Student Spotlight Award Recipient - Amanda Chastain

The purpose of this award is to highlight students who are doing important work in the CBS community whether for research, clinical, and/or volunteer-humanitarian efforts.

This is a way to highlight their achievements, let the ACBS community know important work students are doing, and possibly provide a platform for mentoring, collaboration, professional development, and conversations around highlighted areas.

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Congratulations to Amanda Chastain on being selected as the Student Spotlight Award winner for August 2022!

Learn more about Amanda Chastain:

Background of CBS Research/Clinical/Volunteering efforts/achievements:

I have participated in the CBS community through my research and practice over the last number of years. After becoming completely captivated by what Relational Frame Theory and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy had to offer, I worked to expand my understanding of the relationship between complex verbal behavior and our environment, in generating and refining tools such as ACT to more systematically and efficiently support individuals, and in closing the gap between research and practice within complex verbal behavior and psychological well-being.

I volunteered at the University of Southern California, where I worked with the students and faculty to develop and conduct research in ACT. Examples of projects include the effects of ACT on staff burnout in ABA, physical health of college students, ACT for individuals with developmental disabilities, and studying the effects of components of ACT on delay discounting. I have also worked with a team of scientist-practitioners in the development of the ACT Functional Analysis.

During my time as a Clinician/BCBA, I was given many opportunities to train others in my field on how to incorporate RFT and ACT into their programming. Simultaneously, I was a co-author of an article outlining how ACT may be useful in promoting psychological flexibility at the beginning of the pandemic, and for the chapter on ACT in ABA in the Oxford Handbook of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I regularly present at conferences in the form of posters and symposia, in addition to the occasional workshop or invited talk for ABA and ACT organizations.

Autobiography:

I completed my master’s degree in Psychology (Applied Behavior Analysis) at California State University, Sacramento, where I studied verbal behavior and stimulus equivalence. Through evaluating verbal behavior around my own struggles, I realized that it plays an important role in psychological well-being and the way that we experience the world around us, leading to my obsession with ACT and RFT.

Realizing then that my lifelong academic journey was just beginning, I moved to Los Angeles to receive training and supervision in ACT. During this time, I worked as a Senior Research Associate at the University of Southern California under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Tarbox and as a Lab Manager for the ACT/Prosocial lab with Dr. Thomas Szabo. With the support of my mentors, I worked to build upon my existing knowledge in verbal behavior, relational frame theory, and ACT, while participating in several publications and conference presentations along the way. As a result of my mentors’ ongoing support, I have also been invited to give additional trainings for BCBAs to do my part in closing the gap between research and practice.

I am currently working on my PhD in Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, under the co-supervision of Dr. Mark Dixon and Dr. Tamar Heller. This has allowed me the opportunity to continue basic, translational, and applied research in complex verbal behavior and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, while also working towards making a career out of my greatest passion by becoming a professor.

Future goals:

I hope to contribute to our understanding of complex verbal behavior at the group and individual levels for the purpose of refining current interventions (e.g., ACT, Prosocial) to make them more individualized, systematic, effective, and efficient.

Relevant publications:

Tarbox, J., Chastain, A. N. & Szabo, T.G. (In press). Acceptance and commitment therapy inside behavior analysis. In Twohig, M.P., Levin, M.E., & Petersen, J.M. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Oxford University Press.

Chastain, A.N., Tarbox, J., Meshes, E., Wang, Y. (2022). A Pilot Study: Evaluating the Effects of Defusion on Choice Making Under Negative and Positive Reinforcement Contingencies. The Psychological Record. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-022-00511-3 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40732-022-00511-3)

Chastain, A.N, Love, S., Luoma, S., Miguel, C.(2022) The Role of Irrelevant, Class-Consistent, and Class-Inconsistent Intraverbals on the Establishment of Equivalence Classes. The Psychological Record. https://doi.org/10.10071540732-021-00492-9 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40732-021-00492-9)

Pyles, M.L., Chastain, A.N. & Miguel, C.F. (2021) Teaching Children with Autism to Mand for Information Using “Why?” as a Function of Denied Access. The Analysis of Verbal Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40616-020-00141-2 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40616-020-00141-2)

Wang, Y., Tarbox, J., Chastain, A., Cameron, M. (2020). The Effects of Bilingual Acceptance and Commitment Training on Exercise in Bilingual International University Students. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcbs.2020.08.002 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221214472030168X)

Tarbox, C.M., Silverman, E.A., Chastain, A.N., Little, A., Bermudez, T.L., Tarbox, J. (2020).Taking ACTion: 18 Simple Strategies for Supporting Children With Autism During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Behavior Analysis in Practice. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-020-00448-5 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7466929/)