to train pediatricians, and yet are not sufficiently serious to warrant serious psychiatric diagnosis. His most recent book is “Good Night, Sweet Dreams, I Love You:  Now Get in Bed and Go to Sleep.

 

Abstract: “Anxiety” is a term used for one of the largest classes of psychological/behavioral problems and concerns addressed by psychological research and clinical treatment in the history of psychology. These problems are so prevalent that they have been referred to as the psychological equivalent of fever.  Yet the term anxiety is a hypothetical construct that has never been fully operationalized.  For example, the most currently authoritative book on anxiety disorders does not even attempt a definition for the first 100 pages and the one then offered is a long paragraph that is itself suffused with unoperationalized hypothetical constructs.  Primarily (but not solely) for these reasons, the term has been used to describe the subject of very little research in behavior analysis and almost none in applied behavior analysis.  This is unfortunate because the clinical phenomena referred to by the term are so prevalent, psychologically and behaviorally impairing, and responsive to relatively straightforward behavioral interventions.  A major portion of these phenomena can also easily be classified functionally as avoidant or escape behaviors (i.e., negatively reinforced). This talk will lampoon the contrast between the vagueness of the term anxiety and the extent to which it is used without quotation marks in scientific discourse. It will attempt a behavior analytic conceptualization of the term and the phenomena to which it refers. It will also lament the infinitesimal size of the applied behavior analytic research on “anxiety”, provide some examples of that research that have been conducted at Boys Town, and describe some behavioral interventions for child “anxiety” that have been shown to be effective clinically but that await the type of confirmation that can only come from experimental analyses.

 

1:50-2:00                Break

 

2:00-3:15                UNR Alumni Paper Session

· Treatment of automatically reinforced behaviors within a special education setting: consultation, collaboration, and working with occupational therapists to avoid the use of non-efficacious interventions. Eric Burkholder (ABA Solutions)

· Treating Feeding Problems in Children Using Applied Behavior Analysis: Outcome Measures for a Home-Based Program. Meeta R. Patel (Clinic 4 Kidz)

· The concept of Inherited Behavior is a Finished Psychology. Mark Adams (BEST Consulting)

· Combining evidence-based approaches for the comprehensive remediation of academic deficits. Kimberly Nix Berens (Center for Advanced Learning, Inc.)