"An especially bizarre condition"? Well, there's no life like it...

That's a good question re when Lovaas stopped using aversives. I don't know the answer.

They were used in the 1987 study (slap on thigh, yelling "NO!"), which encompassed the years 1970 to 1984.

Lovaas describes hitting (in the past) the girl who hit her head in the 1993 overview he wrote of his own work in autism. I used this article as a reference:

Lovaas, O.I. (1993). The development of a treatment-research project for developmentally disabled and autistic children. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 26, 617-30.

He had to have stopped by 1991, when the California law banning the use of aversives in behaviour therapies was passed. The law was fully implemented by 1992. There must have been indication that a law would be passed circa 1989. The law was inspired by an autistic child being killed by being restrained (rolled up in a rug; suffocated).

In 1994, Dr Lovaas spoke out against aversives, on the grounds that stronger and stronger aversives became necessary, and the treatment became a sort of butchery. This is from an interview he did in the Advocate, which is sourced in the ABA article somewhere. I've written about it on this board before, if I remember. In this interview, it is stressed that parents sending their kids to Dr Lovaas' program sign permission to allow correction in the form of saying "No" only. It was not stated in this interview that aversives in California were now illegal.

I think Dr Lovaas said something similar (about aversives begetting more and stronger aversives) on a television program about the use of electric shock at the Judge Rottenberg Centre.

He also told me that getting results without aversives is much more difficult.

Dr Lovaas has not apologized, and seems to have defended his actions in various places (Camille found an article that I hadn't seen before). He cited his own electric shock study in an article (re self-stimulatory behaviour)in 1987. It might be worth investigating and finding all his statements on this subject, to find whether he actually has a consistent position, or is simply responding to circumstances.

Edited by author 07-01-2004 09:35 PM
Hi Michelle,

You wrote [quoting Lovaas]: "He also told me that getting results without aversives is much more difficult."

After 25 + years working full-time as a behavoural specialist with the most severely behaviourally disturbed children and adults [many abused in institutions most of their lives by the use of aversive treatments by staff] I have never had difficulty changing client behaviour using positive reinforcement combined with setting control to reduce sensory distractions, excess stimulation, etc.

Above all the first rule for staff working in my programs under my direction is that they will never yell at/threaten/intimidate a client, but will learn to present themselves in a clearly neutral manner so that the instructions they give the [often distressed] ASD clients are presented against a setting [the staffs' own personal presentation] that is devoid of conflicting information/values/meaning etc. It takes a little longer, but the issue is to enable ASD people to use the potential they all, even those with significant intellectual impiarments, possess. The learning that accrues is far more valuable because it is specific to the understanding of the ASD person. Retention is far stronger for that reason also.

Of course my "problem" is that I consider being autistic and the autistic behaviour that my clients [and I also] present as "normal".

Edited by author 07-01-2004 11:04 PM
Hi Jim,

Thanks for you comments. As you know, I have the same "problem".

Thirty-eight years before I spoke with Dr Lovaas on the phone, he also stated in the science that altering behaviour (via teaching social reinforcers) without aversives was possible but "time-consuming and laborious". I quoted this in this article (and referenced it) http://www.sentex.net/~nexus23/naa_wro.html

Which makes me wonder. First, the apparent "necessity" of severely hurting and frightening children in order to obtain the desired outcome should have caused, back in the early sixties, the researchers to question the validity of the outcome they were seeking. They didn't and still haven't.

Second, why can't those who are mistreating your future clients in institutions see what your own observations have confirmed for you repeatedly? What's wrong with them?

Because if their bias from being non-autistic is so blinding to accurate observation of those who are dependent on them, then the conclusion has to be that there is either a comprehensive professional/systematic intolerance of autistics (to the point of impeding judgment, resulting in pain, suffering, and permanent harm); or an inherent non-autistic intolerance for autistics which must actively be overcome by non-autistics and usually isn't. Or is this intolerance of us learned, and reinforced, and passed from mentors to students and from parents to the next generation?

Sorry about my sentence structure. Best I can do right now.

Edited by author 07-02-2004 01:29 AM
Hi Michelle,

You wrote asking if there is "an inherent non-autistic intolerance for autistics which must actively be overcome by non-autistics and usually isn't."

I wonder [even suspect] that this intolerance for autistics is just the specific manifestation of a trait actually hardwired into NT brains? That is, might it not have been adaptive for NT communities over the millenia to reject difference as the "flip side" of like minds/types congregating together because there is strength in a unity of purpose/ideology in the face of perceived threat. The learned/systematic intolerance we face would then flow from the first point that you made about inherent intolerence. Regardless we are not responsible for the intolerance of NTs. [However we must never forget that there are other sections of the community that suffer dicrimination at the hands of the NT majority, lest we be seen to claim some unique ownership of suffering and lose respect, especially our own.] The intolerance of NTs is their problem and I am damned if I will apologise for being me, even if their sensitive feelings are sometimes hurt by my honest directness!

By the way I trained as a teacher in the late 1960s and no methods lecturer I heard ever suggested that increasing the anxiety of learners was a good way to enhance learning. Far from it, one sought to maintain a level of calm, attentive arousal in learners, never fear leading to panic!

As for your question "... why can't those who are mistreating your future clients in institutions see what your own observations have confirmed for you repeatedly? What's wrong with them?" This has puzzled me for years. In spite of modelling "in the field" and coaching staff directly and via video critiques in correct communication/management methods, they continually regress to old patterns of NT responding. Perhaps it has to do with their inability to view their own behaviour as a "mechanical" process clearly and objectively, whereas we have the ability to consider our own actions without projecting into them some social-emotional meaning. I and my colleagues are continually dealing with "program decay" meaning that patterns of responding by care staff continually, though subtlely, change, yet the staff will claim that their behaviour has not varied at all. Perhaps it has to do with Temple Grandin's assertion that everything that NTs do has an emotion attached, thus asking them to act in a manner that is free of NT emotional meaning is very difficult for them?

Edited by author 07-02-2004 02:20 PM
Thanks Michelle for your information on Dr.Lovaas, which is what I feared was his position regarding the use of aversives on autistic children.
 I have been reading excerpts from a book which has recently been published in the UK entitled George and Sam - Autism in the Family by Charlotte Moore, published by Penguin. If you search on http://www.penguin.co.uk you will find a synopsis.
The eponymous subjects of the book are Moore's two autistic sons. In the chapter "Is there a cure?" (she doesn't believe there is a cure for autism )writing about ABA learning theory, Moore claims that "many autistic children don't learn because they lack motivation." But in the next sentence she contradicts herself and continues : "Unlike mainstream children, who accept the socially imposed value of a gold star, or being clapped in Assembly, most autists are only motivated - if at all- by something in itself, not by the significance others attach to it." She has undermined the ABA theory of forcing autistic children to learn by giving them reinforcers.
I am motivated to learn if I am interested enough in a particular subject, or in acquiring a particular skill, but I don't know how I learn, though I'm helped by my excellent
memory.
Moore has replaced the use of ABA on George and Sam with Verbal Behaviour(VB). She claims it is a freer, more flexible system" which "does not follow a prescribed curriculum, though it does insist that certain skills have to be mastered before certain others can be introduced....The first part of the training is always to establish compliance.If the child cannot sit still on request,then he cannot learn anything else until that behavour is in place. Even if this takes months, compliance has to be achieved before work can continue". There is information about Verbal Behaviour on http://www.asotoronto.org/treat.htm .
The resources listed in the book include The Lovaas Institute for Early Intervention.

Dave, re /m2: "oh, i would like to be able to access some of my earlier posts.... helps with my practicum stuff."

The draft (incomplete until we track down a "digest" subscriber) is here: http://www.sentex.net/~nexus23/258-300.html

Thanks Ralph....


And JIIIIIIIMMMMM!!!!! Nice to see you again!

"After 25 + years working full-time as a behavoural specialist with the most severely behaviourally disturbed children and adults [many abused in institutions most of their lives by the use of aversive treatments by staff] I have never had difficulty changing client behaviour using positive reinforcement combined with setting control to reduce sensory distractions, excess stimulation, etc."

To go on from your point there, Skinner never actually had to use aversives. In fact, he was against them.... not for ethical reasons, but simply because they don't work!

So, my question to that person CeleRate would be:

If Skinner didn't need them, why did Lovaas?

Michelle....

" 'Camille wrote "That comment about evil from Celerate makes me wonder if Celerate has seen MY comments on behaviorists and thought they were yours.' "

"Jeez, is this what they mean by "indistinguishable"?"

Ah. Could be. Mebbe. Or not. But hey, funny thought ;)

"Funny how I've criticized the hell out of cognitive scientists in autism and none has responded by assuming that I associate cognitive science and/or scientists with evil."

It is odd, isn't it, that cognitivists don't seen to take such offence (or, at least, APPARENT offence) at criticism, but the new breed of behaviourists do. Even Skinner wouldn't have behaved like that ('scuse pun).

"I'm beginning to have delusions that I'm prescient. I mean, look what I named my article. Now look what the behaviourists are doing (again)."

Oooooo...... *eerie noises off-screen*

About CeleRate's thing:

"** I did look at this section, but did not feel that it answered my questions. I was wondering how you moved from the treatment of people with developmental disabilities, in general, to ABA treatment, specifically. Did you draw from case-specific examples to the field as a whole? One additional question: Is the premise under which you are working that Lovaas = ABA? **"

Didn't Lovaas refer to his work as applied behavioural analysis? I know that Skinner wrote on the analysis of behaviour.....

Edited by author 07-02-2004 03:46 PM
Hi Jim,

I wonder about the adaptivity of the non-autistic pack instinct. Gathering in packs in order to repel perceived threats is fine if those in the packs can accurately perceive real threats. So why are autistics a threat? What are we threatening? Is the problem that our existence, so long as it goes on, shows that non-autistic social functioning is a very fragile, faulty thing?

Dr Lovaas's idea, in the sixties, was that sufficiently hurting and scaring autistic children would then allow adults to take the role of alleviating this fear and pain. This then would result in social behaviour on the part of the children. Dr Lovaas had to work very hard to make these kids show pain and fear. I can't really think about what those kids went through. Since Dr Lovaas is a behaviourist, if the kids didn't conventionally demonstrate they were scared or hurt, in his books, they weren't feeling anything and he had to try much harder to hurt and scare them. He even claimed they did not have nightmares. I'm not going to start adding up everything that's wrong with all of the above. Does anyone actually believe that those kids were not aware that they were being deliberately hurt? What did they learn from this?

I'm always very careful when describing autistic emotions. That we can act independently of expressed emotions is often used to claim we have no emotions. Just because I can act with precision and clarity when I'm furious doesn't mean that I'm not furious, for example.

The "program decay" you're describing maybe comes from a core disbelief on the part of the staff that autistics notice what they, the staff, do. It maybe comes from the staff being unable to prevent themselves from imposing their feelings on the environment: an absence of this imposition being threatening to their identities. I think that's just another way of stating one of your ideas. My guesses are just based on how intractable this problem is.

I'm not in practice like you are. But an equivalent problem is alive and well in experimental science in autism. I'm not prepared (literally) to explain it here since I've mostly gathered numerous examples and have yet to concisely frame the problem. But it has to do with an inability to observe autistics accurately, even when the researchers are surrounded with experimental and statistical constraints.

Edited by author 07-02-2004 04:21 PM
Hi Philip,

"Lack of motivation" is usually associated with the third variety (the other two are Lovaas-style ABA, and VB or AVB--analysis of verbal behaviour) of IBI in autism, which is called PRT or Pivotal Response Training. I suppose PRT is a fancy version of incidental teaching... <sighs loudly>

I asked one of the PRT people (Schriebman) about our supposed lack of motivation and got a pile of stuff in response, which simply assumed lack of motivation. So the question wasn't answered. In PRT, the reinforcers are actually what the kid asks for. Kid says "truck" he gets a truck, not a candy.

This sometimes happens in AVB and sometimes not, depending on which reductive piece of language is being taught.

In AVB, language is reduced to Skinner's version of language (tacts, mands, etc) in his (non-scientific) book Verbal Behavior. This is the book that Noam Chomsky famously ripped to shreds, Skinner having strayed outside of his area of expertise (pigeons, rats) and into Chomsky's (language).

AVB does require the extreme compliance you've described. It does require the child to obtain everything by asking for it from an adult. It does prevent the autistic from doing anything except what the adult wants ("errorless learning"), so the autistic is prevented from expressing autistic learning. Now, what would that do for your motivation?

Heavy use is made of establishing operations, which are supposed to increase the likelyhood the kid will emit the desired behaviour. Depriving a child of something for a long time will increase the likelyhood of her asking for it--ergo, motivation.

AVB has no controlled studies to show it works. So the AVB people, who include some notorious travelling salesmen, use Lovaas-style ABA stats to promote AVB as effective, proven, etc. Some of the Lovaas people are not too happy with that (I think this was discussed near the beginning of this comment board).

There are huge areas (Quebec and Ontario, for example) where early IBI is mostly AVB, since we've been hit very thoroughly by the travelling AVB people--Christine Burk in Quebec and Vincent Carbone in Ontario.

Sorry, me again. Re Lovaas=ABA, that's a trap, not a question.

I wrote in my article that ABA is used in the teaching of all children, to some degree. One behaviour analyst I spoke with said glibly that ABA was everything, everywhere, he lived ABA, and it really helped him with his golf.

ABA includes the study of traffic safety and OBM (Organizational Behaviour Management) and what all. I read in a behaviour modification textbook a description of a controversial use of behavioural theory, which maybe could be called ABA, to promote safe sex.

So you can't say that Lovaas=ABA. But if you try to reduce Lovaas to DTT, with which he is strongly associated, that is also an error. Dr Lovaas and his followers have pointed out that for a long time now, Lovaas treatment is much more than just DTT. Dr Gresham did recently tell me that parents all want 40 hrs of DTT a week, but his career has been fighting against this demand.

Dr Lovaas' idea was to use ABA intensively at a very basic level at a very young age for 40hrs/wk. His idea expanded to include teaching all behaviours in all environments, when behaviours (each of which had to be taught--Lovaas does not find pivotal responses) taught in one environment failed to generalize to others. This expansion meant the treatment, which he had thought might require a year, now would require many years.

"ABA" has come to have meanings in law and in the public domain in autism. The Quebec government, e.g., wrote to tell me that they consider "ABA" to be the "scientifically proven" treatment for autism. It was easy for me to figure out they weren't referring to OBM. Since the Quebec gov't is funding, whether they know it or not, a lot of AVB, I can also figure out that for them "ABA" means any early IBI. In other places, as in Auton, ABA was considered at times to mean a Lovaas-type treatment, though even this was not consistent throughout.

In my writing I try to balance both the strict scientific definition(s) of ABA and the popular, legal, and official interpretations of same. I'm concerned generally with behavioural views and treatments of autism and autistic people.

Hi,

Maybe Skinner never shocked rats, but his followers must have because I have read about rats being put in cages that shock them if they go one way or the other...

Skinner was autistic though, so I don't want to pick on him any more than is necessary. :-)

I posted my series of photos with comments proving beyond any possible shadow of a doubt that the man was an autistic of the highest order.

A fantastically smart autistic young man (Kaiden) analyzed my study and reported that I was right. He said an NT would logically assume emotion and practice cognitive emotionally based psychology...
an Autistic might recognize that others have emotion but instinctively steer clear of this and find an external non-emotional explanation for behavior. An autistic relating to the minds of animals more than those of humans would more likely say that humans are no more than animals in the their motivations...

My friend is a genius. Unfortunately, the tragic outcome of an autistic being uncomfortable with guessing the emotional states of others was the science called "Behaviourism" (in Canada and Britain) and "Behaviorism" in the US. This is so unfortunate because Skinner's operant conditioning has been used to harm other autistics and degrade their unique approach to life.

Quelle domage.

Camille - rhymes with famille and coquille

The following message was originally posted here: http://www.quicktopic.com/25/H/4NqUrcUWgSE5R/p265.257#QTmsg261
---------------------------------------

After losing most of this board to a QT computer glitch, the good news is we've entirely restored messages 461 through 725 (to be published shortly).

Now I'm hoping that one of our "digest" subscribers will help fill in the blanks, namely the personal edits in messages 258 to 460 (which are not delivered to those who receive individual emails - such as myself).

If anyone has digest versions which include the above messages, please email me directly at nexus23@sentex.net

Many thanks.

Ralph Smith
naacanada

"Hi,"

Hi Camille.......

"Maybe Skinner never shocked rats, but his followers must have because I have read about rats being put in cages that shock them if they go one way or the other..."

Yes. Therein lies the problem... same with Freud's followers... they get on a bandwagon and then they mess up the whole thing. Freud never advocated for psychoanalyst's training being only for medical people, and nor did he advocate long-term therapy; Skinner advocated against the use of punishments. And, something I like on this, Skinner was against punishments purely because they don't work!

"Skinner was autistic though, so I don't want to pick on him any more than is necessary. :-)"

He does strike me as being at least somewhat autistoid, you know....

"I posted my series of photos with comments proving beyond any possible shadow of a doubt that the man was an autistic of the highest order."

Dunno about proving it ;) But the expressions and postures look very familiar, don't they?!

"A fantastically smart autistic young man (Kaiden) analyzed my study and reported that I was right. He said an NT would logically assume emotion and practice cognitive emotionally based psychology..."

This would be quite accurate.

"an Autistic might recognize that others have emotion but instinctively steer clear of this and find an external non-emotional explanation for behavior. An autistic relating to the minds of animals more than those of humans would more likely say that humans are no more than animals in the their motivations..."

One of Simon Baron-Cohen's earliest questions was, in fact, "are autistic children behaviourists?"... and - indeed - when I began in psychology, I was actually very impressed by the scientific appearance of behaviourism. Then I studied psychology properly, and found it very seriously wanting!

"My friend is a genius. Unfortunately, the tragic outcome of an autistic being uncomfortable with guessing the emotional states of others was the science called "Behaviourism" (in Canada and Britain) and "Behaviorism" in the US. This is so unfortunate because Skinner's operant conditioning has been used to harm other autistics and degrade their unique approach to life."

Yes it has. And the thing is that, as a description of stuff, OC isn't all that bad; but as a theory, it sucks.

"Quelle domage."

Olne ihan samaa mieltä, hen.

"Camille - rhymes with famille and coquille"

David - rhymes with absolutely f*cking nowt!

Hi Jim,

"As for your question "... why can't those who are mistreating your future clients in institutions see what your own observations have confirmed for you repeatedly? What's wrong with them?" This has puzzled me for years. In spite of modelling "in the field" and coaching staff directly and via video critiques in correct communication/management methods, they continually regress to old patterns of NT responding. Perhaps it has to do with their inability to view their own behaviour as a "mechanical" process clearly and objectively, whereas we have the ability to consider our own actions without projecting into them some social-emotional meaning. I and my colleagues are continually dealing with "program decay" meaning that patterns of responding by care staff continually, though subtlely, change, yet the staff will claim that their behaviour has not varied at all. Perhaps it has to do with Temple Grandin's assertion that everything that NTs do has an emotion attached, thus asking them to act in a manner that is free of NT emotional meaning is very difficult for them?"

This is where a bit of Lewinian theory comes in: He said that there were three phases to changing organisational attitudes, and these might be useful here. First the attitudes in the organisational body concerned need to be unfrozen, and then they can be changed, after which they need to be frozen again. Unfreezing is usually best done by joint discussion and T-group work, after which the discussion can continue with members making public commitments to a new way of working; these commitments should come after the members have actively learned something during these T-groups relevant to the whole matter. After that, the new attitudes can be re-frozen, by sending the members back into their workplace and (essentially) reinforcing behaviours compatible with the attitudes publically committed to during the T-group training.