to develop, test and disseminate practical, proven, cost-effective strategies rooted in behavioral science to be scaled up, sold, implemented well with sustainable effects on human wellbeing for whole populations—not just private practice clients or persons with diagnoses. I will use examples of the population-level strategies I’ve built my career on: working with Sesame Street, Implementing a National Safety Program in New Zealand, state-level multiple baseline on tobacco control, parenting interventions, mission readiness involving military families, reducing county-wide meth use, and, of course, the Good Behavior Game. All of this has been done in the context of a for-profit business engaging in continuous improvement based on the principles of applied behavior analysis.

My call to the audience is to create the First Carbon Valley—linking early career and established career behavioral scientists to better the world with commercialized, continuously-proven behavioral science. I am willing to help start and support this effort, which we have already begun to do informally.

Board certified behavior analysts; licensed psychologists; graduate students. 

Dennis D. Embry received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas, focused on using ABA for population-level efforts with Sesame Street and the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety—ultimately implementing that work throughout New Zealand. Dr. Embry is president/senior scientist at PAXIS Institute in Tucson, and co-investigator at both Johns Hopkins Center for Prevention and the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy.  Founded in 1998, PAXIS Institute is an international prevention science company, focused on preventing mental, emotional, behavioral and related physical disorders at population-level. He is a SAMHSA/CMHS National Advisory Council member, the board of the National Federation of Families for Children’s Mental Health, and the scientific advisory board of the Children’s Mental Health Network. In the 1990s, he implemented the first RCT at population-level to reduce youth violence (PeaceBuilders) using ABA principles. In 1999, he began replicating the longitudinal Hopkin’s studies of the Good Behavior Game. Today Dr. Embry’s prevention efforts affecting more than one million children in 38 states, multiple provinces of Canada, and EU countries with multiple studies showing population-level reduction of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders using PAX GBG and evidence-base kernels. As grad student, Dr. Baer (his advisor) asked Dennis why he wanted to study ABA having a political and history background, the answer: “I want to use science to make our world a better place for children.”