Perspectives on Behavior Science最新文献

Through the application of behavioral principles, behavior analysts seek to produce socially meaningful behavior change, defined as alterations in behavior that yield important outcomes immediately beneficial for the direct consumers of interventions and key stakeholders. Behavioral practitioners and researchers often engage in assessment and reporting of the meaningfulness of behavior change using social validity assessments. These assessments ensure that target behaviors are appropriately selected, intervention procedures are acceptable, and satisfactory outcomes are produced. The purpose of this review is to identify the current state of social validity within behavioral literature. We reviewed eight peer-reviewed journals between 2010 and 2020. We found that 47% of the intervention studies reviewed included a social validity assessment. Social validity assessment across journals has increased over time, with a significant rise from 2019 to 2020. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future work are discussed.

Relational frame theory (RFT) has historically been considered the basic explanatory science behind acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). However, some have argued that there has been an increasing separation between the two in recent years. The primary aim of the current article is to explore the extent to which RFT concepts, particularly those that have been proposed recently in the context of "up-dating" the theory, may be used to build stronger links between basic and applied behavior analyses in which there is a shared language of relatively precise technical terms. As an example of this strategy, we outline RFT process-based experimental and conceptual analyses of the impact of one of the most widely used sets of interventions employed in the ACT literature, defusion. In addition, we suggest a potential experimental methodology for analyzing the basic behavioral processes involved. Overall, the current article should be seen as part of a broader research agenda that aims to explore how RFT may be used to provide a functional-analytic abstractive treatment of the behavioral processes involved in human psychological suffering.

Four articles appear in a special section of the current issue of this journal. Each offers methods for introducing students to the history of behavior analysis. Their distinctive approaches vary from delineating a course addressed specifically to history, to combining issues in behavior analysis with those within related fields, or to splicing historical events or methods into various courses within behavior analysis. I sketch these briefly to encourage readers to read them directly before proposing that the history of our field can also be understood both as an overarching narrative and as a collection of stories. Boje (2008) distinguishes between the two by characterizing narrative as a rather formal, organized account, on the one hand, with stories, on the other hand, being more disorderly episodes of behavior-in-process. Each has its roles for introducing behavior analysis-and even for effectively understanding it ourselves-and thus, the best place of each within strategies of teaching, bears systematic examination. Although narrative supplies an organized account, stories more strongly engage the reader. Stories are especially effective at keeping the reader or listener engaged when they entail nested relations delineated by establishing stimuli. Besides offering a principle of organization, this formulation yields a strategy for using stories to enable the overarching narrative to sustain the reader's or listener's behavior.

Teaching the history of behavior analysis can be approached in many ways. One is to embed history in courses on the field's discipline and subdisciplines (e.g., its basic and applied sciences and their conceptual foundations) and practice. Another is to teach courses on the histories of the discipline and subdisciplines and practice. Still another is to teach a stand-alone course that includes these approaches and more (e.g., their integration, relations with other sciences, the influence of U.S. history and culture). The purpose of this article is to foster teaching the stand-alone course. It has four sections. The first addresses structural considerations: course titles, catalog descriptions, curricula, certification, and accreditation. The second addresses contextual considerations: purposes of teaching history; distinctions between history and historiography; and starting points in selecting textbooks. The third addresses functional considerations: course content organized by topics and their required and recommended readings. The fourth discusses how the course might be revised by eliminating topics (e.g., the Middle Ages), expanding topics and subtopics (e.g., the behaviorisms, philosophy of science) and adding topics and subtopics (e.g., institutional history; diversity, inclusion, and equity). Given the field's continuing development as a science, system, and practice and the rapid growth in its number and variety of its members, its history is becoming its common core-and a means of teaching it. The course elucidates the field's integrity; incorporates the entirety of its community of students, scientists, scholars, and practitioners; and advance its coherence as a cultural practice.

Resurgence is the return of a previously reinforced response as conditions worsen for an alternative response, such as the introduction of extinction, reductions in reinforcement, or punishment. As a procedure, resurgence has been used to model behavioral treatments and understand behavioral processes contributing both to relapse of problem behavior and flexibility during problem-solving. Identifying existing procedural and analytic methods arranged in basic/preclinical research could be used by basic and preclinical researchers to develop novel approaches to study resurgence, whereas translational and clinical researchers could identify potential approaches to combating relapse during behavioral interventions. Despite the study of resurgence for over half a century, there have been no systematic reviews of the basic/preclinical research on resurgence. To characterize the procedural and analytic methods used in basic/preclinical research on resurgence, we performed a systematic review consistent with PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses). We identified 120 articles consisting of 200 experiments that presented novel empirical research, examined operant behavior, and included standard elements of a resurgence procedure. We reported prevalence and trends in over 60 categories, including participant characteristics (e.g., species, sample size, disability), designs (e.g., single subject, group), procedural characteristics (e.g., responses, reinforcer types, control conditions), criteria defining resurgence (e.g., single test, multiple tests, relative to control), and analytic strategies (e.g., inferential statistics, quantitative analysis, visual inspection). We make some recommendations for future basic, preclinical, and clinical research based on our findings of this expanding literature.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40614-022-00361-y.

We reviewed five behavior-analytic concepts related to development: behavioral trap, cumulative-hierarchical learning (CHL), basic behavioral repertoire (BBR), pivotal behavior, and behavioral cusp. We searched for terminological variations of the concepts in the CAPES Journals Portal and selected for analysis 31 peer-reviewed articles written in English or Portuguese, published between 1967 and 2021, that contained the search terms in the title, abstract, or keywords and contextualized in the main text. We analysed the conventional usage of the concepts, their conceptual limitations, and the relationships among them, declared or implied, and proposed a conceptual integration of the concepts under a CHL framework, following a path indicated by other authors. We considered BBR, pivotal behavior, and behavioral cusp nonsynonymous concepts of the same logical category, referring to prerequisites for important developmental outcomes and targets of CHL-inspired interventions but defined by different effects on subsequent behavioral development. The three concepts can be conflated in a superset-subset fashion, based on the specificity of their effects: BBR consists of a broad class of behaviors that may affect subsequent learning; the subclass of BBRs characterized by far-reaching collateral effects are classified as pivotal behavior, and the subclass of pivotal behaviors whose potential effects include contact with unprecedented environmental contingencies are classified as behavioral cusps. We propose that behavioral traps be explicitly incorporated in the CHL framework, to emphasize the environmental component of the cumulative-hierarchical learning process. Our formulation seems to organize the conceptual field in a way that respects the conventional use of concepts, preserving their strengths. Regardless of the specific formulation, we believe that integrating the various development-related concepts within a cumulative-hierarchical learning framework can encourage a more proactive integration of findings, questions, and practices informed by each concept, which could lead to the mutual refinement of the corresponding conceptual and methodological frameworks, as well as new research questions and practical applications. In particular, we expect that explicitly incorporating behavioral traps within the CHL framework will provide a useful heuristic model to guide research on how natural environmental contingencies influence the systematic transformation of behavior across the lifespan.

This article introduces a special section of Perspectives on Behavior Science on teaching the history of behavior analysis. Although behavior is distinctive, behavior analysis is diverse, and the history of behavior analysis is deep, teaching the field's history often is not. The special section offers means for remedying this. The introduction has three sections. First, it relates the genesis of the special section: the 2018 meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis International and, before that, the 2015 meeting of Cheiron: The International Society for the History of the Behavioral Sciences. Second, it addresses the purposes-reasons and rationales-for teaching history, especially the history of behavior analysis. And third, it offers a prologue for teaching the field's history based on a review of what is taught or not in recent textbooks and handbooks on the field's basic and applied research and their conceptual foundations. In its conclusion, the article previews the section's other articles: (1) three exemplars on how history can be embedded in courses on the field's foregoing three subdisciplines; (2) an exemplar of teaching history in a stand-alone course on the field's history overall; (3) a discussion that addresses how to improve instruction in these courses through narrative methods; and (4) a conclusion about the present and future of teaching the field's history (e.g., giving the history of behavior analysis away).

People with intellectual disabilities (ID) are an often overlooked minority population. They experience significant health disparities and a high risk of exposure to traumatic events that can lead to stress-related disorders. Access to effective treatments for stress-related disorders is limited for people with ID due to a lack of appropriate assessments and common communication deficits. We discuss and analyze four factors that have led to these disparities: (1) historical segregation; (2) society's response to identification of trauma in vulnerable populations; (3) lack of accessible assessments and treatments for stress disorders in people with ID; and (4) communication deficits common in people with ID. Based on this analysis, we suggest behavior analysts advocate for policy development that would (1) increase acknowledgement of trauma in people with ID and mandate sharing of information about trauma across providers; (2) require observable and measurable goals be included in the assessment and treatment of trauma-related behavior change; and (3) increase funding for services and research in this area.

Observability is a tricky concept that has been used by philosophers and scientists in an inconsistent and vague way. In this article a reformulation and operational analysis (as used by Skinner, 1945) of this concept is proposed and its implications are discussed. According to the view presented in this article, observation is defined as the act of making contact with a natural phenomenon and should not be conflated with observability, which is defined as the potential to make contact with a natural phenomenon. On the basis of our current faculties and tools, observability may be divided into four levels, labeled as (1) public, (2) private, (3) technology-enhanced, and (4) conceptual. Conceptual observability (typically referred to as interpretation) is especially important for scientific purposes, as long as it is informed by observations conducted at the other levels. Entities that fail to classify in those categories should be considered unobservable. It is further suggested that because all natural phenomena by definition lie within the observability spectrum, the notion of existence might be restated in terms of observability. An observability-based truth criterion is also proposed, according to which a statement may be considered true insofar it tacts (i.e., is controlled by) an observable event or series of events. Last, some implications of the present conceptualization of observability for putative psychological entities will be discussed.

Individuals diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder also are commonly diagnosed with a medical comorbidity. Because of this, it is estimated that this population experiences nearly twice the incidence of pain or discomfort as their neurotypical peers. Although behavior analysts consider the effect of biological variables on a client's behavior, considerations of pain appear to be underdiscussed and understudied. The purpose of this article is to discuss how pain may interact with the efficacy of behavior analytic assessments and treatments, provide potential solutions to the barriers associated with pain states, and describe avenues to promote clinical research to improve our behavior analysis of pediatric pain while developing treatments for behavior problems such as aggression.