Standard Celeration & Acceptance and Commitment with Dr. Scott O'Donnell (Part I)

ABA on Tap is proud to present Dr. Scott O'Donnell. (Part 1 of 2)

Dr. O’Donnell earned a bachelor’s in Psychology minoring in Cognitive Neuroscience under the mentorship of Dr. Philip Hineline at Temple University where he assisted in conducting an experimental analysis of behavior with rats and pigeons. 

Dr. O’Donnell began working with adults with autism and intellectual disabilities in 2013, youth with autism and intellectual disabilities in 2015, and received his registered behavior technician credential in 2016 working for multiple companies providing autism services. Dr. O’Donnell earned his masters in Psychology and Applied Behavior Analysis in 2018 from Purdue Global (nee Kaplan University) where he studied under Dr. Antonio Harrison, a researcher and practitioner of behavior analysis in health, sports, and fitness settings. In 2022, Dr. O’Donnell graduated with a PhD from The Chicago School for Professional Psychology where he researched applications of applied behavior analysis in non-traditional settings including sports and organizational behavior management under Dr. Jack Spear, publishing his thesis in 2021 reviewing behavioral interventions to improve the performance of competing athletes and conducted his dissertation on behavior analysis with competing golfers. 

Dr. O’Donnell works with under-served mental health populations providing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to clients on medical assistance in Philadelphia. Dr. O'Donnell is the President of the Philadelphia Metropolitan Association for Behavior Analysis. Dr. O’Donnell volunteers with his local civic association and promotes the use of radical behaviorism in government. Some of his research interests include translational behavior analysis (theory to practice), Health/Sports/& Fitness, social responsibility and sustainability, freedom and government, Relational Frame Theory, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, radical behaviorism, and self-applications of behavior analysis.

Dr. Scott is a wealth of knowledge and an amazingly cool dude. We look forward to his next visit. This is a nice, super-chilled, tasty and refreshing brew. Feel free to pour generously and always analyze responsibly. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to ABA on Tap, where our goal is to find the best recipe to brew the smoothest, coldest, and best tasting ABA around. I'm Dan Lowry with Mike Rubio, and join us on our journey as we look back into the ingredients to form the best concoction of ABA on tap. In this podcast, we will talk about the history of the ABA brew, how much to consume to achieve the optimum buzz while not getting too drunk, and the recommended pairings to bring to the table. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and always analyze responsibly.

SPEAKER_00: 0:55

All right, all right, and welcome back to yet another installment of ABA on Tap. I am your ever-grateful co-host, Mike Rubio, along with Mr. Daniel Lowry. Mr. Dan, it's been a few weeks, sir. How you doing?

SPEAKER_01: 1:07

Great to be back and really excited about today. We've got some amazing guests on today, starting with Dr. Scott. Really, really excited

SPEAKER_00: 1:14

to

SPEAKER_01: 1:15

have him on the podcast and talk about maybe some ABA outside of autism.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20

A lot of that. And what's really, I think, what really got me about his background, he's done everything we've done, and then he's exploring a whole bunch of other avenues, and it seems like his daily practice is something that we haven't had a chance to focus on enough if at all i think on aba on tap so without further ado super excited to introduce dr scott o'donnell give it up for our house band there they don't have they don't have a name yet so maybe dr scott will be the first to cast his vote dr scott thank you for your time sir we're super excited to have some time with you and chat how are you doing today

SPEAKER_02: 2:00

It's great. Great to be here. Love to be on the show. I'm a fan of the show. I would say a name could be the Tappers. and now I actually get to talk back.

SPEAKER_00: 2:33

Man, that's, we have to tell you, just really kind words. We truly, truly appreciate that. And we want to give a shout out, that said, to our show producer, recently joined, Suzanne Juswick, for really propelling us forward and making these connections with folks like yourself. And glad to be in your car, glad to have you on our screen and on our show. We love the origin story. You've probably heard that. So we want to give you some time to just tell us all about it. about your background. You've done cognitive neuroscience, you've done the RBT route and worked with autistic individuals. You're doing a lot of mental health related work, which I think is an area that needs much more exploration in terms of bringing our ABA technologies into that realm. Please tell us how it all got started. Tell us what drives you, what started your fire and what keeps it going.

SPEAKER_02: 3:25

sure i'll get into that but i got to be a fanboy for a little bit longer if you like okay so i do remember the first one of the first episodes mike had a baby right and then you know and it's funny listening to that episode because it wasn't that long i listened to that episode but how old is that child at this point four four four going on 14 that is amazing because i do remember an episode with it where the child was two weeks old then it was 22 months and now it's you know

SPEAKER_00: 3:58

change she's um she's part of i don't know if you've heard it dan she's part of our outro now uh in the voice and she's the one that says always analyze so listen for that on some of the newer episodes I think I've put it on two now and I'll see if I can integrate her little voice more because she comes into the you know I'll be editing and stuff and she'll come in and she just wants to play with the microphone loves to hear herself so I really appreciate you asking um what uh um What an amazing continuing education for me, right? In terms of, you know, I'm pretty sure that was her, that's her whole role in my life right now is reminding me all those things I preach and then I have to come practice and it's not always as easy.

SPEAKER_02: 4:39

The other thing I want to mention is, Dana, I really liked what you said about how, what your approach is going to be and with this ABA company with highly trained RBTs and then how you looked at it like, well, Is that high school diploma and 40 hours of training enough? No, I want my RBTs to be really highly trained. And that 5% supervision isn't enough. And I was just in the car saying, hallelujah, thank you guys for saying that. I really appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01: 5:09

You're welcome. And thanks for acknowledging that. And hopefully that becomes something in the field. Because, yes, we are excited to hopefully promote that.

SPEAKER_02: 5:18

And the last thing I want to mention is, other than I'm really happy for more episodes, is I really liked, Mike, your conceptualization of the sympathetic nervous system and the escape avoid control response, because I find this to be very significant in working with people who have PTSD, and when we are identifying triggers, and we talk a lot about the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. And I explained to them that I see it not as two switches, but two knobs. can get turned up and the other one gets turned down at the same time. And I do explain it very neuroscientifically, but more behaviorally, as in like, hey, what behaviors can we engage in to reactivate the parasympathetic nervous system? And one of the main ones is deep breathing. So I do preach that a lot for my clients and teach them diaphragmatic breathing and deep breathing and stuff like that. But I appreciate that, especially the part where you talked about the blood draining from the frontal lobe. And it makes so much sense because this is an adaptive thing. We had to make decisions faster sometimes at some points, especially when our life really depended on it and we had to fight or run. And you don't want a whole lot of blood going around in your frontal lobe and you thinking about a lot of things. No, you need to make an immediate decision based on the immediate future. So I found that to be like, I found it to be significant. And I adopted it myself. And the way I'm talking about it and the way I'm explaining how, like, hey, you know, there's a part of body that's affected here, too.

SPEAKER_00: 6:59

Nice, man. That's incredible feedback. We really appreciate that someone's out there listening and someone like yourself can take some of those concepts. And that's what this is all about. It's why we started this is really to start. a lot of self-criticism, I would say, at the beginning. And now it's taken a turn to where there's a lot more collaboration. Here we are talking this neuroscience stuff that I wasn't sure, you know, who's out there listening and you're taking it and, you know, giving it a whole new level. I really appreciate that. I think that there's a lot more to learn and many more directions that we can go in, which is why we're super excited to hear more about your work and what you're doing with ABA and how you're applying some of those concepts. You know, the idea of deep breathing and the sort of generalization Yeah, I appreciate that. same function as a curve is pretty interesting to me. So maybe we'll get into that at some point.

SPEAKER_02: 8:20

Yeah, yeah. I'm big on those parts of it. In fact, that's really where my background came from. I came from an experimental analysis of behavior background and predominantly read mostly JAB and not Java when I first started getting into the field. And I was lucky to be mentored by Dr. Heinlein at Temple University, which has been a great experience, especially recently. I'm an adjunct there now, and I'm teaching some of the same classes that I got to teach, including the next couple of terms. I'll be teaching experimental analysis of behavior there. So it's like a big full circle thing coming back to me, like teaching it again. But yeah, so I got my degree in psychology and cognitive neurosurgery. neuroscience there for my undergrad. And I didn't have to do a ton of neuroscience classes. I got most of those credits spending time with Dr. Heinlein and taking classes under him. So they were all behavioral classes. I had the rat in the box and everything. And that was an eye-opening class when you're training a lever press and stuff like that. And I'm just big on that whole like, hey, what we do really has to be conceptually consistent with our science. And it has to go all the way back it has to be these basic concepts from the experimental analysis of behavior that we elucidate in translational research and then and then do applied research and then feed our practitioners with this uh with this information so i like that continuum just on that uh that piece where we have conceptual you know consistency um makes sense to you guys right

SPEAKER_01: 10:03

100 percent I just take notes. So if you see me looking down, I just take notes of things that we can talk about moving forward. So if you see me looking down, I'm just taking notes because you've already made me think about a couple of things to talk about. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_02: 10:18

Okay. Interesting. I take notes when I talk to my clients too. So like, you know, I'm the note taker, but you know, and they actually kind of find that as valuable. Sometimes some of my clients would say, hey, can you go back to like what I said or this time? And it's been worth it when, you know, if they're having, you know, dealing with courts and stuff like that too sometimes they could say like oh can you send this the lawyer like you know uh my previous notes and stuff like that so um but and so uh just to continue my background i moved on and uh and i did i wasn't in the field for the longest time i just want to pay off my bachelor's and i was out of the field and did a bunch of different things but seemed to really kind of keep that like you know my eye on behavior analysis i was a supervisor at ups and really just uh started using a my department to number one, which is like, and, um, this was like, we, it was the island of misfit toys there. It's the people would send me workers that they didn't want, like, oh, they couldn't work for me. They'd suck. And I would just use, you know, just ABA principles and then treat them well. And then all of a sudden they're working for me. And, and it's like,

SPEAKER_00: 11:26

imagine that that's killer.

SPEAKER_02: 11:28

Yeah, your loss. But I was out of the field for a long time, and then with the insurance mandate changing, I'm like, oh, maybe there would be a use for me. And I went back and got my master's, and I had a two-week-year-old kid at the time. So you can imagine doing your master's. And I jumped right into the PhD right afterwards. And I was lucky to study under Antonio Harrison, who was into behavior analysis in sports. during my master's. And then I was going to start with some autism research, but COVID kind of changed some plans. And then I pivoted to sports research. So I published in that a review article, which like, you know, we haven't talked about a whole lot, direct versus indirect competition in sports. I think it's, I think it's interesting. I use the behavioral contingency to like create a classification for like, for different sports types. Like you could, you could have a sport where like, golf where you're it's indirect competition like I can't block you in golf I can't stand in front of your shot or make you miss or something like that the only competition that's created is like a score to beat or something like that or versus basketball where like I can get directly in your way and it really how I am as a defender really has to do with like how you're going to do offensively and then I continued with that research and I did some research in golf which I'm hoping to publish soon. I've tried publishing a couple of times. I have to pare it down a little bit, I think, and try again. But I think it's going to be significant when it comes out.

SPEAKER_00: 13:12

So that means you're going to be adding the direct competition element to golf. They're going to be tackling each other. That'd be fantastic. Happy Gilmore style. I would certainly watch if that was the case. A whole

SPEAKER_02: 13:22

new sport. Yeah, a whole new sport. I can't wait to talk about that. That's in my mental notes. You've got to talk about that. the sports

SPEAKER_00: 13:29

research

SPEAKER_02: 13:30

are you guys golfers i was i was curious

SPEAKER_00: 13:32

i am not i am not no sir

SPEAKER_02: 13:34

okay no so because i was gonna i was gonna talk about golf a lot but do you guys play pool

SPEAKER_00: 13:40

a little bit a little bit a little bit sure enough yeah okay i mean yeah you can get into any of that

SPEAKER_02: 13:46

Oh yeah, I've been dabbling in that a lot too. So yeah, so I'm a pool player and a golfer and I like to investigate in sports. Like I've done so officially in golf and did a study which included golfers with eight irons on a golf simulator and came up with like some data that was pretty orderly, a lot more orderly than I expected it to be that indicated some functional relations in terms of the target. So it really looks like the target makes a big difference in performance and how someone's going to perform. And a lot of the golf research recently has been with tag teach, which is not really focusing on a target. In fact, they're not measuring that stuff at all. They're just measuring topography. And this is like a little pet peeve of mine. It's been bothering me that there's this focus on topography and not this focus on function and behavior analysis. sports and i just feel like maybe the field needs to be set right and like maybe that there needs to be a clear distinction there so we really kind of understand what is what is biomechanics versus what is behavior analysis versus what is kinetics

SPEAKER_01: 15:00

can you uh talk about what you mean oh i'm sorry when you say target versus topography in relation to golf what do you mean by that

SPEAKER_02: 15:07

Well, we got enough people worried about your swing when it looks like, right? And then maybe you look at the angles between body parts. And is that something that Skinner looked at when he had the rats and they were pressing the levers and stuff like that? He didn't care what body part that rat would use to press the lever. He couldn't use his hind paw or its nose or his front paw or whatever. It wasn't about that. It was about the switch and the weights and the schedules of reinforcement. And I think that's what, if our science was based off of that originally, I think that's for us to be conceptually consistent and conceptually systematic. I think that's where we have to go with behavior analysis in sports. And I think that's actually really closely related to a lot of the metrics that our athletes are already recording. So I don't think it's going to be a big transition for them. And I think those metrics are right there. And it kind of makes sense that that's what they're using because they've been successful with them. We just know how to use them the best because we're behavior analysts. Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 16:11

That's fascinating. Wow. Yeah. I've got

SPEAKER_01: 16:13

so many questions. Go ahead, though, Mike. Wow. I'm not even sure where to start. Me either. I was like, whoa, sports? Wow. Using ABA with sports is just so amazing because I'm a huge sports fan. So, wow. Go

SPEAKER_00: 16:25

ahead, Mike. And so you're talking about body mechanics. So that's a whole new level. Are we saying that those don't have to be so uniform? Is that what you're saying and that we look at that? currently that closely or scrutinize it in terms of mechanics being a very specific way and not necessarily looking at the end result. So like a quarterback, for example, and his mechanics, as long as he throws the ball and he gets it downfield, Is that kind of what you're saying?

SPEAKER_02: 16:55

I would say that's where behavior analysis should focus, right? Just like you said. And there's people out there that do biomechanics and they do a really good job and their measures look different than ours. They are very concerned about angles between moving body parts and they'll use a, they'll use a like fit to a bio model and they'll use a lot of, a lot of different measures and stuff like that. Like the cameras and stuff like that, motion tracking and, and they're, calculations look different. And maybe that's just not where I mean, that's not where behavior analysis came from. And it doesn't make sense for us to be going there. You know, with like, what a task analysis, you know, compared to what they're using, like, you know, it doesn't look the same. And don't get me wrong, task analysis, I'm not saying it's not useful. I'm just saying that there are other things that we can be doing. And there is a clear role for behavior analysis and, and sports that's not by mechanics.

SPEAKER_00: 17:54

Well, you've probably heard it here. I think we like to say, I think we're guilty of overly task analyzing a lot of the time. And then if you pair that with a very inflexible vision of what the behavior eliciting is supposed to look like, you can really make a mess of things. You can really conjure up behaviors that now you're attributing to diagnostics and it's not at all. It was the situation, the circumstance you've just created here. So I agree with you. I think we've overly It's really fascinating to think about that application in sports, and it makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_01: 18:29

I think we talk about, and I've talked about this too, we talk about response generalization, but we don't allow for it, right? We say, oh, we should generalize responses and allow for different responses to the same stimuli. Look at Steph Curry, Reggie Miller, and Kobe Bryant. They all have different shooting form, right? And they've all been very successful. But in ABA, we've only accepted, like you've said, and Mike, you just mentioned one specific thing. And if we don't get this one specific answer, answer the one specific response to the one specific SD then we don't accept it as correct and we don't allow for any response generalization yet in all of my 40 hour trainings we train on response generalization but somehow that just gets thrown out the window

SPEAKER_02: 19:07

Yeah. And the research out there actually kind of shows that maybe we shouldn't be looking for a repetitive topography, like the same motion over and over again, because when we see that, we actually don't get the same results over and over again. But when we see very slight variations in topography, it's like the athletes are varying very slightly to get the same performance over and over again. So maybe the goal isn't to have perfect topography result perfect function I think the goal should be like when function gets there the topography would look very close too but that should be the goal we should work on on that first and go back to your example Mike like all right like we shouldn't be worried about their the quarterback's mechanics but the other things he's worried about how fast that ball goes how far that ball travels the trajectory of that ball and whether he hits his target or not

SPEAKER_00: 20:02

yeah well then behaviorally what you know what changes in terms of of being able to practice that to you that term specifically so that you can repetitively perform knowing that just doing the same repetitive motion isn't necessarily what we're after here. So that's really, I mean, that's a fascinating, you're going to have me thinking about that the rest of the day. Anytime I watch a basketball game for the rest of the season.

SPEAKER_01: 20:26

Well, game seven, Warriors Rockets tonight. That's right. I've been thinking about you. Question for you, Scott. So going back, so you were kind of in the ABA field, it sounds like, or you did your research more in the lab. Um, side of things. And then you said you took a break, then COVID came around, you went back into the field and then you found yourself in relating behavioral behaviorism to sports. How did you get there? Because there's so commonly the trajectory is, oh, you get your BCBA or you do anything behaviorally. Now you work with kids with autism and do ABA. That's, that's the career path. And we're trying to show here at the podcast that there's so many other things that you can do. So how did you get from behaviorism to sports?

SPEAKER_02: 21:08

Yeah, and you know what? through autism somehow you know because you can't really avoid it in this field and I worked with kids and adults with autism for 10 years so yeah I guess that way but that was never where I started and it wasn't about that like I said I started with the rats and the pigeons in the behavior lab so it wasn't like I wasn't reading Java I wasn't reading about like how this would be used for autism I never thought that not until the insurance mandates changed around in 2013, but I mean, I got my bachelor's in 2002. Um, so this was way before that. And for me, it was like, how can we use the science of behavior, um, to, um, you know, help, help people and change the world. And I was asking myself, how can I use this to help my Philadelphia sports teams win championships? Um, and like, if that could happen, then that would be a really good proof for the science. Like if I could use the science to do that, then that would, that would really really proved to me that this science... I mean, not that I need it at this point, and I haven't done that yet. I am a full believer in behavior analysis. I'm very deeply committed to the science. But just to see that, that would be proof of concept. You

SPEAKER_01: 22:24

know what I mean? Of course. So with that, would it, in your opinion, be possible to use behavior analysis to have the Cowboys win a championship? Or is that just too far? Is that outside of... It was too easy. Did we get that comfortable thing? I mean, there's probably limits to behavior analysis. Dr. Scott? I'm going to let Dr. Scott answer this. If you said,

SPEAKER_02: 22:47

would it be possible to help the Eagles win a championship, I would say 100%. And as long as you get me involved, then yeah, we're going to do it. But the Cowboys.

SPEAKER_00: 22:59

Oh, man.

SPEAKER_02: 23:00

You had to pick the Cowboys. Could you, can you like pick another team? Like, give me an example with another team.

SPEAKER_01: 23:06

Oh, sure. So in fairness to Mike, I don't particularly have sports teams that I root for because I try to stay objective. So I do have kind of an ability to give him a hard time, but he cannot reciprocate it because I don't have a sports team. So objective.

SPEAKER_02: 23:21

How about the, how about the Browns? You know, how about the Browns? Yeah. A hundred percent for the Browns. No problem. No problem. In fact, you know what? I think, I, I think 100% for every team, maybe, except for the Cowboys, maybe. No, but seriously, seriously, yeah, I think you could. I would go with an OBM approach for the front office, and then you go with contingency management and act for the players, and then you go like teacher-student interaction scale with the coaches, and then you got ABA on like three levels there. I think, yeah, I think that's how you would do it. That's how I would do it.

SPEAKER_00: 23:58

Does Joe listen? Don't. I mean, he's listening. I hope he's not listening. Because I'm hoping he's writing this down. I mean, that sounds like a winning recipe right there, man. Jeez. I mean, yeah. Come on. Help us out, brother. I

SPEAKER_02: 24:11

came up with it.

SPEAKER_00: 24:12

It's going to be a rough few seasons, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 24:16

Yeah, Miami is another team, which any other team by the Cowboys. I don't think ABA works in that stadium.

SPEAKER_00: 24:28

Well, you're saying nothing's 100%. You're saying nothing's 100% in all fairness. No, no, no.

SPEAKER_02: 24:33

I'm just being biased.

SPEAKER_00: 24:36

Of course, you have to be. You got to keep up your street cred. Can you imagine if people in Philadelphia found out you were saying you could take the Cowboys to win? We can't have that out there.

SPEAKER_01: 24:45

Actually, our last... Our second to last guest, Maggie, was from Philadelphia and she was so excited about the Eagles. Yeah, so if we talk too much Cowboys, we're going to lose our Philadelphia.

SPEAKER_00: 24:54

Yeah, our Philadelphia contingency.

SPEAKER_01: 24:56

Yes. I actually have a question for you going back before, kind of transitioning a little bit away from the sports. So it's funny because I'm looking at a sticker here in our studio. It has the Living Room Cafe, but we have a... A mantra that we talk about a lot called the lab to the living room and how ABA has obviously been brought up in the lab with Skinner and Ratz and you have a really better understanding obviously than even I would in the lab side of things. That being stated, the way that ABA maybe differentiates or actually BSD, Behavioral Service Delivery, certainly differentiates from EAB is that it's done in the home and we don't have the experimental controls in the home that you would have with rats and pigeons in the lab. But so often we see that people are trying to emulate the lab in the home and maybe there's some incongruencies there and maybe they're trying to fit a square peg through a round hole. Do you have any thoughts about ABA transitioning from the lab to to the living room because you have such a great expertise from the lab side of things. You've done it. Tell us how.

SPEAKER_02: 26:05

Yeah. And I guess that would be my niche where I'm like the translational guy. And I'm not saying I'm the only one. There's definitely people out there who have that EAB experience and the ABA experience. And the big difference between the two is going to be how much experimental control that you're able to gain or you're even looking for. like a reversal design makes a lot of sense in the lab, but clinically you have to like consider whether you really wanna reverse that behavior or not, because you're doing it for a very socially significant reason. And the other big difference is, and I'm just looking to answer some basic questions too with EAB and translational research, like how does this work and willing to experiment to elucidate that where, and applied behavior analysis, then not so much because you are considering that maybe procedures would be built off of this. And then in service delivery, like those are, like you are working clinically and your primary concern is that client and those stakeholders. So, but there's, you know, there's that ethical consideration there that really exists in terms of social validity and working with a client. And that's the way I see that big difference But hopefully there's not as much lost. I have a feeling there is some things lost when we go from the lab to the field. But there should also be some backwards flow where we're researching things that are happening in service delivery and saying like, hey, maybe we should take another look at this and kind of experiment and elucidate this. Here's an example. And I know we talk about it all the time. And I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be that guy that talks against something because it's just really one of my professors that really kind of convinced me. But he was writing this paper and he let me see it. He was going to publish it. I don't know if this went out. But Dr. Roger Bass was talking about the idea of the MO and EOs and stuff like that. And have we experimentally separated these from antecedent stimuli? And we haven't. And it was just kind of a conceptual paper. And then we would just... adopted that right into practice. And there wasn't like, hey, you know, we could really tell the difference between this being an EO and this being an SD. And you can't. In fact, we often see that SDs will gain appetitive, you know, functions and different kinds of functions that make it seem like it's an EO when it's not, when it's an SD. So, like, yeah, I would like to see that done. Like, experimentally delineated where we can see, oh, yeah, this is a clear difference. I don't think there will be, though, even though we talk about these are two different things in practice.

SPEAKER_01: 29:08

So it's so interesting because I've worked so many people through there because I was the trainer at my last few companies. So we had a lot of people sitting for the BAC or BCBA exam, excuse me. And that was literally probably the hardest thing consistently across all of the people that I would train is that when we would do the mock test questions is differentiating the SDs from the EO. And I totally remember there was, you know, an example of an individual who was hammering a nail and asked his assistant to get a screwdriver or something, who was trying to take care of this nail and asked his assistant to get a screwdriver. And the question was, what is the site of the nail? An SD or an EO? And it was, you know, so we walked through it and I was able to kind of walk them through the answer to that. But sometimes it does become pretty intertwined and it certainly becomes ambiguous of what the difference is in certain situations. And the question is, does it matter what the difference is in either situation? But I just when you brought that up, I was just having flashbacks to constantly going over that specific question and in my head remembering that. Trying to talk people through the site of the nail. What is that to the person asking for the hammer? And it was the EO, not

SPEAKER_00: 30:34

the SD. When I could join your training sessions, one of my favorite things to do, just because, you know, admittedly, I think I'm better in practice and not as fluent with the technology. But being able to delineate that and say, for the test, you're going to want to say this. Now, in the real situation... Who cares? What are you going to do? You know, what's the appropriate response here? And then let's move forward. I do think that's a... Again, back to the idea of, you know... over task analyzing, over identifying. I think that's a really good point. And again, one of those aspects of lab to living room. How much of this do we need to replicate? I know we love to talk about it here on the show and joke about being so rigid about replicating certain things that you had to have that IKEA table and chair and the discrete trial had to go through these trial types. And it's not to say that we throw those things out the window because they're useless. No, they're not. They are the foundation upon which we stand to be able to take those things out, in my opinion, with less experimental control now trying to develop some type of instructional control. And if we're too rigid, yeah, I think we walk into self-fulfilling prophecies of challenging behavior that we were a part of in an effort to try and intervene. It's a really interesting quandary.

SPEAKER_01: 31:53

Yeah. So with that, what are your thoughts on that, Scott? Because like Mike said, and we did this so often, we were so DTT heavy in the beginning. And you always say, Mike, that if Lovaas saw what we were doing today, he'd be rolling over in his grave because hopefully 30 years from the time... People are still trying to emulate the Lovaas model and DTT and things like that, which is basically trying to emulate the lab. Let's get a room with nothing in it because we had to have the bare room with, like you said, the IKEA table and chair and the picture cards. And we had to ask 10 times. So it was so much of trying to reconstruct the lab in the home to potentially eliminate a lot of the constrainious or confounding variables. But then we... So we got... a little bit of the external or internal validity, but never really got to the external validity part. And now there's kind of been a shift of, okay, let's do a little bit more PRT, naturalistic settings, maybe getting rid of a little bit of the internal validity or not being as solid there with a hope of getting the external validity and the generalization there. What are your thoughts on kind of the progression of ABA and how you would recommend people do it or just in general, because I know you've come from that high end internal validity backing from the lab

SPEAKER_02: 33:16

well um I guess in in practice for me it's different for you guys because my clients like are all verbal and they tell me what's going on. Where you would be doing an ABC data sheet on someone and sitting there and filling it out and watching them and observing them, my clients do it with me because they're verbal and they can talk it through. And then when we try to figure out the function, it makes it a whole lot easier because they will tell you, no, that's not what I was trying to do. Yes, that wasn't what I was trying to do. Or they'll tell you what's up. And they'll even tell you, and this is an interesting thing that I've realized in doing these ABC data sheets, um, is like, I'll, I'll ask them like, is that what you want it to happen? Right. And so oftentimes it isn't what you want it to happen. So you guys talk about like problem behavior and like, and the other way I'm translating them, I always feel like I'm translating from autism because I know you're talking about this world, uh, this autism world where, where like I'm translating it to like, Oh, how would this, this work for, uh, you know, other people. And these are the same principles. So this isn't like something that should be really hard to translate, but it like it is something that like oh how do i apply this with regular people and they they tell you um the other thing i realize is that um is that problem behavior is differentially reinforced and and i realize that because i'm doing these abc data sheets with people and they're talking me about problems that they're having and i'll say to them like is that what you wanted to happen and they say no this is what ended up happening and it's not what they wanted right so it's like yeah that means that sometimes this is working for you and sometimes it isn't and And that shows to me it's differentially reinforced. And that's why it's kind of persistent. And that's why you're still having an issue with it and having a hard time moving on. So then we look at things, all right, you know, let's interrupt this. Can we, you know, come up with some other options of behaviors? When we see this, when we see this antigen stimuli, can we come up with a couple other options of behavior? You know how that works. You know how that's going to go, yelling or reacting or fighting or whatever, whatever the problem behavior is. But let's have like, let's have another option. option here just because you didn't like how that turned out last time. And maybe this other behavior option might have some different consequences that you like a little bit better.

SPEAKER_01: 35:33

Well, what's so cool about that is he keeps saying, is this what you wanted to happen? Did you like the outcome of this situation? And that's a scent basically for the nonverbal people that we work with. But so often it's not for the people that we work with. It's not Are they happy with what happened? It's are the parents, are the people around them happy with what happened? And I mean, the voice, like you said, you work with individuals that are more vocal. So I think that really does shed a lot of light on how that inherently sometimes we treat individuals that are non-vocal so differently than individuals that are vocal because when people are vocal, we start asking them, are you happy with the response? But a lot of times with individuals that are non-vocal, were discerning their happiness based on other people around them, which is very interesting.

SPEAKER_02: 36:21

Yeah. Um, yeah. And, uh, it's just a different, it's a different world. Like I've done, I can't tell you how many ABC data sheets I've done with my clients and every single one, they're my partner in the analysis and they, you know, determine the function with me and stuff like that. And they come up with the antecedent and the behavior and the consequence, and it's all their words. Um, so it's, they're my partner in it. And, um, and I don't want to go back to the way it was where I'm doing behavior analysis on someone. I like it better that they're my partner in it and they're doing it with me.

SPEAKER_01: 36:54

I love that because again, and I'll stop relating it to autism, get back because I'm very interested to hear your demographic because it is so different and we're so excited to learn from it. You would think that, let's say we present something and a client that we work with cries, right? So relating it to kind of what Scott's saying, that person saying, hey, this isn't working out for me. But in ABA, again, and BSD, what so often is going to happen is, wait, this person's crying. We have to stop the crying because that's a maladaptive behavior. It's not working out for us. It's not working out for us, right? And we need to stop that behavior rather than focus on the fact that this person's saying it's not working out for them.

SPEAKER_00: 37:37

That is, and I think you bring the other element in this if we're working with younger children and parents, parents' natural reactions. I like to do the analogy to the smoke alarm, right? Yeah. You're cooking bacon happily on a Saturday morning and that smoke alarm goes off and you're just hardwired to respond to those sounds. So it's almost like it's a real catch 22 that we're in because it's not like we want the child to continue crying. That would seem cruel and unusual. At the same time, based on this premise we're elaborating here, that would be the function and that would be okay. And we're going to soothe you through it and then find a way to explain to you, you know, other outcomes or other possibilities for the future. It's really a fascinating premise, even in trying to be more ascent based in our work, especially as of late, we run into that challenge of trying to somehow control that, that we'll call it distress behaviors. I stopped using tantrum, but the idea that somebody is expressing distress and because you're a parent and you're hardwired to be distressed by that distress, you want that negative reinforcement. How do I make this go away? And I think, you know, parents or professionals, young professionals get into some real vicious cycles with that just trying to, and that gets back into the idea of, I don't know, much more authoritarian approaches. I'm telling you what to do and this is the way things get better for you and whatever. But yeah, it's really interesting that now, so I'm thinking about maybe older clients that are verbal, vocal and are able to communicate with me and some of the clients that I see that are on telehealth now. And yes, how refreshing it is in having gone over treatment plan goals with him and his family. And then, like you mentioned this earlier with your client site, because we're on telehealth, I can pull up these worksheets and I basically have our tasks for the day and the things we're talking about. And I relate them back to the treatment goals. And I'm always talking about why we're doing this. Why are we doing this activity? Do I care if you learn how to sketch? No, we're just gonna engage our observational learning skills right now. I just want you to watch and imitate. We're gonna watch each other. Watch the video. That's it. And there's this ease that I see him, you know, shoulders kind of slink down like, cool. I know why I'm doing this. I enjoy doing this. This is good stuff. I see him smile. You know, his parents are reporting back good things. And it is it's very refreshing to be able to engage, you know, the clients directly. And then there's the question of. You know, not going back necessarily into autism, but speaking of somebody nonverbal or somebody younger who may not have that capacity and learning or are still developing that capacity and learning more about how to apply these exact approaches nonetheless. What other forms of communication are available to us? They're there. In fact, we just talked about the crying. It's there. Unfortunately, we want that to stop instinctively. And it's hard to sort of develop any treatment protocol, if you will, beyond that. It's a challenge. And again, something that difficult not to say we won't get there, but In fact, it gives us the impetus to really explore with vigor, you know, check those questions out.

SPEAKER_02: 40:46

Yeah. And Mike, you're a developmental guy and you can probably conceptualize this like this. If you think about a response and a response gets reinforced, that response, like responses evolve, right? As a reinforced, because we are talking about a selectionist system here in which like the environment is selecting behaviors. So that's makes sense that it would evolve. And so like that, that crying doesn't, go away is still there's still that same basic need and the basic basic function of behavior and it just turns into something else later and i guess you can you know consider that to be complaining or something like that or griping you know i like to say to my clients it's good to advocate you know for yourself so i also like to tell my clients like hey during therapy, it's your right to complain. This is, if you want to gripe or complain, not because, not necessarily because like, hey, like I really want this person crying more, but like, hey, you know, that's, we could talk about these things that are bothering you and maybe like come up with some different perspectives and maybe try, you know, try to work on those things around you and solve them instead of trying to work on that you're depressed about it. You know what I mean? Like, because it makes sense you're depressed about it. This isn't, you know, and you're not happy with the things around you. So let's change the things around you and then And then once those things change, then all of a sudden you start seeing people do better because the things around them are better. But I would say it's like an interesting, I guess like from my perspective, like what you just said with the crying, like, hey, this isn't necessarily something that's bad. Although it irritates us and it bothers us, it's not necessarily something bad. And I often will talk to my clients about like their feelings of depression or anxiety or something like that. If you went up to a parent and you said, I'm anxious, they would try to get for you as if it's something bad. Instead of like, well, why are you anxious? Or, you know, or some impending activity or something like that, you know, that's going to happen. You know what I mean? So, and then with the schizophrenic clients too, there'll be, I'll think that, like, I want them to talk. I don't want them just to shut up. Like, yeah, it's a problem if they have a delusion and they go on and they start talking about something and it's somewhat non-contextual and it doesn't really make sense. And then they start, you know, saying that like, you know, it's the, it's the fault of like, or I saw a sign and that sign was meant for me. And it's like something magical about it or, you know, about this inanimate object or something like that. And it's like, well, do you like, what's your role here as a behavior analyst, just to get them to shut up about it or like that they're telling you these things and you're telling you they're having these experiences because the experiences are relevant. Like they make a lot of sense. Like that's what they need help with. Not just like that, you know, they need help not talking about it. You know what I mean? So yeah, we get annoyed when kids cry and we get annoyed when people complain, you know, but if we like show them how to help themselves with it, then they won't have to cry about it anymore, right?

SPEAKER_00: 43:49

I've always wanted, I mean, absolutely. I've always wanted to develop a training model for like RBTs, for example, where we, you know, do a simulation with like, you know, there's clear auditory stimuli that get us to that level and like trying to practice the idea of maybe it's moral reflex or something and like kind of dampening that so that we don't kick into this. I don't know if it's possible, like kick into this mode of trying to make it go away, but giving ourselves a couple seconds to take it in and go contextualize and go, oh, that's why this is happening. Now this is my response. It's so hard not to react to those stimuli. Rightfully so, they're adaptive. I mean, you know, there's a child in distress. We should all feel a little bit of distress, but you have to act, you have to react upon it or professionally speaking, can we train ourselves to respond, yeah, give it a couple seconds and then go for it. I feel like maybe in my, you know, nearing my 30th year of practice, maybe I've, you know, developed that a little bit. I'd love to learn more about how to train that or help people understand that better. I mean, it's what we're talking about here.

SPEAKER_02: 44:55

Yeah, it's basically, I guess, what I'm doing. I guess I do that a lot. I go back to one model I present to people. It's the sacred pause. I don't know if you've heard of that, but that's like a Buddhist thing. And the act therapy involves a lot of some Eastern philosophies and the mindfulness and stuff like that. So it kind of makes sense that we would circle back around to that. But that certainly has to do with taking these stimuli in your your environment first and then act according to what is important to you. And take that perspective where you could see yourself reacting to it, not like that you're caught up in it, that kind of approach to it. But I also work with people with ADHD a lot, and we do those executive functioning tasks. And it works really well with the behavior analysis conceptualization of it, because Skinner was always the proponent that private events aren't necessarily not for behavior analysis, but it's just the issue is we can't be objective with them. But we see the talking and the thinking as these are two mutually exclusive processes. They work on a lot of the same brain structures, except the ones that move your mouth when you're thinking. But the ones that move your mouth when you're talking, yeah, they're active. So you can't really do both think and talk at the same time. So because of that, yeah, we know that people with ADHD aren't like going through these executive functioning tests, like thinking through the next few steps, thinking through the next day, thinking through the little steps, what they have to do, right? And that's what I will do with these clients often. I'll say, all right, take me through until the next day. What's going to happen now? What's going to happen next? What do you have to do to do that? What do you have to do to do this? And they'll just like break the day down piece by piece. And they're like, wow, like, I just, I don't, I don't normally do that. It's like, well, yeah, that's why you're... That's why you're so unstructured and you just kick your feet up and procrastinate and look at your phone for hours because you didn't think about what the next few things you had to do were. We know. That's why you're telling me you're not thinking about it. We talk it out. That's very similar to thinking about it. If we talk it out enough, then they don't have to talk it out. They could just think.

SPEAKER_01: 47:17

Interesting. Can you explain? You talked about your history. You were working in a lab. Then you went back to school. And you said that you don't really work with a lot of individuals with autism now, at least not in the in-home way that we do.

SPEAKER_02: 47:32

Yeah, not the in-home way. Yeah, a couple.

SPEAKER_01: 47:34

So you're a PhD, you're a doctor. Can you talk about kind of what you do now and who you primarily work with? I know you've alluded to it, a lot of people with schizophrenia, ADHD, etc. But can you just, for our audience, let us know exactly what you do now?

SPEAKER_02: 47:47

Yeah. All right. So my plate right now is pretty full. If you want to know everything I do, and it involves a lot of behavior analysis, which is part of it I like. So my full-time job, I am working at a clinic in Philadelphia close to the center of the city. We call it center city, Philadelphia, right? And close to that and with a very diverse population. So I can't tell you who's going to walk in the door or, um, you know, what they're going to have or what they presented from is I, I never know. I have no ideas, but it's just, it's a very diverse place to live. Um, but it is for a nonprofit that is, uh, been a minority run since its inception and back in the sixties and seventies. So, um, so, um, yeah. And, and, um, I get a lot of enjoyment out of that. I do the act therapy and I do a lot of traditional behavior analysis in that too. Um, I'll do assessments. here and there. And then my part-time job is adjuncting at Temple University. I just started that, finished my first semester there and taught a couple classes. I taught an ethics class that was really fun. And I taught a methods class on visually analyzing graph data, which is like right up my alley. I really like that. It's all right up my alley. I just really, I love all of it. And I'm also the vice president of the a local civic association here and I use behavior analysis there and basically local government, very small time politics kind of situation. And I'm also the president of the Philadelphia Metropolitan Association of Behavior Analysis, which is the ABAI special interest group local chapter that includes Philadelphia and parts of the surrounding area. in New Jersey and Delaware. And also, oh, geez, what else do I do with it? I am just using it in my everyday life. I chart a lot. I have a chart on all the charts I keep. So this is basically an idea of how much I chart.

SPEAKER_00: 50:04

It's a meta

SPEAKER_02: 50:04

chart. Yeah, it is. It's a meta chart. Yeah, it's the first one I fill out. And actually, I think this would be the only one if I really wanted to increase how much I do in a day would be the only one that... I actually provide reinforcement on it. You see, it is up to date. That was yesterday. That included my workout

SPEAKER_01: 50:23

and stuff like that. I see a bunch of lines.

SPEAKER_02: 50:27

Yeah, lots of dots in a piece of paper. Do you guys use behavior analysis on yourself?

SPEAKER_00: 50:36

Oh, great question. You'll have to return for the answer and part two of our interview with Dr. Scott O'Donnell. Please do come back and

SPEAKER_03: 50:45

always analyze responsibly.

SPEAKER_00: 50:49

ABA on Tap is recorded live and unfiltered. We're done for the day. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. See you next time.