Lec 12 We need to do an assessment whether they are positive or neg.

Then we implement some sort of procedure to increase or decrease this negative or positive behavior. Examples: Four years old engaging in tantrum behavior 8 years old has wrist biting behavior Self stimulating behavior Trichotillomania-pulling hairs disease 19 years with binge eating disorder Behavior is lawful -Relationship between the environment and client. It is controlled by environment. We can change it form treatment perspective. Identify wht the stimulus control elements are? It is considered an SD. Sd could be anything. Time and place when behavior occurs. What maintains the behavior in a long run? A behavior that is mutually exclusive you cant engage in both at the same time. Child engages in tantrums behavior in a preschool environment while, kicking, smacking other for toys. We can possibly teach the child to go up to the kids and ask for toys. You cant engage in both at the same time. Instead you can encourage a behavior where a maladaptive act is impossible to carry out. Look at the motivations of negative behavior. Social Positive reinforcement mediated by a third party. E.g. attention, activities, praise, goods, tangible things Social negative reinforcement- we are terminating aversive stimulus. A kid not complying with class activities e.g. escaping from task. Automatic positive reinforcement occurs automatically without human intervention- e.g the person interacts with environment where social variables are taking place but no interaction is possible. E.g autistic kid playing with toys that provide visual stimulation Automatic negative reinforcement- relief from pain or anxiety on their own; no third party Indirect methods- interview evaluators on one side of the table and they get information what the As and Bs and Cs are. Disadvantage could include info provided by parents or teacher can be biased & also memory is not perfect. From an informant, the info is not going to be accurate. It is not the cleanest data that you will take. But this method takes less time. Interviews are popularly employed and they are educational for client. People (like parents) are nave to the approach so they dont understand the operational variables that we use in psychology. We wanna obtain specific info not vague (e.g

classroom, park etc , wht part of class? What part of the park? etc). Also, look for reinforcement e.g What other changes that occur after the behavior? Wht child gets after the problem behavior occurs with respect to negative reinforcement. Behaviors dont happen in vacuum. We tend to come up with clean spaces but unfortunately thats how individual works. Measure the behavior in natural context. Direct method- take a lot of resources, time & its expensive. The advantage is that we can get clean & accurate data. The observer is trained properly and data is collected in timely fashion. Imp considerations is that you need to have a trained observer. Some school psychologist work on these. They will have assistance to deal with wide variety of other areas therefore they employ trained observers. Timeliness is imp. You want somebody in the moment capturing the data. Different approaches: Descriptive- piece of paper which have column for time, behavior, consequence, etc. you dont wanna scribble. You can have lot of diff piece of info. You might find number of antecedents in the future. Informant might not disclose everything in one instance. Disadvantage-> this type of data may not be quantifiable. In a checklist - We can take these sheets and directly make a spread sheet out of it. So it is quantifiable. But on flip side, it is very constrained approach (a lot of scribbles) Real time- the real clock divides into intervals, we do this by allowing it to happen in real environment. You want to interact with them. But you dont want to interrupt a teacher in curriculum of other students. It provides accurate analysis. Functional analysis- we are able to possibly demonstrate functional relationship with environment and behavior. Because u are a scientist, it is very flexible. You are going to engage in hypothesis and will identify many variables. You dont necessarily know all the behaviors for sure. So, you can manipulate the environment, antecedent and adequately employ the procedure which will lead to good treatment. This demonstrates a functional relationship b/w controlling behavior and the antecedent. A lot of resources, time, effort and professional training go into this. There is a huge need for professional help. We evaluate number of diff possible hypothesis from descriptive assessment. You gather info and we use that to form a hypothesis to design a procedure.