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Honk More—Wait More
The following article appeared recently in the New York Times. It describes how police in Mumbai, India, undertook an experiment to control the excessive blowing of car horns by drivers caught in what must be nightmarish traffic in that largest of Indian cities.
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As Useful as a Third Ear
When I was a graduate student in clinical psychology, lo those many years ago, I was as
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Rules, Contingencies, and the Battle of Britain
The distinction between contingency governed (or “shaped”) and rule-governed behavior is an old saw for most behavior analysts. Like most dichotomies, this one doesn’t hold up under careful analysis.
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Professional Development through Animal Research
Behavior analysis today gets most of its mainstream recognition for the work being done in applied settings, referred to as applied behavior analysis (ABA). The progress of behavior analytic applications has been important for the dissemination of the science and even better for the clients across the world who require behavioral services.
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Has Behavior Analysis Developed Tunnel Vision?
A Florida Tech grad student describes how behavior analysis is more than just working with autism
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What Does it Mean to Say Ours is “A Science of Behavior?"
Every behavior analyst (hopefully) has learned that ours is a science of behavior. We do not learn that ours is a science of the individual or a science of the person. Why is that? Are we not, however, concerned with people, you may ask? Are we not concerned with the human condition? Are we not humanists?
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Operant Behavior and Snowflakes
Sitting here at my desk on a cold, snowy morning watching the snowflakes gently descend to blanket the landscape outside my window (such descriptions reveal why I am a behavior analyst and not a poet), reminds me of the operant (another reminder, too, of why I am not a poet). The operant is one of our most important concepts. Operants are classes of responses that have a similar effect on the environment. That effect can be to operate something that allows their measurement (like a child’s block-stacking or a pigeon’s key peck) or to produce a reinforcer or punisher.
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Measuring Thoughts
“Neuroscientists Decode Brain Speech Signals into Written Text.” If you suspect that the National Enquirer wrote this recent newspaper headline, you would be wrong. It was published by the respected British newspaper, The Guardian.
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The R.E.A.L. Gift for Behavior Analysts
I am a behavior analyst practitioner working with children who live in a world of chaos and distractions. I greet them each day to work and play and saying goodbye when I end my day.
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Generalization in Times of Crisis
… Generalization in Times of Crisis Generalization in Times of Crisis Applied Behavior Analysis is mostly implemented within controlled environments (schools, clinics, hospitals and residential settings), with a recommended 30-40 hour/week treatment … in the natural environment is not so prominent, but we are still presented with the challenge of transferring stimulus control to the caregivers. Considering a time of crisis where face-to-face interventions are not possible, telehealth … into opportunities for our clients. While much of generalization is assessed across people or settings within the controlled environment where skills are initially taught (clinic, school . . . ), a deficit exists in terms of …
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Antecedents Have Last Names
In the latter years of his life, Dr. Jose Martinez, the founder of ABA Technologies. Inc., and the driving force behind the creation of the School of Behavior Analysis at Florida Tech, was heard to utter the title of this blog in every one of his presentations relating to the influence of antecedent conditions on behavior, “Antecedents have last names.”
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The Parallels between ABA and OBM
Applied Behavior Analysis is more than just a bag of tricks known as Discrete Trial Training, the VB-MAPP, and token systems. However, when we begin to conceptualize our science as such, we lose the fundamentals upon which we found them. We rely too heavily on them in practice, and we fail to individualize our services.
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Framing Trauma: How do we apply behavior analysis to a mentalistic term?
A Perspective on Relational Frame Theory and TraumaTalks on TraumaTrigger Warning: talks about traumatic experiences
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Social Validity in the Late 20th and Early 21st Century
An extension of Kennedy’s work was published seven years later in 1999, by James Carr and colleagues. Their paper assessed the frequency of social-validity measures reported in the first 31 years of JABA. They analyzed the difference in trends of reporting social validity for experiments that had highly controlled analog settings versus more naturalistic and dynamic settings. The reason for doing so harkens back to Kennedy’s comments about the difference between basic and applied research.
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Analyzing Sources of Bias
From the moment we are born, we start interacting with our environment. A whimper is followed by getting picked up and access to food.
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