Towards a Functional Account of Mass-Shooting: Prediction and Influence of Violent Behavior becomes clinically important the moment a team has to turn good intentions into reliable action inside case conceptualization, intervention design, staff training, and literature-informed problem solving. In Towards a Functional Account of Mass-Shooting: Prediction and Influence of Violent Behavior, for this course, the practical stakes show up in stronger conceptual consistency and better translational decision making, not in abstract discussion alone.
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Join Free →Mass shootings affect both local and national communities. When a mass shooting occurs, significant effort is expended to understand, predict, and prevent future shootings from occurring. This typically involves developing mass shooter profiles and typologies. We argue that these efforts are useful and necessary, but they enable only prediction of mass shootings; they do not tell us how to change a shooters behavior before the shooting. Given that behavior analysis is a systematic, natural science approach to understanding all behavior, we believe behavior analysis is uniquely poised to tackle this important topic. In this paper, we first describe a specific subset of mass shooters – "fame-seeking mass shooters," and specify general behavior patterns/contexts that have been associated with this subset. We then provide a broad behavioral analysis of these behavior patterns and contexts, explain how they may essentially create behavior traps, and describe how they may contribute or influence a mass shooting. Finally, we describe three interventions that could be adopted to influence the behavior of potential mass shooters. The goal of this paper is not to provide a unifying account applicable to all mass shooters. Rather, the goal is to illustrate how behavior analysis may utilize and extend the predominantly non-behavior analytic research (e.g., categorizing/typologizing based on the form of behavior) that currently exists to better enable the prediction and influence of mass shootings.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | General |
Diana Delgado, Ph.D., BCBA-D is a professor in the ABA Program at the University of Memphis. She obtained her doctoral degree at the University of Nevada, Reno under the mentorship of Linda J. Hayes. Dr. Delgado has contributed to the dissemination of behavior analysis in Bogotá, Colombia, where she directed a research lab working on topics related to the analysis of complex human behavior. She has also taught in the satellite Master’s program at the University of Nevada, Reno, and is currently the Practicum Coordinator at the University of Memphis. She has experience working with children and adolescents with autism and other developmental disabilities in residential, clinical and school settings, and is passionate about conducting translational research to develop and evaluate practices based on the application of basic behavioral principles. Her current research interests focus on stimulus equivalence, rule governed behavior, and cultural design.
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280 research articles with practitioner takeaways
279 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.