Introduction

1. Chapter 17Severe Aggressive & Self Destructive behavior: Mentalistic Attribution Steve HolburnTina Dasscaldwell college

2. Introduction • What is Mentalistic attribution? For years, practitioners have used behavioral assessments strategies that suggest an environmental cause of a behavior to formulate an effective treatment package. Research has been conducted to outline assessments for use in assessing the environmental cause of a behavior, for example naturalistic observation ( Repp, Felce, & Barton 1988) and pretreatment variable manipulation(Iwata et. al, 1982).

3. mentalism Many people treat behavior under the notion that behavior stems from an inner source rather than developing new behaviors-environment relationships. This is called mentalistic attribution. In this presentation, we will discuss mentalistic formulations and how these formulation has fostered unhelpful strategies in addressing serious aggressive and problem behaviors.

4. mentalism • The belief that behavior originates from something that happens inside of us, such as a thought, feeling, or impulse, with the resulting behavior being an expression of the mind, from which that thought, feeling or impulse emanated. (Day, 1983; Skinner, 1953.1974). • “Everything we think, do and feel is generated by what happens inside us” (Glasser, 1984, p.1) • Something inside the individual has to be changed before the behavior can change. • The person is responsible for their own actions.

5. Behaviorism • Radical behaviorism (Skinner 1953,1974) is the anti-thesis of mentalism • Nothing in radical behaviorism is mental. • Skinner (1986) “In a given episode the environment acts upon the organism, something happens inside, the organism then acts upon the environment, and certain consequences follow” (p.716) • Both behavior and environment act and change each other continually.

6. Mentalisticaccounts • A man in New Mexico, Raphael, displayed poor health as a result of ruminating food. Halburn used a simple food-satiation procedure (Jackson et. al., 1975; Rast et. al,1981) • Results: rapidly restored health and prior robust experience. • Although Halburn used a procedure that was based on research and science, the staff at the institute believed his improvement was because Halburn got rid of empacho which is associated with witchcraft where one person places a hex on the other.

7. Mentalistic accounts • Glasser (1984) • “Nothing we do is caused by what happens outside of us. If we believe that what we do is caused by forces outside of us, we are acting like dead machines, not living people” (p. 1) • World Trade Center – terrorist behavior is satisfying a need for power, and power is said to be equivalent to external control(Glasser, 2001) • Confusing: Did the terrorist fall victim to their own harmful inner need for power or whether the attacks had a true external factor?

8. Hypothetical constructions Lazy Angry Low self-esteem Poor motivation Depressed Tired

9. Hypothetical Construction • What is the problem with these construction? • They do not exist as entities, and as such cannot cause anything. (CITE) If a parent claims their child is lazy, and that’s why he is not engaged in his full day schedule, how do you provide a rationale?

10. Staff attribute problem behaviors to mentalistic attributions. • Some researchers suggest that mentalistic attributions are associated with how staff respond to problem behavior (Hastings, 1997; Remington and Hopper,1995). • Survey was handed out to direct staff at the psychiatric hospital in Staten Island, New York. • N=63, 49 surveys returned • Results: 40 out of 42 respondents checked one or more mentalistic attribution. • McDonell (1997): interviewed 81 direct support staff and concluded that “a large proportion of staff also classified the causes of incidents in terms of dispositional characteristics of the residents rather than the situational factors” (p.162)

11. Why mentalism? • Antecedents are hard to detect. • Persons with developmental disabilities can’t articulate well enough what they are experiencing and what occasioned the behaviors. • Antecedent  Behavior Consequence • What do you think happens when the antecedent is hard to detect or identify? Or what if we rely on reports by others, without direct observation of the behaviors?

12. Why Mentalism? • Research • Gardner, Karan, and Cole (1984) Bad night’s sleep increased the likelihood that certain immediate stimuli would give rise to aggression in the work environment.

13. Why mentalism? • Deficits in processing information or forming cognitive representations result in aggression (Guerra, Nucci and Huessman, 1994) • Dodge (1986) claimed aggression is caused by deficits in processing social information at any or all of these steps: 1. Encoding social cues 2. Representation and interpretation of cues 3. Response search 4. Response decision 5. Enactment

14. Inner causal trapsCircular Reasoning Conclusion Premises

15. Circular Reasoning Source of problem behavior is believed to be inside an individual Practitioner applies intervention to alter behavior Intervention is considered weak because this “inner phenomenon” was not confirmed Circular Reasoning

16. Circular Reasoning • Sensory Integration therapy The therapy consists of stimulating multiple senses through techniques such as deep physical pressure, brushing and rubbing with objects of different textures. These techniques claim to repair defective nervous system integration and neural pathways, but only behavior is measured before and after treatment.

17. Circular reasoning “The main problem with such approaches is that any internal mechanism can be posited as causal, and the hypothesis can appear valid with the pseudoconfirmation. Employing techniques based on such rationales might seem harmless, but it diverts time and resources from more fruitful methods of inquiry and delays access to effective treatment” (p. 286)

18. The need to release If behavior originates inside the person it must somehow exit. Build up inside Acting out Blow up/ go off Venting Get it out of the system

19. The need to release • The problem with this approach is that if the conditions responsible for the behavior are not modified, it is likely that the person will continued to act out in the same manner, or at best continued to practice tension-reduction techniques. • If aggression is a way of expressing anger, one might seek anger management and practice reduction techniques. • These techniques divert attention from establishing operations and environmental variables that maintain that behavior. • Exorcism

20. The need to release People are prisoners trapped in their body and this resulted in Facilitated Communication (FC) . FC claimed that people with autism can learn to type messages. Perceives the person as a capable learner and claims that it has released the person from silence and a body that couldn’t be controlled.

21. Reification • When a team of people are unable to get a behavior under control, it is common to speculate about an inner cause and to refer a person to a specialist outside the team to confirm suspicions. • Is present when severe problem behavior is linked to a syndrome for example, the spoiled child syndrome. • These causes misguides treatment efforts if they are viewed as entities that reside in people. • Attention should be on correcting behavior-environment interactions.

22. Conclusion Environmental accounts of problem behavior do not deny the existence of anxiety and rage in affecting behavior, but they maintain that the internal state originates in the environment. Psudoexplanations discourage functional analysis of behavior and make people vulnerable to unnecessary therapies, medications and in some cases even surgeries. A more productive position will guide the search to a person’s interaction with the environment, where a solution can be found.

23. references Day, W. (1983). On the Difference between Radical and Methodological Behaviorism. Behaviorism, 11(1), 89-102. Dodge, K. A. (1986). A Social Information-Processing Model of Social Competence in Children. Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology, 18, 77-125. Gardner, W., Karan, O., & Cole, C. (1984). Assessment of setting events influencing functional capacities of mentally retarded adults with behavior difficulties.In A.S Halpern &M. J.Fuhrer(Eds.),Functional assesmentin rehabilitation.(pp.171- 185).Baltimore:Brookes. Guerra,N.G.,Nucci,L.,&Huesmann(994).Moral cognition and childhood aggression. In R.Huesmann(Ed.),Aggressive Behavior:Current perspective(pp.13-33).New York:Plenum. Iwata, B. A., Dorsey, M. F., Slifer, K. J., Bauman, K. E., & Richman, G. S. (1994). Toward a functional analysis of self-injury. J ApplBehav Anal, 27(2), 197-209. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1994.27-197  Jackson, G. M., Johnson, C. R., Ackron, G. S., & Crowley, R. (1975). Food Satiation as a Procedure to Decelerate Vomiting. American Journal of Mental Deficiency, 80(2), 223-227.

24. REFERENCES Jacobson, J. W., Foxx, R. M., & Mulick, J. A. (2005). Controversial therapies for developmental disabilities : fad, fashion, and science in professional practice. Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum Associates. Repp, A. C., Felce, D., & Barton, L. E. (1988). Basing the treatment of stereotypic and self-injurious behaviors on hypotheses of their causes. J ApplBehav Anal, 21(3), 281-289. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1988.21-281 Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. New York,: Macmillan. Skinner, B. F. (1974). About behaviorism ([1st ed.). New York,: Knopf; distributed by Random House. Skinner,B.F.(1986).Is it behaviorism?The behavioral and brain sciences,9,716.