ABA Basics: Principles, Terminology, and How It Works

Presented by Amanda Tami, LPC, BCBA
The Johnson Center for Child Health and Development

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[kilua]

I’ve learned more in this hour training than I did in graduate school. I sincerely thank you for your time, insight, passion and dedication to this field, you are truly a gem.

[reneeherman]

Thank you this was excellent and well presented. I appreciate the chance to learn.

[kathrynhall]

This is full of very helpful information. Watched

[speciallearningwithabhi]

ABA comprehension...easy to understand for newbiew...thanks a lot Amanda...

[rogerpowe]

this excellently clear and well-explained talk with helpful diagrams, is very informative and usefully focuses on helping autistic folk via highly structured Skinnerian operant conditioning but there are, of course, many other treatment models and processes that can also help autism

[lovmeright]

This was extremely helpful. You covered all the bases. Thank you!

[richardzawlocki]

You covered a lot of ground and did it well within a very short time frame. However, a suggestion, Antecedents EVOKE (or in more friendly terms make it possible for the behavior to occur and hopefully be rewarded) not ELICIT (that's for reflexive or respondent behavior) and FADING is an antecedent stimulus procedure and should not be used for CONSEQUENCE manipulations (e.g., you can thin or reduce reinforcement but not fade it) this is too common an error occuring even in the literature at times.

[DDD-wtly]

I agree with most of this and it makes a great amount of sense. But once she said the word noncompliance was unkind and that they aren’t using it anymore that’s when I saw that agreeableness and neuroticism is going to be a huge issue in this field going forward. I will likely be dealing with colleagues that cannot handle anything that could cause confrontation or conflict.

For instance. If you have two people, one of which is responsible for the other (just like a parent is for a child). Then they need that child to be compliant with their expectations as long as they are reasonable. If a child isn’t reasonably compliant then what are we talking about here. The whole purpose of this therapy is to train their behaviors into compliance with particular expectations in mind. Particularly ones that lead to a more stable and reciprocal relationship.

It’s possible you can make the word more friendly for people if you called it dismissive behavior instead. But it still sounds like you are saying the same thing to me with extra steps.

[tomasdearco]

How many ours per week is recomended for ABA teraphy?

[Neilgs]

@9:37 it says it all with respect to why the entire basis of ABA is an embarrassing token relic of the past. To paraphrase, "We (ABA) are not concerned with involuntary behaviors, the beating of our heart, lungs and so forth and, therefore, only voluntary behaviors." Really? Is interoceptive (internal) feelings of safety involuntary or voluntary behavior? How about hypervigilance, hyperarousal which shifts physiological state regulation from interoceptive (internal) feelings of safety with others and activates our sympathetic-adrenal nervous system resulting in ADAPTIVE (not maladaptive) fight/flight defensive behaviors or worse if the child is in parasympathetic withdrawal/shutdown and/or dissociation?

In other words, these afferent pathways, that is affective signals from the body/autonomic nervous system back into the brain directly affect the so-called, "socially appropriate or inappropriate behaviors." It is a single bi-directional system and thus the infantile description of voluntary vs involuntary no longer apply! So by teaching/reinforcing through BS A, B, C strategies, "Appropriate" vs "Inappropriate" behaviors and cognitive tasks you are essentially and resplendently placing a strait-jacket on the child's entire system and thus laying the foundations for further repression and dissociation (i.e. PTSD).

Basically, you have at that juncture (as all behaviorists do) stripped away and flushed down the toilet the child's nervous system or physiological state regulation/organism which exist between the S (timulus) and R(esponse) (which adaptively DETERMINES what you call appropriate/vs inappropriate). Hence, why this is not partly but incontrovertibly and unequivocally criminal and destructive for the last 60 plus years!

[alienpix]

This is just grooming against appropriate response from the CNS. Using ABA for physical contact is literal human trafficking grooming. This sounds like residential schools.

[pamelareeves]

Takes much too long to get to the point!

[Tulsitea]

ABA is literally like conversion therapy for autistics. ABA tries to force us to confirm to neurotypical standards, it only benefits neurotypicals. Basically just teaches us how to mask our autism which is incredibly harmful (I almost took my own life because of masking my autism for so many years). I can't imagine if I had been in ABA on top of the masking I already taught myself to do. I feel so sad for autistic people who are put in ABA, especially nonverbal autistics who can't verbally describe how they feel about being in ABA.

[Neilgs]

From a DEVELOPMENTAL Affective Neuroscience perspective, ABA methodologies are banal, reductionistic as well as severely aberrant, punitive and misguided to the point of criminality.

[Neilgs]

The reason why this is so utterly inane as well as embarrassingly antiquated is because ALL behaviors are the symbolic or external manifestation of our underlying state regulation. For example, whether the child feels internally or interoceptively safe or not safe (for example, our parasympathetic autonomic ventral vagal or our social-emotional engagement system or if not safe mobilized for adaptive sympathetic-adrenal fight/flight behaviors or worse dorsal parasympathetic immobilization, withdrawal/shutdown or dissociative states). Hence, the so-called, "discrete data driven empirical observables" are just the external manifestation of the underlying and emergent properties of our ventral or dorsal vagus state and LHPA axis (limbic hypothalamic, pituitary adrenal axis into autonomic states) which bi-directionally connects with executive planning/functioning.

Essentially, our subcortical influences/determines 80% of premedial frontal cortex and executive functioning. The latter is determined not by the bankrupt and infantile naming, tagging of adult directed manipulations of "surface behaviors" (e.g., trained through environmental contingencies of reinforcement declarative memorizations, "Do X and get reinforced by Y" or any combination therein) but rather by cultivating the psychosocial neurobiological conditions of safety for the child (or adult) through the dynamics of back and forth reciprocal co-regulated empathic relationships. In other words, real science that has to do with Affect and Developmental Neuroscience: Interpersonal Neurobiology and Polyvagal Theory.

[Neilgs]

Sorry, but when you begin to look ar a child (or an adult) as a compilation of learned "appropriate behaviors versus inappropriate behaviors" you have flushed down the toilet, or extinguished if you will, the biopsychosocial complexity of human existence and thus have brilliantly and resplendently demonstrated not one iota of mammalian or human empathic understanding! You have to begin to understand a wee bit more emotionally or empathically (rather than under the centuries long supposition, "giveth a child an inch and s/he will take a mile, especially one with 'behavioral' issues"), what that child is experiencing/feeling. And please spare me the blithe ignorance that 'feelings' are not observeable; they in fact are from an exhaustive evidentiary perspective and is what build the foundations of neural connections (i.e., between the eariler and later or subcortical and executive functions of the brain). Where are thou the evidence? I would be happy to provide it, but it is readily, openly and exhaustively available, neuroanatomically, neurophysiologically and neurodevelopmentally.

It is about understanding the child's arousal, feelings of extreme anxiety; hyperarousal (or hypoarousal and withdrawal). It is unerstanding not "behaviors" at a cortical but subcortical and LHPA level; and how a diathesis in physiological states become optimally regulated around deepening affect reciprocal attachement and attunement around the child's individual (heterogeneous) sensory processing differences; meeting the child where s/he is functionall-emotionally developmentally; having that child's, e.g., physiological state of hyperarousal or extreme anxiety and bodily-emotional perceived threat to increased calm and safety by feeling undestood, felt and connected with through affect (emotional) nonverbal levels of reciprocal back and forth engagement by (empathically) attributing purpose and meaning to his/her actions; becoming a part of his/her world and deepening those bonds of engagement in two-way reciprocal problem solving around his/her emotions!

[hersheek.]

Did you know that BF skinner was against using ABA on children and also didn’t believe in grades? He also became cynical as time passed.

[Neilgs]

Please tell us, What are "Socially significant behvaiors" and how do they differ from other behaviors which are less "socially significant"? Completely, antiquated and destructive nonsense!