Article Review #3

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The Right to Effective Behavioral Treatment This article by Ron Van Houten (1988) was rectified to bring attention to Behavior Analysis as a profession and how to refine such profession to make it appropriate and accessible to all individuals who would benefit from it. He presents these principles of treatment to avoid any encounter with malpractice. Houten lists the rights of individuals seeking treatment in order to ensure their safety and successful treatment. The first right of an individual receiving treatment is the right to a therapeutic environment. This outlines an environment that is welcoming and accommodating for any individual who seeks treatment. The environment needs to be safe, responsive, and humane. It needs to have access to therapeutic services, leisure activities, and adequate materials. The staff, teachers, and caregivers must remain competent and responsive. The environment must include many positive interactions and an allowance for personal freedom. The second right is the right to services whose overriding goal is personal welfare. This right states that treatment should work to help individuals develop functional skills that will help them become more independent. The professional should seek to consider the short-term and long-term welfare of the client. Finally, if there is any sense of malpractice, it is important that the safety of the client is always a priority, and any adjustment should be made in order to do so. The third right is the right to treatment by a competent behavior analyst. This right details that the professional providing the care should have the proper education and training. They should have practicum experience and know the basic principles that make up behavior analysis. Doctoral level behavior analysts should use their knowledge and skills to help detect good practices in behavioral analysis and foster good professional skills in their peers. The fourth right is an individual has a right to programs that teach functional skills. The goal of this right is to ensure that the program is designed to help the individual develop enough skills to function in their immediate environment and the wider society. Treatment plans should include the acquisition, maintenance, or generalization of behaviors that allow them to gain more social interaction. This right also includes the proper elimination of behaviors that are harmful to the individual or their immediate environment. This right works to make sure that appropriate efforts are made for any individual seeking treatment. The fifth right is the right to behavioral assessment and ongoing evaluation. This entails that before treatment, clients are entitled to prior assessment to determine whether or not there is a skill deficit or behavioral disorder. These previous evaluations ask questions on whether the behavior always occurs, never occurs, is associated with discomfort, etc. Successful evaluation is helpful in determining if the treatment is working and should be continuous. The sixth right is the right to the most effective treatment procedures available. This means each client is entitled to effective and scientifically validated treatments. Professionals only use techniques that are outlined in scientific literature. And the professional should ensure that they are using the least restrictive, yet effective techniques. Ron Van Houten presents a thorough outline that helps determine good practices of behavioral analysis. There are plenty of counter arguments out there that criticize Houten’s methods by saying that it is impossible to change the long-term mind of an individual with autism and coin his techniques as “abusive.” Where I think these arguments fail is that Houten argues that the behaviors that need to be changed have gone through ha series of questions determining if the treatment will be ethical and if it will benefit the welfare of the client. I think

that Houten is accurate in his findings and that they can be very applicable to behavioral analysis today. I think these guidelines can be used in beneficial ways in behavioral analysis in not only determining what the problem behavior is but also how to effectively and respectfully go about correcting the behavior.

Toward a functional analysis of self-injury This study by Brian Iwata used functional analysis to identify the relationship between self- injury and certain environmental events. There were nine subjects in this study who experienced developmental disabilities and were exposed to a series of environmental conditions. The environmental conditions were as follows: unstructured play, academic demand, social disapproval, and alone. Each one was used to demonstrate the effects of the environment on self- injury. The study consisted of nine participants who all experienced some sort of developmental delay. Each participant was sent to an inpatient or hospital for evaluation. All the participants have engaged in some sort of self-injurious behavior. The ages of the participants tranged from 1 year and 7 months to 17 years and 2 months. The dependent variables or the self-injurious behaviors are as follows: ear pulling or gouging which is the closure of fingers or hand on the ear or the digging in the ear with fingers, eye gouging which can be described as any contact of any part of the hand to the eye area, face slapping or the forceful contact of the hand to the face, hair pulling which includes the grasping of fingers onto the hair and followed by a pulling motion, hand mouthing or the insertion of one or more fingers into the mouth, head banging which is the forceful contact of the head into a stationary object, head hitting or the forceful contact of any part of the hand to the head, neck choking known as the closer of hands around the neck, and self-biting which is the closure of both the top and bottom teeth on any part of the body. The study consisted of eight sessions (2 per each condition) these sessions were conducted over four days in order to determine the conditions of self-injurious behaviors. In unstructured play, the subject was resented with various toys and no academic demands. In this environment, self- injurious behavior was ignored. In academic demand, the subjects were provided with age- appropriate academic activities and the instructor used prompting to help the subject. Upon completion of the task, praise was given, when self-injurious behavior occurred the trial was promptly ended. In social disapproval, the subject was presented with toys and told to play while the instructor “did some work”, upon self-injurious behavior the subject was given momentary attention by being told to stop. In alone, the subject was left alone in the room with no toys to determine if the behaviors are automatically reinforced in the subject. Iwata found that there were low levels of self-injury in the unstructured play trial, and self-injury was highest during the alone trial for four of the subjects. He found that the multielement manipulation of th environments produced varying results in each of the subjects. This study is interesting to see the functional relationship between self-injurious behaviors and certain environments, but I think it is also important to consider that there are limitations to functional analysis because there could be other factors that cause these individuals to partake in self-injurious behaviors independent of the trials. The individuals could hav previous factors that cause them to occur in self-injurious behaviors that are affecting the results of the study. Also we can see that there are varying results so it is specific to each subject. I think this is a good study going forward to ensure that other outside factors are considered when using functional analysis.

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