Examining Procedural Variations of Delivering Competing Stimuli in the Treatment of Stereotypy.

Competing stimulus assessments (CSA) are effective tools for identifying stimuli that compete with automatically reinforced behavior. However, Jennett et al. suggests there are cases for which non-contingent access to competing stimuli are insufficient at decreasing target responding and additional treatment components may be necessary.

Assessing and Treating Anxiety in Individuals with Autism.

Anxiety is a cluster of responses that can involve both operant and respondent behavior, which can be both public and/or private in nature, and occurs when an upcoming aversive stimulus is signaled. Despite the reported high comorbidity of autism and anxiety, there has been very limited research on how to directly assess and treat anxiety, especially with individuals who have limited communication skills. In Study 1, anxiety was assessed in five individuals with autism, ranging in age from 10 to 19 years old.

Examining stereotypy in naturalistic contexts: Differential reinforcement and context-specific redirection.

This study examined stereotypy in naturalistic classroom contexts (i.e., academic programming, leisure skill acquisition) with differential reinforcement of contextually appropriate behavior (DRA).

Increasing item engagement and decreasing automatically reinforced problem behavior within a modified competing stimulus assessment.

A competing stimulus assessment (CSA) is commonly used to identify leisure items for use in treatments designed to decrease automatically reinforced problem behavior. However, this type of assessment may not yield useful information if participants do not readily engage with leisure items. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a modified CSA that included additional treatment components (i.

An analysis of treatment integrity of response interruption and redirection.

Response interruption and redirection has been shown to effectively decrease stereotypy, but its application outside an experimental setting has not been well studied. In Experiment 1, decreases in automatically maintained vocal stereotypy were obtained following treatment in a controlled setting for 3 participants diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Descriptive data on the consistency and accuracy of response interruption and redirection were then collected in the classroom setting.