Marc Weeden

Self-injurious behavior and functional analysis: where are the descriptions of participant protections?

This study examined the reporting of participant protections in studies involving functional analysis and self-injurious behavior and published from 1994 through 2008. Results indicated that session termination criteria were rarely reported and other specific participant safeguards were seldom described. The absence of such information in no way indicates that functional analysis procedures were unethical or otherwise inappropriate, although the fact that participants emitted many self-injurious responses in some studies where no protections were described and no rationale for requiring such a large sample of behavior was provided is cause for concern. Future publications would benefit from the inclusion of clear and detailed specifications of participant protections.

THE MATCHINg LAW

This article introduces the quantitative analysis of choice behavior by describing a number of equations developed over the years to describe the relation between the allocation of behavior under concurrent schedules of reinforcement and the consequences received for alternative responses. Direct proportionality between rate of responding and rate of reinforcement was observed in early studies, suggesting that behavioral output matched environmental input in a mathematical sense. This relation is termed “strict matching,” and the equation that describes it is referred to as “the matching law.” Later data showed systematic departures from strict matching, and a generalized version of the matching equation is now used to describe such data. This equation, referred to as “the generalized matching equation,” also describes data that follow strict matching. It has become convention to refer to either of these equations as “the matching law.” Empirical support for the matching law is briefly summarized, as is the applied and practical significance of matching analyses.

Psychotropic drug treatments for people with autism and other developmental disorders: a primer for practicing behavior analysts.

Many people with developmental disabilities receive medications prescribed to improve behavior. This manuscript overviews the psychopharmacology of developmental disabilities and considers how practitioners can assist in improving the quality of the pharmacological treatments that their clients receive.

Ethical Issues and Considerations

Functional behavioral assessment (FBA) refers to a range of methods designed to identify the environmental variables that control problematic behaviors. Methods for collecting these data revealing these variables include indirect measures, such as interviews and questionnaires, or direct methods, such as narrative recording of the antecedents that precede responses of interest and the consequences that follow them. Many behavior analysts believe that the “gold standard” of FBA is experimental functional analysis (FA) (Iwata, Dorsey, Slifer, Bauman, & Richmond, 1982/1994), which systematically arranges consequences for problem behaviors to identify their functions, that is, the reinforcers that maintain those behaviors. FBA is one of several ways of collecting information about clients, and professional organizations such as the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB) have established general ethical guidelines regarding how assessments should be conducted and interpreted. For example, Standard 9 of the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct promulgated by the APA (2010) is devoted entirely to assessment. The same is true of Standard 3.0 of the Behavior Analyst Certification Board Guidelines for Responsible Conduct (BACB Guidelines, BACB 2011). That standard is presented in Table 13.1. Any practitioner who abides with the standards established there and elsewhere in the Guidelines is therefore behaving ethically, regardless of whether he or she is involved in functional assessment or another professional activity.

SOME GUIDELINES FOR CONDUCTING RESEARCH IN APPLIED BEHAVIORAL PHARMACOLOGY

The Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) has published a number of articles on the behavioral effects of psychomotor stimulant drugs in individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Some additional JABA publications have included investigations of the behavioral effects of other drugs. However, a review of these articles revealed many methodological differences among studies, which makes it difficult to evaluate the relative contribution of each research effort to the overall database. In this context, we offer some guidelines to solidify the methodological rigor of behavior pharmacological research published in JABA.