children

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.

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.

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.

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).

Derived relational responding in traditional match-to-sample tasks has been well documented in the behavioral scientific literature utilizing children with developmental disabilities, but less is known regarding derived rule-following and corresponding transformations of stimulus function.