APA Handbook of Behavior Analysis

This two-volume handbook continues the inductive translational approach to the science of behavior analysis by providing overview and in-depth chapters spanning the breadth of behavior analysis.

Behavior analysis emerged from the nonhuman laboratories of B. F. Skinner, Fred Keller, Nate Schoenfeld, Murray Sidman, James Dinsmoor, Richard Herrnstein, Nate Azrin, and others who pioneered experimental preparations designed to do one thing -- find orderly relations between environment and behavior. This bottom-up approach to a natural science of behavior yielded a set of behavioral principles that proved orderly and replicable across subjects, laboratories, and species.

By the 1960s, behavior analysts began translating these principles into interventions for institutionalized humans characterized by impoverished repertoires of adaptive behavior. When these interventions proved successful in replacing problem- with adaptive-behavior, the field of Applied Behavior Analysis was born.

Over the last 50 years the field of behavior analysis has grown substantially both in the number of practicing behavior analysts and the range of behavior to which behavioral principles have been applied. Today the laboratory study of basic principles of behavior continues to expand our understanding of behavior and to inform the treatment of disorders ranging from autism to substance abuse.

The present volumes continue this inductive translational approach to the science of behavior analysis by providing overview and in-depth chapters spanning the breadth of behavior analysis.

Volume I provides comprehensive coverage of the logic, clinical utility, and methods of single-case research designs. Chapters walk the reader through the design, data collection, and data analysis phases and are appropriate for students, researchers, and clinicians concerned with best practice. Volume I also provides an overview of the experimental analysis of behavior, and chapters reviewing some of the most important areas of contemporary laboratory research in behavior analysis. Topics covered include memory, attention, choice, behavioral neuroscience, and behavioral pharmacology.

Volume II includes 10 chapters illustrating how principles of behavior discovered in basic-science laboratories have provided insights on socially important human behavior ranging from the complex discriminations that underlie human language to disorders treated by clinical psychologists. The second section of Volume II includes 12 chapters, each devoted to a particular behavioral/developmental disorder (e.g., behavioral treatments of ADHD, autism) or to behavior of societal importance (e.g., effective college teaching, effective treatment of substance abuse). Each of these chapters provides a review of what works and where additional research is needed.

Gregory J. Madden, PhD, is a professor in the department of psychology at Utah State University, Logan. He earned a master's degree in behavior analysis from the University of North Texas is 1992 and a doctorate in psychology from West Virginia University in 1995. After completing a 3-year National Institutes of Health-funded postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Vermont, Dr. Madden held faculty appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the University of Kansas before joining the faculty at Utah State University.

Dr. Madden's research falls under the umbrella of behavioral economics, with an emphasis on impulsive choice and health decision making. He is the author or coauthor of many of the seminal scientific articles in the study of delayed-reward discounting and its relation to addictions. His research in this area is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (National Institute on Drug Abuse). He also holds grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The latter grants support behavioral economic approaches to influencing dietary choices made by children in school cafeterias.

Dr. Madden coedited, with Warren K. Bickel, Impulsivity: The Behavioral and Neurological Science of Discounting (APA) and currently serves as the editor of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, established in 1958 and the flagship journal of basic research in behavior analysis. Dr. Madden has served on a number of important decision-making bodies (e.g., the Executive Council of the Association for Behavior Analysis International) and is the recipient of several teaching honors, including being selected as the 2011 G. Stanley Hall lecturer for APA Division 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology).