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Rapport is a primary component in the development of a therapeutic relationship between health-service professionals and clients. Presession pairing is a procedure often recommended in behavior analytic practice to build rapport with clients. However, many service providers may not exhibit presession pairing skills correctly or at a sufficient rate. The current study aimed to operationally define therapist behaviors that are indicative of presession pairing and to train direct care staff to implement said skills.

Impairment in social skills is a primary feature of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). Research indicates that social skills are intimately tied to social development and negative social consequences can persist if specific social behaviors are not acquired. The present study evaluated the effects of behavioral skills training (BST) on teaching four parents of children with ASDs to be social skills trainers. A nonconcurrent multiple baseline design across parent-child dyads was employed and direct observation was used to assess parent and child behaviors Results demonstrated substantial improvement in social skills teaching for all participants for trained and untrained skills. Ancillary measures of child performance indicated improvement in skills as well. High levels of correct teaching responses were maintained at a 1 month follow-up. This study extends current literature on BST while also providing a helpful, low-effort strategy to modify how parents can work with their children to improve their social skills.

Social deficits are a hallmark feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Consequently, socially mediated consequences (i.e., praise) may not function as reinforcers for individuals with ASD. Given the frequency in which praise is used as a programmed consequence in empirical research and in clinical practice, it is necessary to explore procedures that could condition praise to function as reinforcers. Operant discrimination training has emerged as a potential procedure to condition stimuli to acquire reinforcing properties. This study aimed to utilize the operant discrimination training procedure to condition a praise statement to function as a reinforcer. Four children diagnosed with ASD participated in the study. A nonconcurrent multiple baseline design across participants was used to evaluate this emerging pairing procedure. Findings suggest that immediate effects were observed across all participants, but responding did not maintain, suggesting that reinforcing value of the praise statement diminished.

The current study examined child preference for presession therapeutic conditions. A 4-year-old female diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was exposed to three conditions in a concurrent-chains arrangement: presession pairing (PSP) prior to the onset of discrete-trial instruction (DTI), free play (FP) prior to DTI, or immediate onset of DTI. Initial link selections in the concurrent-chains arrangement suggested a relative preference for the PSP condition across multiple therapists. Negative vocalizations decreased across all conditions following implementation of the concurrent-chains arrangement with no differentiation between therapeutic conditions. Keywords Concurrent chains . Early intervention . Presession pairing . RapportRapport-building procedures, such as pairing one's self with preferred stimuli, are commonly recommended in early intensive behavioral intervention (Barbera, 2007;Sundberg & Partington, 1998). The objective of pairing is to establish a positive therapeutic relationship (i.e., rapport) between therapist and client through the delivery of preferred tangible and/or edible stimuli, attention, and activities in the absence of demands (Barbera, 2007;Sundberg & Partington, 1998). Recent literature has examined the effects of pairing on client behaviors (Kelly, Axe, Allen, & Maguire, 2015; Shillingsburg, Bowen, & Shapiro, 2014) and established technological procedures for pairing interventions (Lugo, King, Lamphere, & McArdle, 2017). Shillingsburg et al. ( 2014) evaluated the effects of pairing on social avoidant behaviors (i.e., elopement, latency to sit, crying, out-of-seat behavior) for two children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Pairing was described as a zerodemand, high-density reinforcement session during which preferred items were freely available. Following the pairing intervention, both participants exhibited fewer social avoidant behaviors during discrete-trial instruction (DTI) with a therapist who conducted the intervention than with a therapist who did not. Unfortunately, this evaluation did not include a control condition or a report on the specific criteria for implementation of the pairing procedures. Kelly et al. (2015) further evaluated the effects of pairing on behaviors exhibited during DTI. Kelly et al. (2015) measured challenging behavior and accurate responding and demonstrated reductions in challenging behavior when presession pairing (PSP) was conducted prior to the onset of DTI. Moderate increases in accurate academic responding were also observed after implementation of PSP. Similar to