Applied behavior analysis


Applied behavior analysis, also referred to as behavioral engineering, is a psychological discipline that uses respondent and operant conditioning to change human and animal behavior. ABA is the applied form of behavior analysis; the other two are: radical behaviorism and experimental analysis of behavior, which focuses on basic experimental research.
The term applied behavior analysis has replaced behavior modification because the latter approach suggested changing behavior without clarifying the relevant behavior-environment interactions. In contrast, ABA changes behavior by first assessing the functional relationship between a targeted behavior and the environment, a process known as a functional behavior assessment. Further, the approach seeks to develop socially acceptable alternatives for maladaptive behaviors, often through implementing differential reinforcement contingencies.
Although ABA is most commonly associated with autism intervention, it has been used in a range of other areas, including applied animal behavior, substance abuse, organizational behavior management, behavior management in classrooms, and acceptance and commitment therapy.
ABA is controversial and rejected by the autistic rights movement due to a perception that it emphasizes normalization instead of acceptance, and a history of, in some forms of ABA and its predecessors, the use of aversives, such as electric shocks.

Definition

ABA is an applied science devoted to developing procedures that will produce meaningful changes in behavior.
It is to be distinguished from the experimental analysis of behavior, which focuses on basic research, but it uses principles developed by such research, in particular operant conditioning and classical conditioning. Both branches of behavior analysis adopt the viewpoint of radical behaviorism, treating thoughts, emotions, and other covert activity as behavior that is subject to the same responses as overt behavior. 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 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".

History

The field of behaviorism originated in 1913 by John B. Watson with his seminal work "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it." In the article, Watson argued against the field of psychology's focus on consciousness and proposed that the field instead focus on observable behaviors, a concept referred to as methodological behaviorism.
In the 1930s, B. F. Skinner established the concept of radical behaviorism which extended Watson's theory to encompass private events that are unobservable to others, such as thoughts and emotions.
The initial experiments studying the effectiveness of behavior analysis on human subjects were published in the 1940s and '50s, including Paul Fuller's "Operant conditioning of a vegetative human organism".
In 1957, the Society for Experimental Analysis of Behavior was founded by a group of behavioral psychologists, including Skinner and Charles Ferster, to publish a journal that focused on operant conditioning, and the following year, the first edition of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior was published.
Teodoro Ayllon and Jack Michael's study "The psychiatric nurse as a behavioral engineer" in 1959 was the first to employ the seven dimensions of ABA, which demonstrated how effective a token economy was in altering the aberrant behavior of hospitalized patients with schizophrenia and intellectual disability. The successful results from this study led researchers at the University of Kansas to start the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis in 1968.
A group of 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 treat autism, manage the behavior of children and adolescents in juvenile detention centers, and organize employees who required proper structure and management in businesses. 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.
From 1960 through 1997, Ivar Lovaas researched the efficacy of ABA techniques on autistic children. While Lovaas is often considered a pioneer in the field of ABA and his work was instrumental in establishing it as an effective treatment for autism, his early use of aversives has raised considerable ethical concerns. In 2022, a major ABA trade group, the Association for Behavior Analysis International, issued a policy statement unconditionally condemning electric-shock aversives. However, the following year, the task force ABAI formed to assess the use of electric-shock aversives authored a paper in which they claimed such methods were not inherently unethical and that patients and caregivers should be permitted to opt into them to treat "severe, life-threatening behavior." ABAI has historically been criticized by members of the autistic community, including by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and its leadership, for routinely platforming staff from the Judge Rotenberg Center at its annual conferences. The JRC is the only known facility in the United States whose ABA practitioners still use electric shocks to punish autistic people in their care, a practice labeled torture by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture. After ABAI released its 2022 policy statement, ASAN called on ABAI to stop platforming JRC staff members and lobby for a federal ban on electric-shock aversives.
During the 1960s and 70s, researchers began experimenting on the use of ABA techniques in the form of gay conversion therapy. These methodologies often involved the use of punishment procedures. Lovaas and his doctoral student George Rekers co-authored a paper titled "Behavioral treatment of deviant sex-role behaviors in a male child" in 1974. Several of Lovaas's contemporaries released criticisms of the paper shortly after its publication, and conversion therapy was formally condemned by ABAI in 2021. In 2020, JABA added an expression of concern and an editor's note to the 1974 paper, which it had originally published. The documents acknowledged the harm done by the study to its 4-year-old subject and the LGBTQ+ community at large, while also claiming the study did not violate the ethical standards of its time and could not be causally linked to the subject's suicide as an adult. Some members of academia, including Arthur Kaplan and Austin Johnson, criticized the journal for claiming the study was conducted ethically for its time and refusing to retract the paper outright.
Over the years, "behavior analysis" gradually superseded "behavior modification." Instead of simply attempting to alter maladaptive behavior, behavior analysts sought to understand the function of that behavior, what reinforcement histories promote and maintain it, and how it can be replaced by an alternative, more appropriate behavior.

Characteristics

Baer, Wolf, and Risley's 1968 article is still used as the standard description of ABA. It lists the following seven characteristics of ABA. Another resource for the characteristics of applied behavior analysis is the textbook Behavior Modification: Principles and Procedures.
  • Applied: ABA focuses on the social significance of the behavior studied and works to improve the lives of those receiving ABA services.
  • Behavioral: ABA focuses on behavior, which is defined as the observable and measurable movements of an organism. Definitions of behavior should be written unambiguously so they can be clearly understood by a third party.
  • Analytic: Behavior analysis is successful when the analyst understands and can manipulate the events that control a target behavior. This may be relatively easy to do in the lab, where a researcher is able to arrange the relevant events, but it is not always easy, or ethical, in an applied situation. In order to consider something to fall under the spectrum of analytic, it must demonstrate a functional relationship and it must be provable. Baer et al. outline two methods that may be used in applied settings to demonstrate control while maintaining ethical standards. These are the reversal design and the multiple baseline design. In the reversal design, the experimenter first measures the behavior of choice, introduces an intervention, and then measures the behavior again. Then, the intervention is removed, or reduced, and the behavior is measured yet again. The intervention is effective to the extent that the behavior changes and then changes back in response to these manipulations. The multiple baseline method may be used for behaviors that seem irreversible. Here, several behaviors are measured and then the intervention is applied to each in turn. The effectiveness of the intervention is revealed by changes in just the behavior to which the intervention is being applied.
  • Technological: The description of analytic research must be clear and detailed so that any competent researcher can repeat it accurately.
  • Conceptually Systematic: Behavior analysis should not simply produce a list of effective interventions; rather, intervention protocols should focus on including technological descriptions as well as theoretically meaningful terms, such as "secondary reinforcement" or "errorless discrimination", to help the reader understand how the concepts could be used in similar protocols.
  • Effective: Interventions must produce behavioral changes that have a large enough effect to make meaningful, positive changes in the client's life.
  • Generality: ABA intervention should focus on selecting and teaching new behaviors so the client can transfer those skills into new environments and stimuli outside of what was directly taught. Behavior analysts should incorporate plans for generalization when creating programs.