Evaluating the effects of Acceptance and Commitment Training on the overt behavior of parents of children with autism
Behavioral parent training is a critical component of treatment for children with autism, however, engaging parents effectively can be challenging. Despite evidence that private events can strongly influence parent behavior and training outcomes, the topic has received minimal attention in the behavioral literature thus far. Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) is a contemporary behavioral approach to increasing adaptive, flexible repertoires of behavior, by reducing control by problematic rule-deriving and rule-following. This study is the first to examine the effects of ACT on values-directed overt behavior in parents of children with ASD.
Belisle, J., Stanley, C. R., & Dixon, M. R. (2017). The relationship between derived mutually entailed relations and the function of challenging behavior in children with autism: Comparing the PEAK-E-PA and the QABF.
The study evaluated the relationship between participants’ abilities to derive mutually entailed relations across arbitrary stimuli and the function of their challenging behavior as indicated in the Questions About Behavior Function (QABF) indirect assessment. Entailed relational abilities were assessed using the Promoting the Emergence of Advanced Knowledge Equivalence Pre-Assessment (Dixon, 2015), and assessments were conducted across 47 individuals with autism or a related developmental disability.
Assessing and training children with autism spectrum disorder using the relational evaluation procedure (REP)
The relational evaluation procedure (REP) is seen by proponents of relational frame theory (RFT) as a useful means by which to assess and train relational responding. Most REP work so far has been conducted with typically developing adults; however, given the importance of relational responding as a repertoire and of the potential utility of the REP for assessing and training this repertoire, researchers need to investigate its use with other populations including children with autism and other developmental delay. The current study presents relevant data.
Establishing derived conditioned symmetrical and transitive gustatory-visual-auditory relations in children with autism and related intellectual disabilities using the PEAK-E curriculum
Three children with autism or a related disabilities were taught to make coordinated cross-modal conditional discriminations involving gustatory, visual, and auditory stimuli, and test probes were conducted to evaluate the derivation of symmetrical and transitive relations. Participants were able to master the directly trained relations (gustatory-visual, visual-auditory) and consistently demonstrate symmetrical relations (auditory-visual). Two participants additionally demonstrated derived transitive relations (gustatory-auditory).