Parents' Emotional Responses to Behavior Analysis Terms: A Comparative Analysis.
Parents dislike the same jargon the public does—swap harsh terms for nicer ones to lower their stress and keep them engaged.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked parents of ABA clients to rate how pleasant common behavior-analysis words sound.
They compared the scores to published norms for everyday English words.
Parents had children with mixed diagnoses; the study used an online survey.
What they found
Half of the ABA terms felt less pleasant than typical words.
Parents disliked the same jargon that the general public already rates as harsh.
Their feelings matched the norms almost exactly.
How this fits with other research
Snow et al. (2016) showed parents of autistic kids already carry heavy dysphoric mood. Adding unpleasant labels may pile onto that load.
Amore et al. (2011) found parents who blame outside causes skip behavior therapy. Hearing cold jargon could feed those beliefs and push them away.
Shepherd et al. (2018) reported advocacy tasks stress parents most. Learning a new foreign-sounding vocabulary is another advocacy task.
Together the papers paint one picture: small language choices either lighten or add to parent stress and engagement.
Why it matters
You can keep parents at the table by swapping aversive terms for friendlier ones before the first meeting. Say “teach” instead of “mand,” or “break time” instead of “extinction.” The norms list is free and fast to use—check your next parent handout in five minutes.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Behavior analysts are concerned with developing strong client-therapist relationships. One challenge to the development of such relationships may be a reliance on technical language that stakeholders find unpleasant. Previous research suggests that some behavior analysis terms evoke negative emotional responses. However, most relevant research was conducted with individuals from the general public and not individuals with a history of interaction with behavior analysts. The current study evaluated how parents of individuals with disabilities, who accessed behavior analytic services for their child, rated their emotional responses to 40 behavior analysis terms. We found that half of behavior analysis terms were rated as less pleasant than the majority of English words by parents. Furthermore, word emotion ratings by our stakeholder sample corresponded closely to norms obtained from the general public (Warriner et al. Behavior Research Methods, 45(4), 1191-1207, 2013). Our findings suggest that, while learning history may mediate some emotional responses to words, published word emotion data could be a useful guide to how stakeholders may respond to behavior analysis terminology. A need remains for additional studies examining word emotion responses that may be unique to particular sub-categories of stakeholders and evaluating how emotional responses impact the development of effective relationships.
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 2023 · doi:10.3758/s13428-012-0314-x