Antecedent manipulation has become one of the most reflexively deployed tools in the ABA clinician's repertoire — and for understandable reasons. Modifying establishing operations, adjusting demand difficulty, providing choices, enriching environments, and redistributing reinforcer access are effective, fast, and relatively non-intrusive strategies for reducing the likelihood of problem behavior.
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Join Free →It is becoming increasingly common for behavior analysts, both seasoned and newly certified to over-emphasize antecedent manipulations to alleviate behavior problems. Although it is undeniably helpful to alter antecedent condition to rapidly stabilize and even improve behavior problems, like crack these manipulations provide a big bang for the buck and seem to produce desirable results in little time. Unfortunately, all too often, little attention is paid to the need for the individual to learn adaptive skills that will allow him or her to cope with the occasional bump in the road in the form of minor to moderate aversives. Some antecedent manipulations are so pervasive that instead of expanding the person's world it causes it to collapse in on them creating more specialized physical and social environments that actually reduce the individual's ability to tolerate even the mildest annoyance or inconvenience. The answer is to deal with these problems head on by teaching the skills necessary to allow the individual to negotiate these mild to moderate aversives. It is not that antecedent manipulations are in any sense "wrong" but that they are overused, sometimes to a fault. Learning Objectives: 1. Participants will be able to list several down sides of excessive antecedent manipulations 2. Participants will be able to list the six ATES using the Acronym PET CAT 3. Participants will be able to explain when it is reasonable to eliminate an aversive event as opposed to teaching the person to tolerate it 4. Participants will be able to give real examples from their own lives of the six ATES 5. Participants will be able to explain the ethical issues in teaching individuals to tolerate
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1.5 | Supervision |
Dr. Merrill Winston is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst who has worked in the field of Developmental Disabilities for over 35 years. He has worked in small group homes, large residential facilities, secured facilities, family homes, and schools and has worked with a broad population who exhibited behavior problems that ranged from mild to life-threatening. Dr. Winston is comfortable working with both verbal and non-verbal individuals and both children and adults with a range of diagnoses. His strengths are relating to direct-care staff in a manner that sets them at ease as well as working in real-time with children and adults. Dr. Winston excels in public speaking and has given numerous presentations at various professional conferences throughout the country. His areas of interest are crisis prevention and intervention, psychotropic medication usage with special populations, and the development and implementation of training programs designed to increase the skill levels of parents, professionals, teachers, and direct-care staff.
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
279 research articles with practitioner takeaways
258 research articles with practitioner takeaways
252 research articles with practitioner takeaways
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All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.