Читать книгу Functional Behavior Assessment for People with Autism - Beth Glasberg - Страница 9

In the 1980s, there was a shift in the field of behavioral psychology toward viewing problematic behaviors as a form of communication. To change behaviors, we now focus on the question, “What message is that behavior communicating?” rather than on what the behavior looks like. We now know that even the most seemingly senseless behaviors make sense for the person performing the behavior.

Problematic behaviors are learned in the same manner as other forms of communication: an individual who has some need identifies a behavior to get his need met. The example above illustrates this: the boy who learned that hitting his instructor resulted in the removal of his work communicated, “Take away my work, please” by hitting. Other consequences, such as getting his hands held down by his sides or getting a talking-to from the principal, do not prevent him from learning this communication. What matters for him at that moment is that he is motivated to escape his work, and, as a result of hitting or swiping materials off of the table, he does.

Research done by Ted Carr and Mark Durand (1985) was instrumental in developing this clearer understanding of behavior problems. They documented predictable relationships between problem behaviors and the individual’s environment. For example, certain people would have problem behaviors only when they were receiving very little attention. Others might display their problem behaviors whenever they were given a very difficult task to do. Different individuals engaged in their problem behaviors under different conditions. The same behavior in two different individuals might be evoked by two very different sets of conditions. By demonstrating these relationships, Carr and Durand helped to teach us that what a behavior looks like tells us very little about its origin or how to treat it.

A real-life illustration of Carr and Durand’s work is provided by the behaviors of two teenage boys, Andrew and Robert. Consultation was requested for each of the boys for the same reason, aggression. Andrew blocked the door whenever a one-to-one pull-out teaching session, such as speech or counseling, was ending. He then poked his teacher if she tried to leave the room. If the staff member persisted in attempting to leave, Andrew upped the ante by threatening to stab her with scissors or to hit her with a telephone. Further assessment of this behavior revealed that Andrew behaved this way in order to maintain the rich, one-to-one attention that he had access to during these supportive therapies.

Like Andrew, Robert also poked people. Whenever his siblings sat near him or walked close enough, a swat or a poke was guaranteed. However, a closer look at Robert’s behavior revealed a story very different from Andrew’s. Robert poked people in order to make them go away. The longer they stayed, the more forceful the poking and swatting became. As you might imagine, Robert’s siblings learned very quickly to stay away from him.

A particularly exciting result of Carr and Durand’s study was the finding that teaching and reinforcing an appropriate request for whatever was desired weakened the problem behaviors. For example, teaching Andrew to ask the teacher to stay longer resulted in less door-blocking, poking, or threatening with scissors. Teaching Robert to ask for time alone got rid of his poking. The success of this approach, referred to as “functional communication training,” clearly demonstrates that the difficult behaviors so often displayed by individuals with autism spectrum disorders are not an automatic byproduct of the disorder, but rather are learned behaviors, open to treatment using all of the principles of learning.

Other researchers have experimented not only with conditions that might set the stage for a problem behavior, but also with conditions that they suspected might follow a problem behavior (Iwata, Dorsey, Slifer, Bauman & Richman, 1982). This research helped demonstrate that what happens before a behavior can create a motivation for something and that engaging in a problem behavior can result in obtaining what is wanted. To illustrate, consider the boy in our example above who wanted to escape his work: the teacher approaching his desk with work materials created a motivation for him to be someplace else. Hitting his teacher resulted in him being sent to the principal’s office, thereby avoiding his work. The consequences of the behavior were critical to the development of the behavior problem.

Brian Iwata and his colleagues (1982) demonstrated this idea empirically. They placed people in scenarios that mimicked these supposedly naturally occurring conditions and measured the effect on their behavior. For example, they might withhold attention from a study participant while she played with toys, but then provide attention when she performed the problem behavior (self-injury). Upon the occurrence of self-injury, the experimenter would immediately return his attention to the girl in the form of social disapproval (e.g., “Don’t do that; you’ll hurt yourself!”). When the consequences for the behavior were presented consistently in this way, the researchers were able to reliably produce stable patterns of the problem behavior. Using this counterintuitive approach, the researchers replicated what they believed was taking place in the real world and leading to learning. Their results showed that their hypothesis was correct: the study participants were learning these problem behaviors based on their consequences.

Iwata and his colleagues also identified a special kind of behavior that is learned through internal cues and consequences. These behaviors occur because they feel good or are inherently enjoyable for the person performing them. The conditions that trigger these behaviors and the consequences that maintain them occur inside of the individual, and thus are more complex to assess or control. Everyday examples of this type of behavior might include scratching an itch or taking a pain reliever. An observer cannot see the itch or the headache, nor can she document the consequences of removal of the itch or the headache. However, these behaviors are learned based upon the same principles as externally controlled behaviors, and numerous strategies exist to help address them.

By examining patterns of what happens before and after problem behaviors, Iwata and his colleagues were able to identify a number of communicative messages that challenging behaviors might convey. In other words, they identified the purposes that these behaviors were serving for the individuals performing them. These different purposes that behaviors serve are called “functions” of behavior and are described in Chapter 2. A quest to identify the functions of different problem behaviors was born, leading to the emergence of the field we now know as “functional behavior assessment.”