Applied behavior analysis

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) is a scientific discipline concerned with applying techniques based upon the principles of learning to change behavior of social significance. Where the same definition is given, (or quoted), and it credits (or mentions) both the source 'Baer, Wolf & Risley, 1968' (Drs. Donald Baer, PhD, Montrose Wolf, PHD and Todd R. Risley, PhD, (Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Alaska) were psychologists who developed science of applied behavior analysis) and another source, called 'Sulzer-Azaroff & Mayer, 1991'. Beth Sulzer-Azaroff is a psychologist at University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Psychology> It is an applied form of behavior analysis; the other two forms are radical behaviorism (or the philosophy of the science) and the experimental analysis of behavior (or basic experimental research). The name 'applied behavior analysis' has replaced behavior modification because the latter approach suggested attempting to change behavior without clarifying the relevant behavior-environment interactions (this needs substantiation). In contrast, ABA tries to change behavior by first assessing the functional relationship between a targeted behavior and the environment. Further, the approach often seeks to develop socially acceptable alternatives for aberrant behaviors. ABA has been brought to bear on a wide range of areas and behavioral problems. Examples include such things as early intensive behavioral interventions for children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), research on the principles influencing criminal behavior, as well as HIV prevention, conservation of natural resources, education, gerontology, health and exercise, industrial safety, language acquisition, littering, medical procedures, parenting, psychotherapy, seatbelt use, severe mental disorders, sports, substance abuse, phobias, pediatric feeding disorders, and zoo management and care of animals. ABA is an applied science devoted to developing procedures which will produce observable changes in behavior. It is to be distinguished from the experimental analysis of behavior, which focuses on basic experimental research, but it uses principles developed by such research, in particular operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Behavior analysis adopts the viewpoint of radical behaviorism, treating thoughts, emotions, and other covert activity as behavior that is subject to the same rules as overt responses. This represents a shift away from methodological behaviorism, which restricts behavior-change procedures to behaviors that are overt, and was the conceptual underpinning of behavior modification. Behavior analysts also emphasize that the science of behavior must be a natural science as opposed to a social science. As such, behavior analysts focus on the observable relationship of behavior with the environment, including antecedents and consequences, without resort to 'hypothetical constructs'. The beginnings of ABA can be traced back to Teodoro Ayllon and Jack Michael's study 'The psychiatric nurse as a behavioral engineer' (1959) that they submitted to the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB) as part of their doctoral dissertation at the University of Houston. 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 and behavioral engineering—a synonym for ABA,also then called behavior modification—with their patients, who were mostly adults with schizophrenia, but some were also mentally retarded children. This paper later served as the basis for the founding of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA), which publishes research on the application of behavior analysis to a wide array of socially relevant behavior. 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 behavior analysis to instruct developmentally disabled children, manage the behavior of children and adolescents in juvenile detention centers, and organize 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 Behavior 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, and devoted nearly half a century to groundbreaking research and practice aimed at improving the lives of children with autism and their families. In 1965, Lovaas published a series of articles that outlined his system for coding observed behaviors, described a pioneering investigation of the antecedents and consequences that maintained a problem behavior, 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.