Ebook: APA Handbook of Behavior Analysis

Behavior analysis emerged from the nonhuman laboratories of B. F. Skinner, Fred Keller, Nate Schoenfeld, Murray Sidman, James Dinsmoor, Richard Herrnstein, Nate Azrin, and others who pioneered experimental preparations designed to do one thing — find orderly relations between environment and behavior. This bottom-up approach to a natural science of behavior yielded a set of behavioral principles that proved orderly and replicable across subjects, laboratories, and species.

By the 1960s, behavior analysts began translating these principles into interventions for institutionalized humans characterized by impoverished repertoires of adaptive behavior. When these interventions proved successful in replacing problem- with adaptive-behavior, the field of Applied Behavior Analysis was born.

Over the last 50 years the field of behavior analysis has grown substantially both in the number of practicing behavior analysts and the range of behavior to which behavioral principles have been applied. Today the laboratory study of basic principles of behavior continues to expand our understanding of behavior and to inform the treatment of disorders ranging from autism to substance abuse.

The present volumes continue this inductive translational approach to the science of behavior analysis by providing overview and in-depth chapters spanning the breadth of behavior analysis.

Volume I provides comprehensive coverage of the logic, clinical utility, and methods of single-case research designs. Chapters walk the reader through the design, data collection, and data analysis phases and are appropriate for students, researchers, and clinicians concerned with best practice. Volume I also provides an overview of the experimental analysis of behavior, and chapters reviewing some of the most important areas of contemporary laboratory research in behavior analysis. Topics covered include memory, attention, choice, behavioral neuroscience, and behavioral pharmacology.

Volume II includes 10 chapters illustrating how principles of behavior discovered in basic-science laboratories have provided insights on socially important human behavior ranging from the complex discriminations that underlie human language to disorders treated by clinical psychologists. The second section of Volume II includes 12 chapters, each devoted to a particular behavioral/developmental disorder (e.g., behavioral treatments of ADHD, autism) or to behavior of societal importance (e.g., effective college teaching, effective treatment of substance abuse). Each of these chapters provides a review of what works and where additional research is needed.