The New England Center for Children (NECC) is an independently-operated, private special education residential school in Southborough, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1975, NECC provides intensive applied behavior analysis interventions for students with autism spectrum disorder between the ages of 14 months and 22 years old.
The present article offers a brief review of the status of radical behaviorism as a defining feature of behavior analysis from the field’s origins to the contemporary era. It further examines how these changes in the impact of radical behaviorism developed over the decades, the challenges to augmenting its role as a comprehensive context for both research and service activities, and the risks of failing to do so. The article concludes with a brief discussion of why radical behaviorism is important to behavior analysis and applied behavior analysis.
The Women in Behavior Analysis Hall of Fame was created to identify and honor outstanding women who have contributed to the field. Six stellar and impactful women were inducted into the 2022 class: Ellen Reese, Barbara Etzel, Beth Sulzer-Azaroff, Frances Horowitz, Julie Vargas, and Gwendolyn Cartledge. This paper provides details on the individual accomplishments, accolades, and impacts of these women, as described during the Hall of Fame induction ceremony.
To date, only one behavior analytic study has systematically examined the use of functional analysis to assess arranging and ordering, which is a form of higher level restricted and repetitive behavior (Rodriguez et al., 2012). The researchers found that arranging and ordering was automatically maintained and developed efficacious interventions that involved some form of prompting and response disruption. The current study applied the Hagopian et al. (2020) treatment model (i.e., augmented competing stimulus assessments) for automatically maintained self-injury to higher level repetitive behavior. A variety of pretreatment assessments including preference assessments, functional analyses, process-versus-product analyses, and augmented competing stimulus assessments were conducted to inform treatment. Following treatment, generalization probes were conducted. For all four participants, efficacious treatments were identified that consisted of providing competing stimuli identified via the augmented competing stimulus assessment.
Behavior analysis and applied behavior analysis (ABA) have had many opponents since their inception. These opponents present challenges to the understanding and acceptance of our perspective and our professional practice. Asserting that behavior is a product of environmental circumstances is in opposition to our everyday language understanding of the cause of a person’s behavior in that their behavior is determined not autonomous. From a clinical perspective this leads to finding environmental causes and then engineering procedures to produce socially meaningful change in behavior. This piece discusses some challenges from internal critics who place their brand of service above ABA.
