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The Behavioral Observations Podcast with Matt Cicoria
The Behavioral Observations Podcast with Matt Cicoria

The Behavioral Observations Podcast with Matt Cicoria

The Behavioral Observations Podcast with Matt Cicoria is an interview-based show that features conversations with innovative scientists and practitioners in the field of Behavior Analysis. The podcast covers topics such as Autism, Functional Behavioral Assessment, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Functional Communication Training, Verbal Behavior, and more!

Available Episodes 10

Merrill Winston returns to the podcast for what seems to be the umpteenth time (and if you didn't catch the SNL reference we discussed, see here). In this episode, we discuss a presentation he recently gave that dove into the seminal Catania paper, The Myth of Self-Reinforcement. In this episode Merrill distinguishes between procedures and processes, why what we think of as self-reinforcement is likely more attributable to negative reinforcement, and the age-old problem of the term "non-contingent reinforcement."

Merrill also spends a few minutes discussing the contributions of Dr. Henry "Hank" Pennypacker, what he intends to talk about at this year's Stone Soup Conference (shameless plug: save at checkout using promo code PODCAST), and rounds out the episode with some more constructive ways to think about self-management. 

This was a fun episode, and if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing with friends and colleagues. 

This podcast is brought to you by:

The Stone Soup Conference, which is taking place on October 20th. Use code PODCAST to save on your registration as well.

Behavior University. Their mission is to provide university quality professional development for the busy Behavior Analyst. Learn about their CEU offerings, including their brand new 8-hour Supervision Course, as well as their RBT offerings over at behavioruniversity.com/observations.

HRIC Recruiting. Barb Voss has been placing BCBAs in permanent positions throughout the US for just about a decade, and has been in the business more generally for 30 years. When you work with HRIC, you work directly with Barb, thereby accessing highly personalized service. So if you're about to graduate, you're looking for a change of pace, or you just want to know if the grass really is greener on the other side, head over to HRIColorado.com to schedule a confidential chat right away.

Dr. Jim Moore and I get back together to talk about a few specific client outcomes that we thought would be helpful for the audience to learn about. 

In this podcast, we talked about:

Jim closes the show by sharing that he has other cases he could discuss. Please let us know if you want more of these stories!

Anika Costa and Dr. Paulie Gavoni joined me in Session 239 to discuss their latest book, Quick Wins: Using Behavior Science to Accelerate and Sustain School Improvement. In our conversation we talk about why they felt this book was necessary, who represents their ideal reader, and whether we ask too much of school leaders. That last point is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, as we oftentimes ask people with no background in behavior analysis to engage in complex activities like pinpointing performance indicators, diagnosing performance problems, and so on.

We also talk about the distinction between leading and lagging indicators, viewing relationships as accomplishments, their Quick Walk protocol, and what things leaders should do before providing corrective feedback to staff members.

Paulie and Anika are presenting what sounds like a great talk at this year's Stone Soup Conference, which by the way, if you decide to attend, you can save on your registration by using the promo code, PODCAST.

Lastly, the three of us engaged in a little shameless self-promotion by talking about the project we've been working on called The Behavioral Toolbox, which is essentially an e-learning site we built for school-based professionals who are interested in learning how to improve student behavior in educational settings. 

We just launched our first course, Ready, Set, Consult! and we have many more in various stages of development. If you work in these types of settings, please check it out. I should also note that the courses we're designing aren't just for Behavior Analysts. We've done our best to communicate in plain English rather than behavioral jargon so that the content is as accessible as possible. To stay up to date on all things toolbox related, be sure to sign up for The Behavioral Toolbox's newsletter on LinkedIn. 

What exactly is Joint Attention? How does Joint Attention interact with Eye Contact? What does the literature say about these repertoires, and how does that coincide with self-reports of the aversive nature of eye contact from Autistic people? 

These have been a few of the questions rolling around in my head for some time. A few years ago, we briefly touched on this subject with my guest today, Dr. Francesca Degli Espinosa, but it was in the backdrop of a larger panel discussion at the 2022 Verbal Behavior Conference. 

Fast forward to 2023, I recently heard Francesca on Dr. Mary Barbera's show talk about Joint Attention in great detail, so I asked her to join me to extend the conversation. 

In this show, we cover:

  • What people mean when they use the term Joint Attention
  • How JA typically develops in infancy and beyond
  • Why 'attention' may not be an especially helpful term
  • Some of the neuroscience and eye tracking studies that have examined the development of eye contact in typically developing and Autistic populations
  • How to increase the value of looking at peoples' faces
  • Why eye contact should be thought of as a reinforcing consequence 
  • Some strategies to foster JA in the context of learner assent
  • The difficulty of integrating the findings of different literatures that publish research in the area of Autism
  • What she's talking about at this year's Stone Soup Conference (spoiler alert: She's going to go deep into this topic, and remember, save on your registration by using the promo code PODCAST)
  • The problem associated with teaching eye contact via the 'look at me' method

Here are some of the links to the many resources we discussed:

This podcast is brought to you by:

The Stone Soup Conference, which is taking place on October 20th. Use code PODCAST to save on your registration as well.

The University of Cincinnati Online. UC Online designed a Master of Education in Behavior Analysis program that is 100% online and asynchronous, meaning you log on when it works for you. Want to learn more? Go to online.uc.edu and click the “request info” button.

Behavior University. Their mission is to provide university quality professional development for the busy Behavior Analyst. Learn about their CEU offerings, including their brand new 8-hour Supervision Course, as well as their RBT offerings over at behavioruniversity.com/observations.

While I don't personally use TikTok, I am aware of the considerable influence it has across a range of topics. As many listeners can imagine, Autism is one of those topics that generates unfathomable amounts of content on the platform. 

Unlike other forms of medical and scientific dissemination, there are really no barriers to saying whatever one wants, not only on TikTok, but on any other internet-based media platforms, podcasts included of course. And as you might imagine, this brings with it lots of variability in terms of information accuracy.

Today's guests, Drs. Elisabeth Sheridan and Giacomo Vivanti, along with their colleagues Diego Aragon-Guevara and Grace Castle, took up the challenge of analyzing the accuracy of Autism-related content on TikTok. They published their results in a recent issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders in a paper titled: The Reach and Accuracy of Information on Autism on TikTok. 

In this interview, we discuss the audience scope on TikTok - spoiler alert: it's massive, why they decided to undertake this study, how they categorized the veracity of the TikTok videos they reviewed, what type of content creators had more and less accurate videos, what were some commonalities to the inaccurate videos they surveyed, and lots more. We also spent some time talking about the reaction to this paper, which has been considerable. 

Here are the links:

Thanks so much for supporting the BOP on Patreon! If you have friends and colleagues who'd also enjoy getting these ad-free episodes, let them know how they can join too!

This podcast is brought to you by:

  • The Michigan Autism Conference, which is taking place on October 11-13 in Kalamazoo, and online as well. We’ll hear more about this event later on in the show, but if you’re impatient like me, to go michiganautismconference.org, and use the code MAC10 to save $10 at checkout.
  • The Stone Soup Conference, which is taking place on October 20th. This is an amazing event, benefitting a great cause, all for a very reasonable price. Use code PODCAST to save on your registration as well.
  • Behavior University. Their mission is to provide university quality professional development for the busy Behavior Analyst. Learn about their CEU offerings, including their 8-hour Supervision Course, as well as their RBT offerings over at behavioruniversity.com/observations.

Dr. Callie Plattner joins me in Session 236 to talk about her work in the area of Motivational Interviewing. Callie is the Vice President of Clinical Operations at Mosaic Pediatric Therapy, and happens to be a fellow Auburn grad (War Eagle!). 

Now longtime listeners will know that we've covered MI on the podcast before. Back in Session 158, my friend Dr. Jim Murphy, who incidentally also happens to be an Auburn grad, discussed MI in the context of helping young adults reduce binge drinking and other substance-related problems. 

Also, my good friend and colleague, Dr. Paulie Gavoni, has been talking about MI for years. In fact, he's in the process of developing a course on this topic for the project that Paulie and I, along with our colleague Anika Costa, have been working on called The Behavioral Toolbox (brace yourselves for hearing a lot more about this coming up ;-). 

This background aside, in this episode, Callie gives an overview of what exactly Motivational Interviewing is, and defines the four "micro-skills" of asking Open-Ended questions, providing Affirmations, Reflecting, and Summarizing... the so-called "OARS" skills. 

Callie then discusses the research she's conducted with Dr. Cynthia Anderson, which will be coming out soon in Behavior Analysis in Practice, and more generally talks about how MI can be an effective tool to build rapport with stakeholders and possibly improve things like staff and parent adherence to behavior plans, therapy attendance, and so on. 

Links from this episode:

This podcast is brought to you by:

The Michigan Autism Conference, which is taking place on October 11-13 in Kalamazoo, and online as well. We’ll hear more about this event later on in the show, but if you’re impatient like me, to go michiganautismconference.org, and use the code MAC10 to save $10 at checkout.

The Stone Soup Conference, which is taking place on October 20th. Use code PODCAST to save on your registration as well.

The University of Cincinnati Online. UC Online designed a Master of Education in Behavior Analysis program that is 100% online and asynchronous, meaning you log on when it works for you. Want to learn more? Go to online.uc.edu and click the “request info” button.

Behavior University. Their mission is to provide university quality professional development for the busy Behavior Analyst. Learn about their CEU offerings, including their brand new 8-hour Supervision Course, as well as their RBT offerings over at behavioruniversity.com/observations.

Drs. Jane Howard and Gina Green join me today in a podcast that could've spanned several hours. In the time we had, we did manage to cover quite a bit of territory, including the following:

  • What Gina has been up to since retiring from the Association for Professional Behavior Analysts (spoiler alert: she's not hanging out at the beach reading mystery novels).
  • We talk about Jane's career in behavior analysis, including how she got into the field, some of her many, many accomplishments (including being recently honored as a Fellow of the Association for Behavior Analysis International), and what she is working on these days.
  • The basics of research design, including why some experimental questions lend themselves to certain designs over others. In this segment, we also cover group or between-subjects designs and meta analyses, which are relevant to understand when looking at the ABA outcome literature. 
  • The distinction of criterion vs. norm referenced assessments.
  • We discussed a number of initiatives and resources in the general realm of ABA treatment, including the current state of licensure, The ABA Coding Coalition, The Autism Commission on Quality, & CASP.
  • We talked at length about critical thinking, healthy skepticism, and epistemology in Behavior Analysis. 

In addition to these topics, we probably spent the most time talking about the empirical support for ABA interventions for individuals with Autism. In doing so, we discussed the large research projects that Jane and Gina led, what to make of some of the criticisms of this literature that is starting to gain some notoriety, and what research questions we still need answers to. 

Jane and Gina mentioned numerous studies and resources, and I've done my best to catalog them below:

This podcast is brought to you by:

    • The Michigan Autism Conference, which is taking place on October 11-13 in Kalamazoo, and online as well. We’ll hear more about this event later on in the show, but if you’re impatient like me, to go michiganautismconference.org, and use the code MAC10 to save $10 at checkout.
    • The Stone Soup Conference, which is taking place on October 20th. Use code PODCAST to save on your registration as well.
    • HRIC Recruiting. Barb Voss has been placing BCBAs in permanent positions throughout the US for just about a decade, and has been in the business more generally for 30 years. When you work with HRIC, you work directly with Barb, thereby accessing highly personalized service. So if you're about to graduate, you're looking for a change of pace, or you just want to know if the grass really is greener on the other side, head over to HRIColorado.com to schedule a confidential chat right away.
    • ACE Approved CEUs from .... Behavioral Observations. That's right, get your CEUs while driving, walking your dog, doing the dishes, or whatever else you might have going on, all while learning from your favorite podcast guests!

And we're back with another installment in the Inside JABA Series. In this episode, Dr. John Borrero and I are joined by Drs. Jessica Nastasi and Nicole Gravina. We discuss their recent JABA publication, Breaks and Productivity: An Exploratory Analysis (see Nastasi, Tassistro, and Gravina, 2023; and subscribe to JABA here if you want). 

Although this is a shorter episode by Inside JABA standards, we cover quite a bit of territory, including what motivated this research, the broader literature on breaks and productivity, the novel research design that was employed, and how the authors analyzed the data. 

And because this an Inside JABA Series podcast, we spent some time talking about why this study was published in JABA when other alternatives were available. 

In the coming days, this episode will be available for BACB CEU credit, so if you are interested in fulfilling your professional development needs while listening to the podcast, click here to learn more.  

Sea desde el sur de Sudamérica o desde Norte América, desde el Medio Oriente o desde una isla exótica, Carola Scolari porta en grande la bandera de la Perspectiva de las Circunstancias.

Este episodio se centra en el artículo de Dr. Patrick Friman publicado en el 2021 titulado No existe tal cosa como un niño malo: la Perspectiva de las Circunstancias de la conducta problemática.

Carola se tomó el trabajo de traducir el artículo con el permiso de Dr Friman y estará disponible a partir del momento que este episodio sea publicado. Les recomiendo encarecidamente que lo lean y por supuesto que se tomen el tiempo de escuchar este episodio de casi 2 horas donde hacemos una detallada revisión y Carola nos enriquece con sus ejemplos e interpretaciones. Estoy muy orgulloso de este episodio y de Carola. Espero que lo disfruten.

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Whether from the south of South America or from North America, from the Middle East or from an exotic island, Carola Scolari carries the banner of the Circumstances View.

This episode focuses on Dr. Patrick Friman's 2021 article titled There's no such thing as a bad boy: The Circumstances View of problem Behavior.

Carola took the trouble to translate the article with the permission of Dr. Friman and it will be available from the moment this episode is published. I strongly recommend that you read it and of course that you take the time to listen to this episode of almost 2 hours where we do a detailed review and Carola enriches us with her examples and interpretations. I am very proud of this episode and of Carola. I hope you enjoy it.