Kaston D Anderson-Carpenter, Derek D Reed, Tony Biglan, Allison Kurti
{"title":"Behavior Science Contributions to Public Policy: an Introduction to the Special Section.","authors":"Kaston D Anderson-Carpenter, Derek D Reed, Tony Biglan, Allison Kurti","doi":"10.1007/s40614-023-00367-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-023-00367-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Behavior science has a long history of influencing public policy. Numerous scholars have used behavioral principles in experimental and applied research to examine the potential impact of local, state, and federal policies across socially important problems and goals. The utility of behavior science in public policy continues to flourish, and translational behavioral research will remain a critical component of effective policy development and implementation. The articles in this special section highlight diverse examples of applied research in various areas, such as intellectual disabilities, substance use, and greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, this special section includes findings from experimental research demonstrating the benefits of using demand curve analysis and behavioral procedures such as <i>nudging</i> and <i>boosting</i> to facilitate effective policy change. Together, these articles offer diverse exemplars of behavior science's importance in public policy development and implementation.</p>","PeriodicalId":44993,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Behavior Science","volume":"46 1","pages":"1-4"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10013234/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9213333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Time Cost and Demand: Implications for Public Policy.","authors":"Lindsay P Schwartz, Steven R Hursh","doi":"10.1007/s40614-022-00349-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-022-00349-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The success of policy involves not only good design but a good understanding of how the public will respond behaviorally to the benefits or detriments of that policy. Behavioral science has greatly contributed to how we understand the impact of monetary costs on behavior and has therefore contributed to policy design. Consumption taxes are a direct result of this; for example, cigarette taxes that aim to reduce cigarette consumption. In addition to monetary costs, time may also be conceptualized as a constraint on consumption. Time costs may therefore have policy implications, for example, long waiting times could deter people from accessing certain benefits. Recent data show that behavioral economic demand curve methods used to understand monetary cost may also be used to understand time costs. In this article we discuss how the impact of time cost can be conceptualized as a constraint on demand for public benefits utilization and public health when there are delays to receiving the benefits. Policy examples in which time costs may be relevant and demand curve methods may be useful are discussed in the areas of government benefits, public health, and transportation design.</p>","PeriodicalId":44993,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Behavior Science","volume":"46 1","pages":"51-66"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9256361/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9554214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andrew C Bonner, Anthony Biglan, Kylee Drugan-Eppich
{"title":"The Dismal State of Federal Funding for Experimental Evaluations of Interventions to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions.","authors":"Andrew C Bonner, Anthony Biglan, Kylee Drugan-Eppich","doi":"10.1007/s40614-021-00316-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-021-00316-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The threats of climate change to human well-being are well-documented and are growing in number and intensity. Despite the international community investing heavily in technological innovation and policy initiatives to solve the problem, emissions continue to rise. Experts are recognizing that eliminating emissions cannot be achieved without modifying the human behavior of which emissions are a function. However, little attention has been allocated to expanding the use of strategies developed by the behavioral-science community to reduce emissions on large scales. One possible reason is that federal funding has not been arranged to select such research. Therefore, we conducted an analysis of six sources of information about federal funding to fight climate change (the Government Accountability Office, the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, and the Center for Disease Control) and examined the extent to which they are funding behavioral science research to reduce emissions. Our results show an appalling lack of funding for behavioral science research to reduce emissions, especially experimental evaluations of strategies for reducing them. Implications and recommendations for funding of future research are discussed.</p>","PeriodicalId":44993,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Behavior Science","volume":"46 1","pages":"5-34"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10050258/pdf/40614_2021_Article_316.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9233856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Problem of Class Breakdown in Sidman's (1994, 2000) Theory about the Origin of Stimulus Equivalence.","authors":"Benigno Alonso-Alvarez","doi":"10.1007/s40614-023-00365-2","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40614-023-00365-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Sidman (1994, 2000) hypothesized that equivalence relations are a direct outcome of reinforcement contingencies. This theory is problematic because contingencies do not always result in equivalence. Sidman proposed that equivalence relations may conflict with analytic units, the other outcome of contingencies (e.g., in conditional discriminations with common responses/reinforcers). This conflict may result in a generalized class breakdown and a failure to pass equivalence tests. This is more likely in nonhumans, very young humans, etc. The conflict can also result in a selective class breakdown and success in equivalence tests. This occurs after experience shows the organism the necessity and utility of this process. The nature of that experience and the class breakdown processes were not described by Sidman. I explored the implications of the following hypotheses for Sidman's theory. First, conditional discriminations with a common response/reinforcer result in a generalized class breakdown when participants fail to discriminate emergent relations incompatible with contingencies from those compatible. Second, learning to discriminate between the two requires a history of multiple exemplar training (MET). This implies that equivalence class breakdown is a common response to exemplars that have nothing in common except their relations. This, however, contradicts Sidman's views about the impossibility of such process in the absence of a complex verbal repertoire. If that type of learning from MET is possible, then the possibility that MET results in the selective formation of equivalence classes must be admitted, and the utility of hypothesizing that equivalence is a direct outcome of reinforcement contingencies can be questioned.</p>","PeriodicalId":44993,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Behavior Science","volume":"46 1","pages":"217-235"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10050456/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9240367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rachelle N Huntington, Natalie M Badgett, Nancy E Rosenberg, Kaitlin Greeny, Alice Bravo, Roxanne M Bristol, Young Hee Byun, Madelynn S Park
{"title":"Social Validity in Behavioral Research: A Selective Review.","authors":"Rachelle N Huntington, Natalie M Badgett, Nancy E Rosenberg, Kaitlin Greeny, Alice Bravo, Roxanne M Bristol, Young Hee Byun, Madelynn S Park","doi":"10.1007/s40614-022-00364-9","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40614-022-00364-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Through the application of behavioral principles, behavior analysts seek to produce socially meaningful behavior change, defined as alterations in behavior that yield important outcomes immediately beneficial for the direct consumers of interventions and key stakeholders. Behavioral practitioners and researchers often engage in assessment and reporting of the meaningfulness of behavior change using social validity assessments. These assessments ensure that target behaviors are appropriately selected, intervention procedures are acceptable, and satisfactory outcomes are produced. The purpose of this review is to identify the current state of social validity within behavioral literature. We reviewed eight peer-reviewed journals between 2010 and 2020. We found that 47% of the intervention studies reviewed included a social validity assessment. Social validity assessment across journals has increased over time, with a significant rise from 2019 to 2020. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future work are discussed.</p>","PeriodicalId":44993,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Behavior Science","volume":"46 1","pages":"201-215"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10050507/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9240365","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Colin Harte, Dermot Barnes-Holmes, Julio C de Rose, William F Perez, João H de Almeida
{"title":"Grappling with the Complexity of Behavioral Processes in Human Psychological Suffering: Some Potential Insights from Relational Frame Theory.","authors":"Colin Harte, Dermot Barnes-Holmes, Julio C de Rose, William F Perez, João H de Almeida","doi":"10.1007/s40614-022-00363-w","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40614-022-00363-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Relational frame theory (RFT) has historically been considered the basic explanatory science behind acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). However, some have argued that there has been an increasing separation between the two in recent years. The primary aim of the current article is to explore the extent to which RFT concepts, particularly those that have been proposed recently in the context of \"up-dating\" the theory, may be used to build stronger links between basic and applied behavior analyses in which there is a shared language of relatively precise technical terms. As an example of this strategy, we outline RFT process-based experimental and conceptual analyses of the impact of one of the most widely used sets of interventions employed in the ACT literature, defusion. In addition, we suggest a potential experimental methodology for analyzing the basic behavioral processes involved. Overall, the current article should be seen as part of a broader research agenda that aims to explore how RFT may be used to provide a functional-analytic abstractive treatment of the behavioral processes involved in human psychological suffering.</p>","PeriodicalId":44993,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Behavior Science","volume":"46 1","pages":"237-259"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10050485/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9240362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Teaching Behavior Analysis through Its History: Narrative and Stories.","authors":"Philip N Hineline","doi":"10.1007/s40614-022-00355-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-022-00355-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Four articles appear in a special section of the current issue of this journal. Each offers methods for introducing students to the history of behavior analysis. Their distinctive approaches vary from delineating a course addressed specifically to history, to combining issues in behavior analysis with those within related fields, or to splicing historical events or methods into various courses within behavior analysis. I sketch these briefly to encourage readers to read them directly before proposing that the history of our field can also be understood both as an overarching narrative and as a collection of stories. Boje (2008) distinguishes between the two by characterizing narrative as a rather formal, organized account, on the one hand, with stories, on the other hand, being more disorderly episodes of behavior-in-process. Each has its roles for introducing behavior analysis-and even for effectively understanding it ourselves-and thus, the best place of each within strategies of teaching, bears systematic examination. Although narrative supplies an organized account, stories more strongly engage the reader. Stories are especially effective at keeping the reader or listener engaged when they entail nested relations delineated by establishing stimuli. Besides offering a principle of organization, this formulation yields a strategy for using stories to enable the overarching narrative to sustain the reader's or listener's behavior.</p>","PeriodicalId":44993,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Behavior Science","volume":"45 4","pages":"809-818"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9712843/pdf/40614_2022_Article_355.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10446100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christopher A Podlesnik, Carolyn M Ritchey, Jo Waits, Shawn P Gilroy
{"title":"A Comprehensive Systematic Review of Procedures and Analyses Used in Basic and Preclinical Studies of Resurgence, 1970-2020.","authors":"Christopher A Podlesnik, Carolyn M Ritchey, Jo Waits, Shawn P Gilroy","doi":"10.1007/s40614-022-00361-y","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40614-022-00361-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Resurgence is the return of a previously reinforced response as conditions worsen for an alternative response, such as the introduction of extinction, reductions in reinforcement, or punishment. As a procedure, resurgence has been used to model behavioral treatments and understand behavioral processes contributing both to relapse of problem behavior and flexibility during problem-solving. Identifying existing procedural and analytic methods arranged in basic/preclinical research could be used by basic and preclinical researchers to develop novel approaches to study resurgence, whereas translational and clinical researchers could identify potential approaches to combating relapse during behavioral interventions. Despite the study of resurgence for over half a century, there have been no systematic reviews of the basic/preclinical research on resurgence. To characterize the procedural and analytic methods used in basic/preclinical research on resurgence, we performed a systematic review consistent with PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses). We identified 120 articles consisting of 200 experiments that presented novel empirical research, examined operant behavior, and included standard elements of a resurgence procedure. We reported prevalence and trends in over 60 categories, including participant characteristics (e.g., species, sample size, disability), designs (e.g., single subject, group), procedural characteristics (e.g., responses, reinforcer types, control conditions), criteria defining resurgence (e.g., single test, multiple tests, relative to control), and analytic strategies (e.g., inferential statistics, quantitative analysis, visual inspection). We make some recommendations for future basic, preclinical, and clinical research based on our findings of this expanding literature.</p><p><strong>Supplementary information: </strong>The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40614-022-00361-y.</p>","PeriodicalId":44993,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Behavior Science","volume":"46 1","pages":"137-184"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10050505/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9233860","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Érika Larissa de Oliveira Jiménez, Myenne Mieko Ayres Tsutsumi, Carolina Laurenti, Mauro Silva Júnior, Paulo Roney Kilpp Goulart
{"title":"Integrative Review of Developmental Behavior-Analytic Concepts.","authors":"Érika Larissa de Oliveira Jiménez, Myenne Mieko Ayres Tsutsumi, Carolina Laurenti, Mauro Silva Júnior, Paulo Roney Kilpp Goulart","doi":"10.1007/s40614-022-00360-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40614-022-00360-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We reviewed five behavior-analytic concepts related to development: behavioral trap, cumulative-hierarchical learning (CHL), basic behavioral repertoire (BBR), pivotal behavior, and behavioral cusp. We searched for terminological variations of the concepts in the CAPES Journals Portal and selected for analysis 31 peer-reviewed articles written in English or Portuguese, published between 1967 and 2021, that contained the search terms in the title, abstract, or keywords and contextualized in the main text. We analysed the conventional usage of the concepts, their conceptual limitations, and the relationships among them, declared or implied, and proposed a conceptual integration of the concepts under a CHL framework, following a path indicated by other authors. We considered BBR, pivotal behavior, and behavioral cusp nonsynonymous concepts of the same logical category, referring to prerequisites for important developmental outcomes and targets of CHL-inspired interventions but defined by different effects on subsequent behavioral development. The three concepts can be conflated in a superset-subset fashion, based on the specificity of their effects: BBR consists of a broad class of behaviors that may affect subsequent learning; the subclass of BBRs characterized by far-reaching collateral effects are classified as pivotal behavior, and the subclass of pivotal behaviors whose potential effects include contact with unprecedented environmental contingencies are classified as behavioral cusps. We propose that behavioral traps be explicitly incorporated in the CHL framework, to emphasize the environmental component of the cumulative-hierarchical learning process. Our formulation seems to organize the conceptual field in a way that respects the conventional use of concepts, preserving their strengths. Regardless of the specific formulation, we believe that integrating the various development-related concepts within a cumulative-hierarchical learning framework can encourage a more proactive integration of findings, questions, and practices informed by each concept, which could lead to the mutual refinement of the corresponding conceptual and methodological frameworks, as well as new research questions and practical applications. In particular, we expect that explicitly incorporating behavioral traps within the CHL framework will provide a useful heuristic model to guide research on how natural environmental contingencies influence the systematic transformation of behavior across the lifespan.</p>","PeriodicalId":44993,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Behavior Science","volume":"45 4","pages":"863-899"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9712853/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10508426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to Teaching the History of Behavior Analysis: Past, Purpose, and Prologue.","authors":"Edward K Morris","doi":"10.1007/s40614-022-00356-9","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40614-022-00356-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article introduces a special section of <i>Perspectives on Behavior Science</i> on teaching the history of behavior analysis. Although behavior is distinctive, behavior analysis is diverse, and the history of behavior analysis is deep, teaching the field's history often is not. The special section offers means for remedying this. The introduction has three sections. First, it relates the genesis of the special section: the 2018 meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis International and, before that, the 2015 meeting of Cheiron: The International Society for the History of the Behavioral Sciences. Second, it addresses the purposes-reasons and rationales-for teaching history, especially the history of behavior analysis. And third, it offers a prologue for teaching the field's history based on a review of what is taught or not in recent textbooks and handbooks on the field's basic and applied research and their conceptual foundations. In its conclusion, the article previews the section's other articles: (1) three exemplars on how history can be embedded in courses on the field's foregoing three subdisciplines; (2) an exemplar of teaching history in a stand-alone course on the field's history overall; (3) a discussion that addresses how to improve instruction in these courses through narrative methods; and (4) a conclusion about the present and future of teaching the field's history (e.g., giving the history of behavior analysis away).</p>","PeriodicalId":44993,"journal":{"name":"Perspectives on Behavior Science","volume":"45 4","pages":"697-710"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9712836/pdf/40614_2022_Article_356.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10508429","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}