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ABA technical concepts covered in this podcast: Discriminative Stimuli or Sd; Evocative MO’s; Ontogeny; neuroplasticity; pivotal behaviours; Maintenance; Intrinsic vs. extrinsic reinforcers; Unconditioned R+ and R-; Conditioned R+; Stimulus Control; Pairing; NCR; Topographies of behaviour; Stimulus class; Desensitization; Habit reversal; Flooding procedure; de-stimulation; Cusp behaviours; contextual cues; choosing target behaviour; social validity; dysregulation; behaviour shaping; Positive Behaviour Support; behaviour intensities

Presenters - Bobbi Hoadley and Cathy Knights

Cathy's dog Clara is the star of this discussion about desensitization. Teaching an old dog or an adolescent one doesn't have to be challenging if you know how!

We like to talk about behaviour, yours, mine, and the dogs. The theme: you can’t teach an old dog new tricks and looking at why that’s a myth.

We have MO’s that are driven by our internal states. Hormones are one example. Cathy’s dog recently spayed, could be reacting to that internal state. Also the age, adolescence she is creating neuro connections all the time. As you become older, neuro connections become harder and harder to change. It’s just a little more work to change when you’re older. She will probably mature.

Bribing with treats doesn’t maintain behaviour unless it turns into an intrinsic reinforcer. Wanting to please the owner will be intrinsic. Can be the same with people. Use an external reinforcer to pair ourselves with it. But we need stimulus control for behaviour change. The best way is to have good rapport, then you have influence. Influence can become stimulus control.

Cathy’s dog appears to be aggressive toward other animals, including dogs. Without knowing the learning history, as she is a rescue dog, it is difficult to understand the behaviour fully. There was a time when people thought that removing the fear of water out of someone was best done by throwing them in the pool. There are still misconceptions around de-sensitization.

The first step is rapport. Very often we teach some foundational behaviours first, before a desensitization technique. Cathy’s dog Clara, it can be hard to de-stimulate her. People can actually be more reactive to the suggestion of the object of fear.

People who are afraid of dogs, can become very reactive to hearing the word dog or hearing the dog bark in the distance. Whereas they can look at a picture of a dog and say it’s cute. The anticipation can create more anxiety than the object itself. Not to say that an aggressive dog wouldn’t bring on a huge attack of fear. The suggestion of the dog on a more regular basis can create more reactivity.

You don’t want to mix up typical behaviour with the challenging behaviour that is so antisocial. You know what the stimulus is for Clara - it’s another dog. You’ve been building rapport with her and gaining some control. Provide non-contingent reinforcement meaning she doesn’t have to do anything in return. Caring, generosity, attention, eye contact, smiles, compliments, interest in who they are. The other one is pair yourself with primary reinforcers – food, warmth, all the good things in life. Anyone who cannot build rapport, cannot teach, and then you have no control over stimuli.

The next is to understand that labels or suggestions can activate the behaviour. If she is easily overstimulated, you need to get control over that first. Otherwise she can’t hear what you are trying to teach. Cathy is now pairing de-stimulation with a command. She is teaching Clara some regulation, but really they are tricks to perform. Without the intrinsic reinforce of how to self-soothe or calm. Tricks are different from habits. Feeling calm is a whole lot better than not feeling calm. Clara needs to learn a foundational behaviour of how to de-stimulate and regulate. It’s different for everyone, is it poor waiting behaviour, low frustration tolerance, poor self-monitoring, poor self-regulating – any one of these behaviours can cause a person to become reactive in an environment where they feel threatened. We teach a lot of self-soothing and resilience. Resilience is the ability to have a set-back and be able to bring yourself back from it. It’s tied to the self-soothing.

Cathy’s been reinforcing successive approximations of behaviour with Clara and the dishwasher. That’s what she will be doing with desensitization. Any organism is an investment in relationship. Rescue animals are a special commitment.

ABA technical concepts covered in this podcast: Operant conditioning; Learning histories; Inter-behavioural conditioning; intergenerational conditioned behaviours; behavioural cusp; habilitation

Presenters - Bobbi Hoadley, Cathy Knights.

As always, Bobbi and Cathy chat about a new take on an old adage – this one is full of hope and optimism, as they smash rules written in stone.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. The influences of learning on behaviour. What are all those influences that create this perfectly individual human being that's not like any other human being? Identical twins are not the same people. So many studies use twin studies because it's such a good control of the variables, and still individual development makes distinct individuals. The tree may be a whole lot more complex than we understand. We often see the tree as the family system or parent – that may be the trunk of the tree, but there's also the branch, the roots, the leaves, etc. and the environment that supports the tree being alive. It's a great adage, but to just say a person becomes who they are because of their genetics, or what their parents did, or their IQ - it's too simplistic to say that because we know an individual has been created by all those things.

So we talk about inter-behavioural learning – all the things on the tree and more. It's a mistake for us to do an analysis simplistically. Adults are more complex than children. We have inter-behavioural generational conditioning, e.g. if you had a great grandfather who died from a snake bite, you'll probably have a greater incidence of phobias of snakes in your family even if they are unaware of Grandpa's death. You have the demeanour your mother had, or your movements are very reminiscent of someone in your family – all intergenerational conditioned behaviours.

Study of epigenetics, genes aren't hardwired, they are more like switches- they change over our life-spans. We'll have a predisposed gene that we can switch off. Plants or animals where genes can change in a matter of hours. It's still important for us to know what is in your history. The whole nature-nurture argument closed off to us the idea that change was possible if it was in your genes, e.g. if you mother had schizophrenia, it could happen to me. But it's more hopeful to see us as organisms who are responding to our environments with what we know.

Critical incidences in a person's life – sometimes something will happen during a key developing milestone and that incident can be huge.

Disordered personality in adults, the medical model was more focussed on expertise than human treatment, patient became an object. At least 10% of the analyses I do, will have had a prolonged illness in childhood where they were hospitalized for a long period of time with very little nurturing. It can be traumatic. We don't do that to children anymore.

Let's not limit the accidents of fate. Fate teaches resilience, don't try to protect children, and on the other hand facilitate to support them to the next stage of development.

We become a part of our environment and that's where our soul is. It tends to be that understanding that we are part of a whole, something greater than ourselves.

IQ testing can be wildly unreliable if we don't accommodate where the apple fell from, or the internal state of the person being tested. IQ is not a good understanding of human cognition. All those people with cognitive disabilities who are hypervigilant of caregivers, it's highly intelligent to read the internal state of another person. I've had people tell me, this person can't learn. Any person who adapts to their environment, is learning. Maybe I can't learn new phone numbers, does that mean my IQ might suffer from that or that I'm not intelligent?

A diagnosis gives you some more clues, how to best interact with someone, but don't pathologize them. When we say that these things are predetermined, then we absolutely dead-end an individual. I worry about the lack of understanding around these issues. Some of it is marketed around psychotropic drugs. Even psychiatry currently says there's no science to support a chemical imbalance in the brain.

We need treatments that take into consideration a broader understanding that each person needs to develop into who they are. We need to climb their tree, take a nap under it, and eat their apple. We need to understand there's no other apple like them. That apple has the ability to do a good job at becoming itself.