Current Directions in Behavioral Science

It's the Environment, Stupid

2015-09-02T09:42:00.000-07:00

Image Source: Flickr

News flash: It is behavior, not feelings or attitudes, that ultimately leads to global climate change. Decades of experimental research, basic and applied, has shown that certain features of the environment are responsible for much of our behavior and, moreover, that altering those features can produce dramatic changes in behavior. In general, to understand why people do what they do, whether as individuals or in groups, one has to look to their history of behavioral consequences. It is no exaggeration to say that the consequences of our behavior are its single most important determinant.

More specifically, over the last one hundred years or so, behavioral psychology research has demonstrated that consequences more effectively influence behavior when they are relatively certain, immediate, large, and require relatively little effort to produce. In other words, we are more likely to repeat behaviors that are relatively effortless and that produce desirable consequences or escape or avoid undesirable consequences, especially if the consequences occur with a high probability soon after the behavior and are big enough to be valuable.

Because the problems that result from global climate change do not immediately follow the actions of any individual, company, or government and are not easily attributable to the behavior of any single entity, most of us cannot appreciate the dire effects of our collective actions on our planet and our behavior remains unchanged. In other words, the long-term deleterious consequences of our actions do not influence them in any direct way. Likewise, because most people have more pressing concerns (e.g., unemployment, lack of health care, etc.), they are less motivated to do something about their own small contribution to the problem. The immediate reinforcers for engaging in unsustainable behaviors are barriers that work against engaging in sustainable behaviors.

The primary goal in reversing climate change, then, is to establish and maintain “green behavior” (i.e., behavior that contributes to environmental sustainability) on the part of both individuals and companies. Once green behaviors have been identified, he environmental factors that promote or hinder them can be identified. Changing those environmental factors will lead to behavior change and, eventually, to climate change. The irony should not be lost here: changing behavior to save the environment and, ultimately, the human species, will require more widespread appreciation of the role the environment plays in determining the behavior in the first place.

Even by the 1970s, research had already shown that a variety of interventions based on operant learning could modify green behaviors such as reducing litter, increased bus rider ship, decreasing lawn-trampling, promoting the purchase of drinks in returnable containers, initiating a recycling process, or reducing energy consumption. In general, this research showed that the critical component of any effort to change behavior is arranging contingent consequences. However, that much of this research was published two or more decades ago and it is troubling that effective behavioral interventions incorporating simple technology have not been widely adopted.

In truth, behavior change efforts might be more usefully applied to promoting wider-spread dissemination of proven green-behavior technologies than continuing to investigate more ways of changing green behavior. Green technology continues to advance and afford ever-increasing numbers of opportunities for encouraging green behavior, with such technologies typically satisfying the critical elements of effective behavior-change procedures: immediacy and consistency of consequences with little response effort required to produce them. But this won’t happen without a corresponding behavioral technology; and behavioral psychology is in the best position to provide such a technology.

A behavioral analysis of the behaviors that contribute to climate change can help us understand why the behaviors occur and it represents an optimistic approach to altering the behaviors because, unlike other psychological factors, the consequences that influence one’s behavior are accessible and comparatively easy to alter. However, the very same understanding of the causes of human behavior that can lead to optimism also suggests that the deck is stacked against us; the adverse consequences related to global warming are too delayed and uncertain to affect our behavior. Without intentional intervention—informed by behavioral psychology research and practice—to alter the existing “anti-green” behavioral contingencies, the problem could indeed be intractable. However, we choose to be optimistic because of the ample evidence that environmental changes can produce positive changes in behavior. After all, it’s the environment, stupid.

* This post is adapted from an unpublished manuscript co-authored by Henry D. Schlinger and Matthew P. Normand.

A Real Evolutionary Psychology

2015-07-28T18:12:00.000-07:00

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Some estimates suggest that, compared to women, almost twice as many men cheat on their spouses. Why?

The answer seems obvious. The more sex a man has, the more likely he is to get a woman pregnant. The more sex he has with more than one woman, the more likely he is to get more than one woman pregnant. The more women he gets pregnant, the more children he will have, and the more of his genes that will live on in future generations. Selfish genes in action, as it were.

The poor woman is not so lucky, as getting pregnant once removes her from the system for at least 9 months, if not longer, practically speaking. But why, then, do at least some women cheat, too? With a little imagination, we can make sense of this. It turns out that cheating provides an opportunity for the woman to get better genes from fitter donors. She can maximize her limited opportunities to get pregnant and give birth. It is a matter of quality, then, not quantity.

Or is it?

Speculations of this kind about the evolutionary origins of human nature are popular in some circles and such thinking is formalized in the field of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologists contend that much of our behavior has been hard-wired into our brains via natural selection. The field has given off much heat but very little light, but it remains popular. This is unfortunate, as the heat generated by EP stands to keep people away from the light produced by more rigorous analyses of human behavior rooted in science, not pseudoscience.

Evolutionary psychology is not a science, it is “just-so” psychology in which people are observed to behave in certain ways, some plausible story about the problems faced by our ancestors is formulated to explain why the observed behavior would have evolved, and then observations that people do indeed behave that way are offered in support of the explanatory story. This is circular reasoning at its finest. (This is to say nothing of the gross misuse of heritability estimates in research on psychological traits, but that is for another blog post.)

Invoking Darwin, selfish genes, and DNA cannot save it from the clutches of pseudoscience. So what is the alternative?

It turns out that learning is a much more powerful and plausible explanation for much of what is attributed to genetics by evolutionary psychologists. Our brains are not hardwired with many special purpose modules guiding our behavior. What has evolved is an exquisite behavioral sensitivity to our environment, allowing our behavior to be shaped by the pressures we face rather than the pressures our ancestors faced. More than 100 years of experimental evidence supplies us a rich framework with which to understand human behavior (and the behavior of other animals). There are, indeed, parallels between biological evolution and behavioral evolution, just not the kind proposed by evolutionary psychologists.

There are three processes critical to biological evolution: variation, selection, and retention (via replication). As it turns out, these three processes are common features of both biological and behavioral evolution. At the behavioral level, behavior varies from one situation to another and from one time to another in the same situation. Certain types of behavior will produce beneficial outcomes and some will not. The beneficial outcomes "select" the behavior that produced them, leading to that behavior being repeated (due to changes in the nervous system) in similar circumstances in the future.

B. F. Skinner
Image Source: Flickr

We know about this process of behavioral evolution, and the details of how it occurs, chiefly from the work of the late American psychologist B. F. Skinner and his many students and colleagues. Skinner famously discovered operant conditioning, a term he used to collectively refer to the basic laws governing most of human and nonhuman behavior. Operant conditioning encompasses a relatively small number of very powerful principles, including reinforcement, punishment, extinction, and stimulus control. Like evolution by natural selection, operant conditioning is a simple mechanism that gives rise to great complexity.

In Skinner's terms, behavior that produces favorable outcomes (reinforcers) is more likely to occur in the future (an outcome called reinforcement). Additionally, the behavior is most likely to occur in the future in situations that are similar to situations in which the behavior has been reinforced in the past. This acquired effect of the environment is referred to as stimulus control, and the controlling stimuli are called discriminative stimuli. In this way, the reinforcer selects a relationship between a set of environmental circumstances (discriminative stimuli) and certain types of behavior. That is, the reinforcer "reinforces" the relationship between the circumstances and behavior, meaning that the behavior is more likely to occur when those circumstances present themselves. The opposite effect is seen with punishment, whereby certain behaviors are less likely to occur in certain situations because, in the past, those behaviors have produced unfavorable outcomes (punishers) in those situations.

In the 20th century, Skinner was the most notable champion of such selectionist principles as the basic mechanism of learning, but he was by no means the only psychologist to suggest as much. For example, at the turn of the 20th century, one of the most famous and influential psychologists of all time, Edward L. Thorndike, was conducting his research on animal intelligence that resulted in his formulation of the Law of Effect—one of the very few "laws" in psychology. Thorndike placed hungry cats in a handmade wooden "puzzle box," with a dish of food placed outside and in view. The boxes differed from one to another, but all had some way that the cat could open the box and escape, such as a lever that opened a door when pressed. Thorndike observed that, at first, the cats took quite a while to accidentally make the response that opened the box, essentially stumbling on the right solution by trial-and-error. After a cat finally did escape, it was placed back in the box and process was repeated many times, across many days. Over time, and as a result of their experiences, the cats were quicker and quicker to escape, ultimately pressing the lever as soon as they were put into the box.

E. L. Thorndike's "Puzzle Boxes"
Image Source: Yale University Archives

This work is transparently selectionist, insofar as Thorndike reported an ever-decreasing range of behaviors exhibited by the cats as they were repeatedly exposed to the puzzle box. Over time, the wide range of behavior originally seen (e.g., scratching, sniffing, whining) narrowed so as to be dominated by the lever press, which most reliably opened the box and resulted in escape and access to food. In this case, the selecting aspect of the environment for the behavior of the hungry cat was escape from the box and access to the food. This beneficial outcome selected lever pressing as the dominant behavior, while other varieties of behavior went extinct because they were not beneficial under these circumstances. The cats still did all those other things (e.g., scratching, sniffing, whining), but not when they were in the puzzle box.

In the decades following Thorndike’s work, other psychologists arrived at similar conclusions about the importance of environmental selection as a causal mechanism of learning. Again, in the language of Skinner’s operant conditioning, those events that follow behavior and result in the behavior occurring more often in the future under similar conditions are called reinforcers; the increase in future behavior is the result of reinforcement. In short, reinforcement selects behavioral characteristics of the individual in much the same way survival selects other (e.g., physical) characteristics of a species.

A chief benefit of learning over natural selection is that when environment change rapidly, the individual can change, too. With both Darwinian and Skinnerian evolution, a selected characteristic is beneficial only in environments similar in some critical ways to the environment prevailing at the time of selection. At the Darwinian level, a heightened sensitivity to fatty foods as reinforcers serves the species well in times when fats are in short supply, because we need fat in our diets to survive. Across many generations living under such conditions, the numbers game favors those individuals most motivated to seek out and eat fatty foods, as they are the most likely to survive long enough to reproduce. Should conditions change (as they most certainly have) with respect to the availability of fatty foods, this sensitivity to fat as a reinforcer loses its adaptive value and can even become a hindrance. However, it can take quite a long time for evolution to fix the problem, which is where learning steps in.

Of course, learning requires, at the very least, a behaving organism that is the product of natural selection. Even more than this can be granted to evolution, however. Our genes influence our sensitivity to certain aspects of our environment and thereby play a crucial role in determining the extent to which those things influence our behavior. In this way, our evolutionary past most certainly plays a role in determining our behavior, but not in any direct way, at least in most circumstances.

(The role of genes is undoubtedly even more pervasive in some circumstances. The presence of seemingly innate aggressive responding to painful or otherwise aversive stimulation has been documented in non-humans and has led many to conclude that the same might hold true for humans. Though the jury is still out, the claim is not entirely unfounded nor is it especially improbable.)

It is obvious that our genes play a crucial role in the ability of the organism to learn and perform certain behaviors, but the genetic role is one of proximate causation driven by the environment as the ultimate source of causation. Even our genes are changed as a result of our experiences. To quote science journalist Sharon Begley, "Evolution indeed sculpted the human brain. But it worked in malleable plastic, not stone, bequeathing us flexible minds that can take stock of the world and adapt to it."

We have inherited an ability to learn from our experiences, because doing so allows us to survive in an ever-changing world.

Why Psychologists Study Behavior, Not the Mind

2015-07-13T09:33:00.003-07:00

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For psychology, behavior is always the subject matter, despite what some might claim to the contrary. At the end of the day, all that psychologists can measure is behavior. Even the psychologist who claims to study the mind is, in practice, studying behavior. There is behavior and there is the nervous system, but everything else is an inference. To infer something between the nervous system and behavior is dualistic, and so much the worse for the progress of psychology as a science.

Consider the following example. We want to know if understanding a question written in all capital letters without any punctuation is more difficult than understanding a question written normally. We hypothesize that it will take longer for subjects to answer if the question is more difficult to understand. We present the following question to half of our subjects:

"JIM HAS FIVE DOLLARS JOHN HAS TWO DOLLARS HOW MANY MORE DOLLARS THAN JOHN DOES JIM HAVE"

We present the following question to the other half of our subjects :

"Jim has five dollars. John has two dollars. How many more dollars than John does Jim have?"

Suppose that subjects in the first group take, on average, 5 seconds to answer. And suppose that subjects in the second group take, on average, 1 second to answer. We conclude that the first question--the one in all capitals with no punctuation--was harder to understand. Further, we conclude that it took the subjects seeing the first question longer to "process" the question, with the "processing" presumably being some cognitive processing taking place in the brain.

We might, and psychologists often do, assume that we are measuring cognitive processing of some sort with our experiment. But are we?

What we really are measuring is the relationship between the way a question is printed and the length of time (termed "latency") it takes subjects to answer the question. Providing an answer to the question is behavior and that is what we see and measure. We haven't measured a cognitive process, then, we've measured behavior. We infer the cognitive process from the behavior we observed.

But someone else might infer a very different thing from the very same situation. Maybe another researcher would infer that seeing all capitals and no punctuation makes the subject first say to themselves, "I wonder why the question is written in all capitals with no punctuation." Saying this before answering the question is what accounts for the increased time it takes them to answer the question. Still another research might infer something very different.

There can be no real disagreement about the response latency observed. It is objective, well defined, and easily recorded. No inferences necessary. That is the great benefit of approaching psychology as a science of behavior: it is conservative and assumes no more than what can be established through direct empirical investigation.

Put simply, behavior is anything an organism does. More specifically, behavior is the interaction of the muscles and glands of a live organism with the environment. For scientific purposes, we need to add a caveat. Behavior is anything an organism does that is observable and measurable. If we can't in some way see it, we can't measure it. If we can't measure it, we can't study it.

Talking is behavior. Running is behavior. Pedaling a bike is behavior. Writing an answer on an exam is behavior. Taking notes in class is behavior.

Things like understanding, knowing, loving, and even learning, are not behavior mostly because they are too vague--they are just labels for various kinds of actual behavior. Loving, for example, doesn't specify anything in particular and, not surprisingly, there is a lot of disagreement about what love is and how you would go about studying it. We can simplify things and get a foothold on studying something like "love" if we just identify some actual behavior that we believe to be relevant. We might decide to study how often a husband compliments his wife (and vice versa). We might study how often a wife says nice things about her husband to other people (and vice versa). We might study how close a husband and wife sit to one another at dinner or at a party.

Really, we'd have to identify a whole host of behaviors like those above and study them in concert--no easy feat, to be sure. Absent a clear definition of what we're studying and a way to record what we're studying, we'll be spinning our wheels.

Science is mostly a slow incremental endeavor. You can't start with all the answers to the most important questions. First you have to find out what questions to ask. For psychology, you have to figure out what behavior is relevant and how to measure it.

Bigger Is Not Always Better: Why Psychology Needs Smaller Studies

2015-07-06T19:36:00.002-07:00

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Psychology has been embroiled in a professional crisis as of late, and deservedly so. The research methods commonly used by psychologists, especially the statistical analyses used to analyze experimental data, have come under scrutiny—again, deservedly so. Although it is encouraging that so many people are becoming aware of the many problems evident in mainstream psychology research, one fundamental problem has received almost no attention. Namely, the focus on studying large groups of people has gone unquestioned. However, focusing on between-group comparisons is, in my estimation, THE problem, especially because those designs are exactly the kind that lead to the very statistical analyses at the center of psychology's professional crisis.

Smaller within-subject studies are much more appropriate for the kinds of questions most psychologists are asking. Smaller studies also tend to produce data that can be understood without complicated statistics. Moreover, and contrary to popular belief, within-subject studies actually tell us more about each subject studied and, therefore, provide us with more information about when and where the findings are likely to be useful.

Generally speaking, within-subject research allows each subject to be studied very intensively and over a prolonged period of time. Also, because there are fewer subjects, within-subject research often can be conducted under very controlled conditions, unlike studies of large groups of people, which have to rely on one or a few measures of each subject. Not to mention that those few measures typically are measures of what the subjects say the will do, rather than what they actually do. (Unfortunately, what we say we will do rarely matches what we actually do.)

Moreover, because large group designs focus on the average performance of a large group of subjects, they don't tell us about any real effects on any real person. The "average" effect doesn't exist, and an individual subject almost never responds like the mythical "average." This makes it very difficult to translate research findings into practice, because we will never meet the average person, we will only meet a real person.

What we get from studies of large groups of people typically amounts to very little information about any actual person or persons, few and possibly invalid measures of subject performance, and findings that might be "statistically significant" but have no practical implications in the real world.

Irrelevant Things Matter in Economic Behavior

2015-05-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

Supposedly irrelevant factors, or SIFs, matter a lot, and if we economists recognize their importance, we can do our jobs better. Behavioral economics is, to a large extent, standard economics that has been modified to incorporate SIFs ... Consider defined-contribution retirement plans like 401(k)’s. Econs would have no trouble figuring out how much to save for retirement and how to invest the money, but mere humans can find it quite tough. So knowledgeable employers have incorporated three SIFs in their plan design: they automatically enroll employees (who can opt out), they automatically increase the saving rate every year, and they offer a sensible default investment choice like a target date fund. These features significantly improve the outcomes of plan participants, but to economists they are SIFs ... Notice that the irrelevant design features that do all the work are essentially free, whereas a tax break is quite expensive. The Joint Economic Committee estimates that the United States tax break will cost the government $62 billion in 2015, a number that is predicted to grow rapidly. Furthermore, most of these tax benefits accrue to affluent taxpayers. more

Tackling Human Biases in Science

2015-05-28T09:02:00.000-07:00

Psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia says that the most common and problematic bias in science is “motivated reasoning”: We interpret observations to fit a particular idea. Psychologists have shown that “most of our reasoning is in fact rationalization,” he says. In other words, we have already made the decision about what to do or to think, and our “explanation” of our reasoning is really a justification for doing what we wanted to do—or to believe—anyway. Science is of course meant to be more objective and skeptical than everyday thought—but how much is it, really? Whereas the falsification model of the scientific method championed by philosopher Karl Popper posits that the scientist looks for ways to test and falsify her theories—to ask “How am I wrong?”—Nosek says that scientists usually ask instead “How am I right?” (or equally, to ask “How are you wrong?”). When facts come up that suggest we might, in fact, not be right after all, we are inclined to dismiss them as irrelevant, if not indeed mistaken. The now infamous “cold fusion” episode in the late 1980s, instigated by the electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, was full of such ad hoc brush-offs. For example, when it was pointed out to Fleischmann and Pons that their energy spectrum of the gamma rays from their claimed fusion reaction had its spike at the wrong energy, they simply moved it, muttering something ambiguous about calibration. more

Want to Make Your Course ‘Gameful’? A New Tool Could Help

2015-05-27T09:31:00.000-07:00

Barry J. Fishman, a professor of information and education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, would like to help you find out. Mr. Fishman has borrowed elements of gaming to develop GradeCraft, a learning-management system that lets instructors organize their courses in a “gameful” way. The system lets students choose their own path through a course, selecting the assignments that interest and challenge them. At its heart is a tool, called the “grade predictor,” that helps to “manage some of the chaos” of such a personalized system. The grade predictor also helps students figure out what they need to do to reach the classroom goals they set for themselves. GradeCraft also aims to give students the ability to fail without detrimental consequences. There are many assignments to choose from, so any students who do poorly on one can find plenty of other tasks to redeem themselves. Instructors, meanwhile, can allow students to revise their work. Mr. Fishman’s assessment system treats unsuccessful assignments not as failures but as learning experiences that pull students closer to mastery. more

Science Is Often Flawed: It's Time We Embraced That

2015-05-20T09:11:00.003-07:00

In his book Derailed, about his fall from academic grace, the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel explained his preferred method for manipulating scientific data in detail that would make any nerd's jaw drop:

"I preferred to do it at home, late in the evening... I made myself some tea, put my computer on the table, took my notes from my bag, and used my fountain pen to write down a neat list of research projects and effects I had to produce.... Subsequently I began to enter my own data, row for row, column for column...3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 4, 5, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 5, 4, 3, 3, 2. When I was finished, I would do the first analyses. Often, these would not immediately produce the right results. Back to the matrix and alter data. 4, 6, 7, 5, 4, 7, 8, 2, 4, 4, 6, 5, 6, 7, 8, 5, 4. Just as long until all analyses worked out as planned."

In 2011, when Stapel was suspended over research fraud allegations, he was a rising star in social psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He had conducted attention-grabbing experiments on social behavior, looking at, for example, whether litter in an environment encouraged racial stereotyping and discrimination. Yet that paper — and at least 55 others, as well as 10 dissertations written by students he supervised — were built on falsified data. Stories like Stapel's are what most people think of when they think about how science goes wrong: an unethical researcher methodically defrauding the public. But outright fraud is just one potential derailment from truth. more

Cheaters Never Win...or Do they?

2015-05-18T09:26:00.000-07:00

Why do people cheat? Quite simply, the reward for cheating typically outweighs the negative consequence. Cheating is an epidemic in today's society where we strive for the path of least resistance and effort in every aspect of our lives. Allow me to indulge you in a little educational psychology for a minute (something I studied and use in my own classroom as an educator). One of the tenants of behavioral psychological is the learning theory of B.F. Skinner. In a nutshell, the basic theory is that people learn by imitation and then subsequent reinforcement. When we are children we copy what we see: other children and adults around us. When we are given praise and acknowledgement after a particular behavior we tend to keep doing the behavior to seek the reward. Of course there are other factors that play a role in behavior: environment, self-efficacy and a host of other learning theories. But I agree with Skinner that imitation and reinforcement are the main keys to learning (and changing behavior). As a teacher I am very aware of when I offer praise to my students. In fact, I tend to withhold praise until I see exactly the kind of behavior I want. Then I reward that behavior. And you know what? Students tend to keep doing whatever I reward. It is the idea of a "reward" that is the primary motivation for a given behavior. So again, why do people cheat? It's because they see other people cheat (ie, imitation), and they are rewarded when they do. Tom Brady cheated and he won a Super bowl. The Saints cheated with the Bountygate scandal, and they won a Super bowl. Did both teams also face a punishment? Yes, but they still got the reward in the end. more

Smokers More Likely To Quit If Their Own Cash Is On The Line

2015-05-14T07:43:00.000-07:00

A new study finds that employer-based programs to help people stop smoking would work better if they tapped into highly motivating feelings — such as the fear of losing money ... The researchers compared a few approaches. Some people simply got cash for quitting. Others were offered a carrot-and-stick approach. They'd get a similar financial reward if they quit, but they'd also lose $150 of their own money if they started smoking again. "People are much more afraid of losing $5 than they are motivated to earn $5," Halpern says. "And so people's actions go with their psychology" ... "The deposit programs were twice as effective as rewards, and five times more effective than providing free smoking cessation aids like nicotine replacement therapy," Halpern says. more

First Results from Psychology’s Largest Reproducibility Test

2015-05-12T09:18:00.002-07:00

An ambitious effort to replicate 100 research findings in psychology ended last week — and the data look worrying. Results posted online on 24 April, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, suggest that key findings from only 39 of the published studies could be reproduced. But the situation is more nuanced than the top-line numbers suggest (See graphic, 'Reliability test'). Of the 61 non-replicated studies, scientists classed 24 as producing findings at least “moderately similar” to those of the original experiments, even though they did not meet pre-established criteria, such as statistical significance, that would count as a successful replication. The results should convince everyone that psychology has a replicability problem, says Hal Pashler, a cognitive psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, and an author of one of the papers whose findings were successfully repeated. “A lot of working scientists assume that if it’s published, it’s right,” he says. “This makes it hard to dismiss that there are still a lot of false positives in the literature.” But Daniele Fanelli, who studies bias and scientific misconduct at Stanford University in California, says the results suggest that the reproducibility of findings in psychology does not necessarily lag behind that in other sciences. There is plenty of room for improvement, he adds, but earlier studies have suggested that reproducibility rates in cancer biology and drug discovery could be even lower. more

Science That Could Improve the Lives of People with Autism is Being Ignored

2015-05-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

The science of applied behaviour analysis (ABA) has been shown to have significant success in helping people with autism who ask for help. This evidence-based practice can also help reduce the associated economic costs. This science involves the systematic use of behavioural principles to help those diagnosed with autism make socially significant changes in their behaviour. In doing so, individuals and families are provided with new opportunities for making personal choices. For example, ABA has enabled families to holiday together for the first time. Currently, 41 States in America have enacted new laws to ensure that ABA is available under health insurance. By contrast, the body that advises the NHS in England and Wales, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, concluded that it could not find any evidence to support ABA and therefore could not make a recommendation about it ... This gulf in perspectives between Europe and the USA can be explained by the lack of available training in ABA in Europe and the fact that professionals without appropriate training perpetuate the misinformation that has then shaped government policies on autism. more

Time for One-Person Research Trials

2015-05-06T09:00:00.001-07:00

Recognition that physicians need to take individual variability into account is driving huge interest in ‘precision’ medicine ... Classical clinical trials harvest a handful of measurements from thousands of people. Precision medicine requires different ways of testing interventions. Researchers need to probe the myriad factors—genetic and environmental, among others—that shape a person’s response to a particular treatment. Studies that focus on a single person—known as N-of-1 trials—will be a crucial part of the mix ... If enough data are collected over a sufficiently long time, and appropriate control interventions are used, the trial participant can be confidently identified as a responder or non-responder to a treatment. Aggregated results of many N-of-1 trials (all carried out in the same way) will offer information about how to better treat subsets of the population or even the population at large. more

Neurons for Hunger and Thirst Condition Preference for Environmental Cues

2015-05-05T08:51:00.000-07:00

Homeostasis is a biological principle for regulation of essential physiological parameters within a set range. Behavioural responses due to deviation from homeostasis are critical for survival, but motivational processes engaged by physiological need states are incompletely understood. We examined motivational characteristics of two separate neuron populations that regulate energy and fluid homeostasis by using cell-type-specific activity manipulations in mice. We found that starvation-sensitive AGRP neurons exhibit properties consistent with a negative-valence teaching signal. Mice avoided activation of AGRP neurons, indicating that AGRP neuron activity has negative valence. AGRP neuron inhibition conditioned preference for flavours and places. Correspondingly, deep-brain calcium imaging revealed that AGRP neuron activity rapidly reduced in response to food-related cues. Complementary experiments activating thirst-promoting neurons also conditioned avoidance. Therefore, these need-sensing neurons condition preference for environmental cues associated with nutrient or water ingestion, which is learned through reduction of negative-valence signals during restoration of homeostasis. more

Flipping the Equation on Challenging Behavior

2015-05-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

When you decided to become a teacher, did you envision changing young people’s lives for the better and coming home each day with a glow of satisfaction? Sadly, the reality can be vastly different! When a classroom is filled with students engaging in challenging behavior, it can begin to feel like a war zone. It can be stressful and lack reward. How is a person supposed to teach when one or more students are being noncompliant, disruptive, and distracting other students? There are some simple strategies that can empower a teacher to turn all of that challenging behavior around and get back to the business of teaching. First, we need to see behavior clearly for what it is: Communication. It is never random; it always has a purpose. If we can begin to recognize the pay-off a student is getting from engaging in the behavior, we can affect great change. There are four main “usual suspects” that are the underlying causes of nearly all challenging behavior in a classroom setting. more

How to Fix Reward Programs

2015-04-30T08:48:00.001-07:00

Once the bastion of airlines and credit cards, rewards programs have expanded to the point where it is now possible to be “rewarded” for buying everything from a pack of gum to a brand-new car. Every retail checkout clerk is trained to ask, at every visit, if you would like to join the store’s rewards program. Merely sharing your email address can result in a bombardment of messages promising points, rewards, and other inducements ... The evolution has led to some serious questions about rewards programs ... To understand why, you have to go back to Psychology 101 — specifically to the concept of “operant conditioning,” also known as reward–response. Pioneering psychologist B.F. Skinner required subjects to be placed in a “Skinner box.” The box allowed Skinner to control the stimuli that a subject was exposed to and ensure that the program of rewards would establish the operant conditioning. Unfortunately for most marketers, consumers can’t be contained in Skinner boxes — aka an environment where the product would have a monopoly. But even if they could, the operant conditioning of reward–response doesn’t quite achieve its objective of repeat behavior and consumer preference. A program might be successful at first. But as soon as other competitors enter the mix, the conditioned behavior is no longer operative, because rewards are no longer unique and the environment is no longer controlled. Instead of behavioral conditioning, companies get balance-sheet liability and consumers are bombarded with offers and emails. Worst of all, consumers may come to expect rewards for doing nothing. To a degree, then, traditional rewards programs are a waste of corporate money. more

Parent Training Can Reduce Serious Behavioral Problems in Young Children with Autism

2015-04-28T08:16:00.000-07:00

A multi-site study sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) finds young children with autism spectrum disorder and serious behavioral problems respond positively to a 24-week structured parent training. The benefits of parent training endured for up to six months post intervention. Published in the April 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association the study found parent training was more effective in reducing disruptive and aggressive behavior than 24 weeks of parent education. Parent training provided parents with specific strategies on how to manage serious behavioral problems such as tantrums, aggression, self-injury and noncompliance in children with autism spectrum disorder. Parent education offered useful information on autism - but did not provide guidance on how to manage serious behavioral problems. more

Digital Addiction: The Social Cost of Constant Mobile Connection

2015-04-23T07:41:00.001-07:00

“We have some very strong habits around a lot of our technology, particularly the cellphone,” says psychologist Prof Art Markman, author of Smart Change. “Back when I was in college studying introductory psychology, we had to train a rat to press a bar. We rewarded the rat by giving it water. Whenever it went near the side of the cage where the bar was or when it brushed against the bar, you would reward it. “Once it finally figured out pressing the bar, the idea was to give it a reward 40-50 per cent of the time in a random way. That would keep the rat busy for a long time. “There are two other situations in the modern world where we encounter that exact schedule of reinforcement: in casinos and in our cellphone behaviour. “We look for notifications to see if we have email. In doing so we create a pattern to be rewarded with a new message about half the time we take our phones out. We have trained ourselves to press a bar over and over again. Once we’ve done it enough times, we’re basically no different than a rat in a box. We’ll keep doing it for an awfully long time.” more

Study Rules Out Link Between Autism and MMR Vaccine Even in At-Risk Kids

2015-04-22T08:31:00.000-07:00

At least a dozen major studies have found that early childhood vaccines do not cause autism. But one possibility remained: that immunizations could cause autism in a small group of children who were already primed to develop the disorder. Now, new research has ruled out that possibility too. A study of nearly 100,000 children found that toddlers known to have an elevated risk of autism were no more likely to be diagnosed with the disorder if they were vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella than if they weren’t. What’s more, the diagnosis rate for high-risk children who were vaccinated was the same as for immunized children with no family history of the disorder, according to the report published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. By hunting for — and failing to find — a link between the MMR vaccine and autism spectrum disorders, or ASD, in children with an older sibling who had the disease, the study leaves no doubt that the two are not connected, experts said. more

The Giant Rats That Save Lives

2015-04-20T08:27:00.002-07:00

Bart Weetjens, a Belgian product designer, started the HeroRat program after puzzling about how to improve mine detection. As a boy, Weetjens had kept rats as pets, and he came across an article about the use of gerbils for tasks involving scent detection. Weetjens then consulted rodent scholars, who suggested Gambian pouched rats, in part because they compensate for very weak eyes with a superb sense of smell. They are called “pouched” not because they are marsupials but because they fill their cheeks with nuts and other goodies, and then bury them underground — relying upon scent to recover their caches later. Another advantage of Gambian pouched rats is that they have an eight-year life span that offers a lengthy return on the nine months of training needed to detect land mines. So Weetjens started an aid group, Apopo, that trains the rats in Tanzania and then deploys them to minefields in various countries. Apopo is also now branching off into using HeroRats to detect tuberculosis — a disease of poverty that kills 1.5 million people a year around the world. A huge challenge with tuberculosis is diagnosis. It takes a trained health worker with a microscope all day to examine about 25 samples of sputum to determine if they are positive for tuberculosis. In contrast, a HeroRat can screen 100 samples in 20 minutes... more

Behavior Analysis and Behavioral Neuroscience

2015-04-17T09:47:00.000-07:00

Behavior analysis—the science of adaptive behavior—focuses on behavior as a subject matter in its own right, not as an index of cognitive events, and is, thus, not dualistic. Behavior analysis incorporates several laws of learning discovered by researchers using single-subject experimental designs. I argue that behavior analysis can provide neuroscientists with an experimental and a theoretical framework within which to investigate the neural bases of behaviors, including those that are usually described in cognitive terms ... It is behavior, not cognitive events, which is important for organisms—human and nonhuman—both evolutionarily and in their own lifetimes. Behavior interacts with and adapts to the (i.e., is selected by the) environment; and the nervous system has evolved to support that interaction. Behavior analysis, as a science of behavior in its own right, and not as an indicator of inferred cognitive structures or processes, is best positioned to parsimoniously explain that interaction. Neuroscientists require a cogent theory of behavior to support their search for the neurophysiological correlates of behavior. Thus, behavior analysis can offer both an experimental model based on single-subject research and an elegant theory of behavior that can provide neurophysiologists a non-dualistic road map for understanding the neurophysical correlates of adaptive behavior. more

Unreliable Research: Trouble at the Lab

2015-04-16T07:39:00.000-07:00

“I see a train wreck looming,” warned Daniel Kahneman, an eminent psychologist, in an open letter last year. The premonition concerned research on a phenomenon known as “priming”. Priming studies suggest that decisions can be influenced by apparently irrelevant actions or events that took place just before the cusp of choice. They have been a boom area in psychology over the past decade, and some of their insights have already made it out of the lab and into the toolkits of policy wonks keen on “nudging” the populace ... Dr Kahneman and a growing number of his colleagues fear that a lot of this priming research is poorly founded. Over the past few years various researchers have made systematic attempts to replicate some of the more widely cited priming experiments. Many of these replications have failed ... The idea that the same experiments always get the same results, no matter who performs them, is one of the cornerstones of science’s claim to objective truth. If a systematic campaign of replication does not lead to the same results, then either the original research is flawed (as the replicators claim) or the replications are (as many of the original researchers on priming contend). Either way, something is awry. more

Older People Can Learn to Spend Less Time Sitting Down

2015-04-15T08:32:00.000-07:00

Retirement may be more golden if less of it is spent in a resting position. Yet older adults spend an average of 8.5 waking hours a day sitting or lying down, according to TABS study leader Dori Rosenberg, PhD, MPH, an assistant scientific investigator at Group Health Research Institute ... "We're not sure whether older people can improve their health by reducing the time they spend sitting," Dr. Rosenberg said. "To prove that, we need randomized trials--and none have been done yet in older adults." As a first step toward such a trial, she conducted the TABS study, which showed that it was feasible to coach adults aged 60 and older to spend less time sitting: an average of 27 minutes less per day ... In the TABS study, health coaches talked by phone with each participant five times during eight weeks. The coaches used motivational interviewing to engage participants in setting personalized goals to sit less by standing and moving more--and to take more breaks from sitting throughout the day. Participants tracked how much they thought they were sitting. And at baseline, midway through the study, and at its end, participants used two devices for a week to measure how much they were sitting. They also received charts showing feedback from these measurements. Participants found the feedback charts most helpful, followed by the coaching phone calls. "The feedback was like a reward for standing up and moving," Mr. Alexander said. more

Science and Medicine Have '"Publication Pollution" Problem

2015-04-13T08:16:00.000-07:00

The scientific community is facing a ‘pollution problem’ in academic publishing, one that poses a serious threat to the “trustworthiness, utility, and value of science and medicine,” according to one of the country’s leading medical ethicists. Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, director of the Division of Medical Ethics in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Medical Center, shares these and other observations in a commentary publishing April 3 in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings. "The pollution of science and medicine by plagiarism, fraud, and predatory publishing is corroding the reliability of research," writes Dr. Caplan. "Yet neither the leadership nor those who rely on the truth of science and medicine are sounding the alarm loudly or moving to fix the problem with appropriate energy." more

My Bedtime Friend: A Complete Bedtime Solution for Children

2015-04-09T08:09:00.000-07:00

My Bedtime Friend promises to be a safe and fun bedtime solution for children that teaches children their bedtime schedule and keeps them on schedule year round using positive reinforcement ... The first part of My Bedtime Friend is a super soft, cuddly and durable plush toy that indicates to children that it's either bedtime or wake-up time ... The second part of this project is the Bedtime Game. It's the key to My Bedtime Friend's success because it gives children the reason why to stay in their bed. It's a reward chart in the form of a board game. It uses a fixed interval reward system that reinforces the desired bedtime schedule and conditions it to become a learned behavior. Suzanne Lane Hittel used her BA in Psychology and background in behavior to develop a reward system based on B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning. more