Chapter I Flashcards
ABA
Must be: Applied - investigates social significant behaviors with immediate importance to the subject; Behavioral - entails precise measurement of the actual behavior in need of improvement and documents that it was the subject’s behavior that changed; Analytic - Demonstrates experimental control over the occurrence and nonoccurrence of the behavior - that is, if a functional relation is demonstrated; Technological - the written description of all procedures used in the study is sufficiently complete and detailed to enable others to replicate it; Conceptually systematic - behavior change interventions are derived from basic principles of behavior; Effective - improves behavior sufficiently to produce practical results for the participant/client; Generality - Produces behavior changes that last over time, appear in other environments, and/or spread to other behaviors.
EAB - Experimental Analysis of Behavior (EAB)
A natural science approach for discovering orderly and reliable relations between behavior and the environmental variables of which it is a function. Characterized by rate of response, repeated or continuous measurement, within-subject experimental comparisons are used instead of designs comparing the behavior of experimental and control groups. The visual analysis of graphed data is preferred over statistical inference, a description of functional relations is valued over formal theory testing.
Radical Behaviorism
Watson - Stimulus-Response S-R Psychology, which did not account for behavior without obvious antecedent causes
Applied Behavior Analysis
Is the science in which tactics derived from the principles of behavior are applied systematically to improve socially significant behavior and experimentation is used to identify the variables responsible for behavior change
Methodological Behaviorism
Used scientific manipulations to search for functional relations between events
Structuralist
Restrict their activities to descriptions of behavior and make no scientific manipulations
Pragmatism
The philosophical position that “the truth value of a statement is a function of how well the statement promotes effective action”
Explanatory Fiction
A fictitious variable that often is simply another name for the observed behavior that contributes nothing to an understanding of the variables responsible for developing or maintaining the behavior.
Mentalism
Defined as an approach to the study of behavior which assumes that a mental or “inner” dimension exists that differs from a behavioral dimension
Respondent Behavior
Is reflexive behavior as in the tradition of Ivan Pavlov. Respondents are elicited, or brought out by stimuli that immediately precede them
Behaviorism
Is the philosophy of the science of behavior, basic research, is the province of the experimental analysis of behavior, and developing a technology for improving behavior is the concern of applied behavior analysis.
Philosophic Doubt
Requires the scientist to continually question the truthfulness of what is regarded as fact
Parasimony
Requires that all simple, logical explanations for the phenomenon under investigation be ruled out, experimentally or conceptually before more complex or abstract explanations are considered
Functional Analysis
Demonstrates the function relations between environmental variables and behavior.
Functional Relation
Exists when a well-controlled experiment demonstrates that a specific change in one event (the dependent variable) is reliably produced by specific manipulations of another event (the independent variables), and that change in the dependent variable was unlikely to be the result of other extraneous factors (confounding variables)
Determinism
All scientists presume that the universe is a lawful and orderly place in which all phenomena occur as the result of other events
Empiricism
The practice of objective observation and measurement of the phenomena of interest
