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Expand Your Knowledge and Continuing Education Repertoire!
As behavior analysts, we currently must renew our certification every two years by gaining a number of BACB CEUs—either 20 for BCaBAs or 32 for BCBAs. It is true that many professionals often get preoccupied with the day-to-day tasks in front of them: the tasks that have more immediate consequences. If they do not have time to attend conferences, they often end up trying to accrue most, or all, of their required CEUs immediately before the due date to renew their certification (fixed-interval pattern of responding, anyone?).
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Invasive Behavioral Events: Lessons from Invasive Species
Sometimes when invasive species appear, the ecosystem assimilates it without destroying extant species, but at least equally as often, there is a clear winner and a clear loser. The same is true of behavioral systems.
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The Term DRO
Bad or Possibly Redeemable Label?A procedure in which each target response postpones a scheduled reinforcer most often is described in both the basic and applied research and practice literature as a differential-reinforcement-of-other-behavior
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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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Immedium and Procrastinium: A Fable in Waiting
Once upon a time, there were twins named Immedium and Procrastinium. As their names might suggest, the two approached tasks very differently. When a deadline was assigned, Procrastinium’s first reaction was to do something else, while Immedium started on it and soon got it done, PDQ, kazaam, what’s next?
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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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9 Things You Didn’t Know About Generalization
Generalization is one of those areas in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) that is critical to the success of any child, student, and adult with autism or autism spectrum disorder. The concept of generalization is introduced in any college academic course when learning about how the scientific principles of behavior analysis apply to changes in human behavior.
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Registered Behavior Technician® (RBT®) Training Updated for 2022
Our RBT Training is updated for the new 2022 BACB RBT requirementsThis training program is based on the Registered Behavior Technician Task List and is designed to meet the 40-hour training requirement for the RBT credential. The program is offered independent of the BACB.The course is 100% online and self-paced with a 180-day limit
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What is Social Behavior?
“What constitutes social behavior?” The general conception is that social interaction involves two organisms in some form of interaction with one another. Learn more about this behavior from our experts here!
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Behavior in Translation
Have you ever heard a paper presented at a conference or elsewhere about research with rats or pigeons, and it seems like the findings might be helpful in working with your clients? But then you wonder, is there really a connection between the two?
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Happiness
Happiness pervades modern life. It is a major topic of talk-show interviews, best-selling books, psychotherapeutic interactions, everyday gossip (“How can she really be happy with him?”), and personal ruminations. Poets, cartoonists, and novelists have done as good a job as psychologists in understanding it. I personally have always preferred Charles Shultz’s (the creator of the comic strip “Peanuts”) rather structural definition of happiness as “a warm puppy.”
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Out of Thin Air?
In speaking of the origins of operant behavior, Skinner famously observed that “[o]perant conditioning shapes behavior as a sculptor shapes a lump of clay.
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What’s Free About the Free Operant?
There is another question to be answered before considering the question in the title of this commentary: “What is a free operant, anyway?” It is an expression that sometimes appears in talks and articles, but it isn’t as common
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Celebrating Positive Deviance at Work: What COVID-19 can Teach Us
We will need to develop many skills having to do with persistence, flexibility, creativity, and dealing with the unexpected.
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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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