Monday 30 December 2013

The future of Behaviour Analysis

Behaviour Analysis has been around for approximately 50 years. It all started with a paper by Baer, Wolf, and Risley (1968) titled "Some Current Dimensions of Applied Behavior Analysis" which you can read by following that link.

Formally, one could say it actually started with the work of Skinner who, in the early part of the 20th century, made it a bit of a mission to drag Psychology up from it's pre-scientific roots and make it something that could stand proudly shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the sciences. However, Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) as we know it today is really a product of work done after Baer, Wolf and Risley published their article.

In it's time ABA has tackled a number of problems. Environmental behaviours, autism, reading, education, business management and so on. It is successfully applied to any area it's wielder chooses. The emerging field of Behavioural economics and Behavioural public policy stand testament to that. Yet there is a note of discord in the ranks. Subtle though it may be. The flagship journals for ABA (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and Journal of Analysis of Experimental Behavior) are largely concerned, these days, with Autism and other intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Much can be said about Autism and the negative impact it has on peoples lives. Similarly much can be said about the amazing work Behaviour Analysts do around the world helping children learn to overcome any difficulties associated with Autism and lead vastly improved lives. The problem with this, however, is that we are now type-cast.

A typical conversation may go like this;

Person A: "I'm a behaviour analyst"
Person B: "Oh isn't that like a therapist?"
Person A: "Well not necessarily..."
Person B: "No it is, my friends sister had a child with Autism and they had to see a Behaviour Analyst, but she said..."

 And so on, and so forth. Behaviour Analysis is now synonymous with treatment for Autism.

If we pull back slightly and take another look at what  Behaviour Analysis actually is, we might gain some perspective on this development.

Behaviour Analysis is the application of behavioural principles to real life settings. Behavioural principles, in turn, are derived through experimental data. Radical Behaviourism - the philosophy of science - is induced from these principles and acts as a guiding framework within which we understand and interpret human behaviour. To claim that ABA is just about Autism is to grossly underestimate the scope of Behaviour Analysis as a tool.

It is my opinion that if ABA wishes to have a future in Psychology and more broadly in the culture at large, then it needs to expand it's remit to cover over things. As I've said before it DOES cover these things and has done in the past but few have dared to extend it to the same extent that Skinner did.

 How could we apply it further then? Some have suggested a Cultural Analysis of Behaviour is needed. I concur. We can, as it were, analyse and help people on an individual level. We help people with financial difficulties by looking at what they do with their money. We help people with educational difficulties by revising the way they are taught. We help businesses with poor management cultures to see things a different way, but we miss a trick here because rarely is there any engagement on the meta-level.

Whoa. Jargon-y word. I apologise, but it is necessary. By meta-level I mean the level above. We can say that person X is acting under ABC contingency but what created ABC contingency in the first place? What is systematically causing people to have trouble with their weight? or remain unable to save for retirement? or manage a group of people successfully?

We might say that many meta-level contingencies are the product of political engagement. But I say this is only indirectly true. Skinner was not a big fan of politics. He argued that real change would be grass-roots. I agree. Politics tends to do more harm than good, even when well-intentioned. We need a culture that is fluid and capable of adapting to new problems quickly and efficiently without harming the interests of the individuals acting within it. Skinner understood that you couldn't do this from a top-down perspective. It had to be ground up.

Unfortunately we cannot do this just yet. We haven't the understanding of how cultures work - for lack of a cultural analysis - and so we cannot make changes on that meta-level. If we aren't careful we will forever remain hacking away at the leaves of a weed, when really we need to uproot the whole thing.

The future of Behaviour Analysis then is a difficult thing to predict, but certainly something possible to guide. I for one will be working towards a future where Behaviour Analysts are the biggest proponents of evidence-based culture change that relegates the blunt-edge of government to the historical dust-pile.

Sunday 1 December 2013

Mindfulness in the Morning!

As a Behavioural Psychologist I am often expected - by laypersons and by fellow (and much more senior) academics - to be a little bit...well... cold. By cold I mean hard-headed, rational, down-to-earth (why we associate these exemplary traits with some sort of negative overtone is a topic for another time) and altogether very grounded. 

I'm not expected to give much quarter to the (perceived) spiritual side of life; meditation, Buddhism, inner peace and so on are simply not conducive to scientific inquiry, nor appreciation. As a Behavioural Psychologist, I am type-cast as being anti- anything that smacks of mentalism. Indeed, my job as a Behavioural Psychologist involves me focusing quite relentlessly on Behaviour. 

So enters Mindfulness. 

What is Mindfulness you ask? Well Mindfulness is a meditative practice born out of Jon Kabat-Zinn's definitive work with clinical patients in the 80's. It's non-clinical origins lie in ancient Buddhist thought and it based - very broadly - on the idea that through practice and focused attention one can develop more a number of positive traits - such as resilience - and can, in general, learn to resist things like depression and anxiety. For Buddhists it was (and is) seen as a way of achieving Nirvana and is mentioned specifically in the 8-fold path of traditional Buddhism. 

Mindfulness as we know it is actually a secularized version stripped of its mystical origins and revised in a number of ways to deal with problems such as eating disorders (MB-EAT), Cognitive disorders (MBCT), and behavioural problems (ACT. DBT). However outside of it's clinical application it has a number of non-clinical applications that make it a wonderful thing to practice even in the absence of some psychological problem. The most mainstream application is through Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, which whilst clinical, is nonetheless something we can all benefit from (after all, who isn't a little stressed?). 

Now, Mindfulness as we know it is born - in part - out of Humanistic psychological philosophies, inspired by such people as Erich Fromm and Abraham Maslow. Humanism is not something that traditionally jives well with Behavioural Theories with it's emphasis (in fact, it's zeal) on denouncing any sort of deterministic thinking in regard to human beings. So why am I talking about it here? Well Mindfulness is not as mystical or cognitive as some of it's proponents would have us believe, and furthermore I believe that by relinquishing Mindfulness to the Cognitive psychologists on grounds of it being "out of our expertise" would be both wrong and foolish. 

Wrong because Mindfulness clearly involves a number of observable (and private) behavioural patterns and involves a number of behavioural results (such as changing biological markers). Foolish because to acknowledge a subject that is outside of behavioural psychology's remit is to accept a terminal failure of our philosophy - something I am not prepared to do. 

Although here is where it gets tricky. There has been little (if any) work exploring the relationship between Mindfulness proper and Behavioural psychology. So I can't say exactly HOW behavioural psychology fits in with Mindfulness (yet!).

However I can say that it works.

And so I come to the main crux of this post. I have been practicing Mindfulness-based stress reduction for two years now and I can honestly say the benefits are innumerable. Reduced stress levels, better mental acuity, better sleeping patterns, more control over impulsive behaviour and so on... I can't honestly overstate how much better I am for practicing it.

Now I have to be honest, I don't practice every day, and have gone long stretches of time without doing it (and suffered for it!), but I try and do at least 30 - 45 minutes of Mindfulness every day. Now personally I prefer to do it early in the morning. So I wake up, go to work and at around 8am, sat at my desk in my quiet office and I spend a bit of time gathering my thoughts and focusing on my mind (rather than everything else!) and it really sets me up for the day. If you can I suggest you get hold of a book or attend a course on Mindfulness and get practicing. You really won't regret it! 

If you want to know more about Mindfulness I recommend this site; http://www.bangor.ac.uk/mindfulness/
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