We examined publicly available faculty salaries for men and women faculty members at 16 university programs accredited by the Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI). Overall, 52.4% of the 103 faculty members were women, although there were twice as many men as women at the full-professor level. Our data suggest that ABAI-accredited training programs pay women less than men at all academic levels. Both in absolute terms and relative to the wage gap reported in other areas of psychology, the difference in mean wages for women and men in our sample was substantial. The mean salaries of men were 13%, 6%, and 15% greater than those of women at the assistant-, associate-, and full-professor levels, respectively. At all levels, the highest salary reported was earned by a man, and the lowest salary was earned by a woman. This is an embarrassment for our discipline. It is time for a change, and we behavior analysts have the tools to make change happen. Let us put those tools to good use.
In 1998 James Carr and Eric Burkholder authored a tutorial teaching the behavior analyst to graph single subject designs in Microsoft Excel 97. This tutorial has continued to be utilized across the release of four new versions. The release of Office 2007, however, requires that this tutorial be updated. The new user interface and the introduction of the "ribbon" require new instructions and introduce some new techniques. This article attempts to update the original introduction to Excel and incorporates some newer features as well.
Dog phobias are common in individuals with autism; however, evidence supporting behavioral interventions is limited. The current study evaluated the efficacy of contact desensitization plus reinforcement on dog phobic behavior exhibited by three children diagnosed with autism. The treatment package improved contact with dogs in analog and naturalistic settings and the improvements were maintained at follow-up and in generalization tests. Parents/caregivers also provided high consumer satisfaction reports.Approximately 30 % of individuals diagnosed with autism also receive a comorbid diagnosis of a clinical phobia.Research has shown that behavioral treatment for dog phobias in individuals with intellectual disabilities is contact desensitization plus reinforcement using two hierarchies: size of the dog and distance to the dog; no escape extinction was necessary.The current systematic replication shows that this treatment package was effective for children with autism using only a single hierarchy composed of distance to the dog.Future practitioners may wish to examine whether this treatment package also produces changes in supplemental physiological measures such as pupil dilation, heart rate, galvanic skin responses, and respiration.
The Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB®) created a third level of certification, the Registered Behavior Technician™ (RBT®) in 2014. The RBT® was created based upon the requests of stakeholders who wanted to credential those individuals who make direct contact with clients under the supervision of a Board Certified Behavior Analyst®. There has been tremendous growth in the number of RBTs® with over 60,000 individuals certified to date. The BACB® recently sent out a newsletter outlining changes to the RBT® certification, including the processes of training, supervising, and becoming an RBT®. These changes represent a number of potential concerns. The purpose of this paper is to highlight these concerns and to propose solutions to improve the RBT® certification.
Dixon, Reed, Smith, Belisle, and Jackson (, 7-15, 2015) evaluated research productivity in BACB training programs. While research productivity may indeed be an important metric for future researchers, we posit that the field consists mainly of practitioners, and as such training should be focused on practice. We provide an alternative perspective on enhancing the quality of education for behavior analysts who will, by and large, go on to be practitioners.
Applied behavior analysis is a hybrid tradition with roots in many mental health disciplines. Even with these diverse origins, the professional practice of behavior analysis remains distinct and identifiable. Given these factors the professional practice special interest group (SIG) for the Association for Behavior Analysis International has proposed a model-licensing act. The behavior analyst model-licensing act (BAMLA) seeks to restrict the title of "licensed behavior analyst" but not the practice of behavior analysis. This argument has legal basis and precedent. Recently many papers have appeared supporting behavior analytic licensing; however, none to this point have addressed the issues of a licensing board's ability for rule creation and management and aid of impaired professionals, nor their ability to assist in fostering professional identity. This paper seeks to explore these views.
A promising area of study that emerged from the early days of the experimental analysis of behavior (EAB) was the study of aversive control. However, research on this topic has declined and has largely been neglected in contemporary experimental psychopathology. To address the challenge of promoting growth in this area, this paper proposes a revival of basic research by incorporating the examination of complex human problems such as anxiety disorders (e.g., phobias) to increase our understanding of basic behavioral processes and improve the efficacy of our applied treatments by first considering fundamental operant-respondent interactions underlying phobias. Past and future work involving operant-respondent interactions are discussed as well as opportunities for cross-pollination with other disciplines.
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