Ivar Lovaas, Autism Pioneer, Passes Away

It is a common misconception that Dr. Lovaas created Applied Behavior Analysis. He utilized the behavioral science set forth by earlier researches such as Watson, Pavlov, and Skinner to treat individuals with autism and developmental delays.

Lisa:

Lovaas didn’t create applied behavior analysis (ABA), the systematic application of behavioral contingencies to remediate socially significant behavior problems.  ABA was young in the 1960s when Lovaas was doing his early work with autism, but ABA certainly already existed as a practice and field.  

Lovaas’s contribution was to extend the focused pioneering work of Mont Wolf, Todd Risley, Charles Ferster, Sid Bijou, Don Baer, and others to create a comprehensive, science-based approach to the treatment of autism.  Remember, that was a time when autism was still often called  ”childhood schizophrenia,” blamed on bad parenting, and considered generally intractable.  Lovaas and his colleagues in ABA were convinced that the systematic application of scientifically demonstrated principles of behavior would lead to the most effective treatments.  In this they were absolutely correct, and continue to be.  All protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, no other treatment for autism can approach the demonstrated effectiveness of ABA and commitment to scientific validity of its practitioners.  All of this has led to untold benefits to untold numbers of people whose lives have the added dignity that comes from increased self-sufficiency.   

The loss of Lovaas himself is an occasion for great sadness among his friends and colleagues.  But his contributions live on in his works and the works of his students.  Those of us who came after aspire to emulate his model and thus perhaps contribute even a fraction of what he did to helping those with autism achieve greater independence and dignity than was possible before Lovaas’s work showed how it could done. 

James T. Todd  

Dr Lovaas, unlike so many involved with autism issues, actually helped many, many autistic children. His work and those who studied under him have helped many more. My severely autistic son has benefited from Dr. Lovaas work. Autistic children have lost a true friend.

http://autisminnb.blogspot.com/2010/08/dr-o-ivar-lovaas-true-friend-of.html

I am one of the many students and, then colleagues, whose professional lives were profoundly influenced by the teachings and methods developed and refined by Ivar. Those of us “Lovaas Babies,” who have spread throughout the country owe a debt of gratitude to him. For me, it wasn’t so much about learning about treating autism, that was a given. It was more about learning how to ask and try to answer scientific questions and never to be afraid to say “I don’t know.” He was an individual whose efforts spurred controversy, research, and useful discussions about treatment and empirical evidence for decades to come.

am a bit confused: thought Skinner et al developed behaviorism as a concept and approach, but that Lovaas specifically developed ABA (applied behavioral analysis) as a tool for treating autism and other developmental challenges.

no doubt that Lovaas stood on the shoulders of giants, as it were – but what, if not ABA, was his special addition to the field?

Lisa

Lisa:

Here is an attempt to answer your inquiry. It’s long–but, because we have to cover a nearly 100 years of history, we’ll need some context and detail. If all you want is a definition of Applied Behavior Analysis (aka ABA) and Lovaas’s part in it, skip to the third paragraph and read to the end. Otherwise, we’ll start with what “behaviorism” is to put everything into context.

Behaviorism as a specific philosophy of science was initially developed by John B. Watson in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Watson’s main goal was to treat behavior objectively, using the techniques of natural science. The behavior of organisms was a naturally occurring outcome of their genetic and interactional histories. A complete account of behavior could be found in a complete analysis of those factors. Watson never fully developed many critical aspects of his behaviorism before he went into a career in advertising, only hinting at greater sophistication within the approach. Watson’s devotion to Pavlovian conditioning and qualified rejection of Edward Thorndike’s Law of Effect (i.e., the effects of rewards and punishments) left his formulation without the behavioral principles necessary to give a remotely adequate account of most complex behavior. His equivocation about certain metaphysical aspects of his theory, especially the analysis of private behavior such as thinking, left most seeing his behaviorism as being hopelessly mechanistic and superficial despite there being greater depth than is apparent on first reading. There are others associated with early behaviorism, such as Albert Weiss and Knight Dunlap, whose ideas were in some ways more completely developed than Watson’s. They lacked his rhetorical verve, and their views now come to us largely as historical sidelights. In considering Watson’s contributions to psychology it is best to entirely ignore the obligatory and superficial paragraph we see in the first chapter of introductory psychology textbooks and even most upper-level histories of psychology. Rather, his real contributions were to help establish psychology as an academic discipline distinct from philosophy and biology, make objective behavior data the standard across psychology (even in those areas such as cognitive psychology which don’t extend the objectivity to theorizing), and help establish Pavlovian conditioning as the foundation of treatment for anxiety disorders.

Starting in the 1920s, and continuing up until his death in 1990, B.F. Skinner extended and elaborated Watson’s formulation giving us the “radical behaviorism” we associate with him today. (”Radical” here means, “root” or “foundational,” not “extreme.” ) Basically, Skinner’s approach takes all behavior, including that part of behavior which is private to the individual such as thinking, feeling, and dreaming, and treats it as objective real events existing in time and space. (Yes, thinking, feeling, and dreaming are within the scope of Skinner’s system–no matter what the introductory texts say). In this, Skinner agrees with Watson: behavior is what arises when an organism’s genetic and environmental histories meet with current events. The analysis of behavior consists of finding those events in the history of the organism that relate in lawful ways to present behavior. Skinner, of course, emphasized the importance of “operant conditioning,” essentially a much more sophisticated version of Thorndike’s Law of Effect. With both Pavlovian and operant conditioning available, surprising amounts of behavior of organisms could be described, predicted, and controlled with a precision typically associated with the “hard sciences.” The huge variability in behavior data previously coming from studies with mazes and other techniques was transformed into very smooth and regular curves demonstrating the reality of “laws of behavior.” Nowadays, we associate Skinner with work with rats and pigeons, especially in the area of “schedules of reinforcement,” in which different patterns of rewards produce important behavioral effects. From this formulation, tens of thousands of experiments on the basic principles of behavior have come. Skinner’s three-term contingency, popularly conceived and simplified into “antecedent-behavior-consequence” is an analytic tool of extraordinary power–especially in its more technically sophisticated versions. The variables responsible for virtually any specifically definable incident of behavior can be discovered using the analysis. It is also highly effective means of establishing new behavior as well. Reinforce the needed behavior under specified conditions, and you are likely to get more of it. (Sometimes that’s easier said than done!) Of course, we can’t forget Skinner’s cultural contributions, imploring us to realize with books like the much misunderstood Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), and essential Science and Human Behavior (1953) that many of the problems we face as a society come from our own behavior. To solve those problems, an effective science of behavior is necessary. For a fuller account of Skinner, I’d recommend starting with his book “Science and Human Behavior, available on the B.F. Skinner Foundation website. And, for a more technical but still largely accessible view, read the articles in the November 1992 special issue of the American Psychologist. Reading Skinner’s “best of” collection, Cumulative Record would be an excellent next step.

As for Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), Lovaas didn’t invent that. It might be argued that Skinner invented it, at least conceptually, in his 1948 novel Walden Two. Lovaas’s special contribution was showing that it is possible, with the comprehensive and intensive application of learning theory principles, to effectively treat autism as a whole in a substantial number of individuals–with important improvements in those who did not see the full benefits. By “effectively” and “substantial” we mean that roughly half the children tested in the normal range on certain standard tests. In practical terms we can think of this as being able to attend school without special supports. Before Lovaas did this, there was good scientific evidence showing that ABA could be used effectively with specific aspects of autism. Whether it was possible, by creating a comprehensive program of ABA interventions, to effectively treat autism as a whole, had not been established until Lovaas. Now, the term ABA is often misunderstood to mean only what Lovaas did–his “discrete-trial therapy” for instance–but “ABA” really means more. What is ABA? Freely borrowing from something I wrote for another purpose, we can define ABA as:

“The systematic use of scientifically established principles of learning, behavioral conditioning techniques, and related environmental modifications to create demonstrably effective and humane outcome-based therapies with the primary goal of establishing and enhancing socially important functional independent living skills.”

In practice, an applied behavior analysis uses techniques based on learning theory to shape important new behaviors in individuals with specific behavioral excesses and deficits. Interventions conducted by applied behavior analysts typically include the following components:

• A data-based functional analysis of the conditions responsible for the problem behavior.
• Specific and verifiable treatment goals and objectives.
• A well-defined plan using reinforcement theory principles to meet the goals and objectives.
• Ongoing data collection to show that the intervention was actually responsible for the treatment gains.
• A plan to ensure the generalization and maintenance of treatment gains.
• Measures to ensure the social validity of the treatment goals and objectives, and to ensure that all those affected by the treatment can contribute substantially and constructively to all its elements to the best of their abilities.

Eliminating self-injury and teaching academic skills to children with autism, re-establishing independent living skills in people with brain injuries, training appropriate toileting in children with enuresis, improving medical compliance in people with illnesses, establishing effective study habits in at-risk school children, reducing repetitive habits such as nail biting and trichtotillamania, and reinforcing appropriate social behavior in people with social skills deficits are illustrative of, but do not exhaust, the range of behavior issues addressed by applied behavior analysts. There is, of course, and alphabet soup of things that are really, fundamentally, ABA or derived from it: Discrete Trial Training (DTT), Pivotal Response Training (PRT), Early Intensive Behavioral Intervention (EIBI), the Denver Model, Positive Behavior Support (PBS), and many more. A troubling development lately are efforts by the promoters of some of these things to try to pass them off as not being ABA, or largely based on ABA, but as something completely different. Look under the hood. If it is at all effective with autism, you’ll find some kind of contingency management in operation.

ABA still fairly young when Lovaas first used it to try to create a comprehensive treatment for autism in the 1960s. But, prior to Lovaas, starting in the 1950s, work recognizable as ABA had been applied to all kinds of behavior problems, typically in people with development disabilities and schizophrenia, generally in laboratory and institutional settings. Large programs devoted to applied behavior analysis, such as the Department of Human Development and Family Life (HDFL) at the University of Kansas, were being established in the 1960s. (HDFL is now the Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences). The Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis was founded in 1968, almost 20 years before Lovaas published his landmark 1987 study, “Behavioral Treatment and Normal Educational and Intellectual Functioning in Young Autistic Children” in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Thus, unlike virtually all of the “treatments” for autism we hear about, ABA is not a new “model” waiting around for someone to do a study to figure out if it works at all. ABA interventions for specific behavior problems were based directly on principles discovered and proven in the behavior laboratory. Comprehensive ABA interventions are made from more focused treatments already shown to work. ABA is not waiting to get into the scientific journals; it comes from the scientific journals. The typical question was not whether the intervention will work–that is usually the easy part–but can it be effectively applied in the real world with all the complications that the real world brings? Names associated with these early efforts include Paul Fuller, Nathan Azrin, Teodoro Ayllon, Donald Baer, Sidney Bijou, Todd Risley, Jack Michael, Montrose Wolf, Charles Ferster, Kurt Salzinger, Israel Goldiamond, and many more. Those who know a little bit of history will recall the first systematic effort to apply ABA to autism by Mont Wolf, Todd Risley, and Hayden Mees: “Application of Operant Conditioning Principles to the Behaviour Problems of an Autistic Child” published in the March 1964 edition of Behaviour Research and Therapy. I think a good place to find a comprehensive modern view of ABA is Cooper, Heward, and Heron’s excellent textbook Applied Behavior Analysis. Some elements of ABA are also covered in the aforementioned November 1992 issue of the American Psychologist. However, ABA is a huge field with a history going back, if we include the basic research, well over 100 years. Thus, it is impossible for any single book to capture it all.

I hope this answers your question. I am sorry I didn’t have enough time to write a shorter answer.

Jim

James T. Todd, Ph.D.
Eastern Michigan University

Hi Lisa,

“Over time, Lovaas and his followers found that aversive approaches to education were less effective than “reinforcement” (rewards) for work well done.”

I think that this is the most important point.

I try to remember this all the time, but don’t always succeed…

W&N

Lisa,
I just wanted to add an additional comment to Jim Todd’s detailed and thorough reply, however I might add from my understanding is that Lovaas’ significant contribution (which was probably an expansion of the applied research already being done at the University of Washington (where he did Post-doctoral work), University of Kansas and other programs in the late 50’s and early 60’s, as was previously noted) was perhaps the finding by the UCLA group that it was the early (toddler/early preschool) and intensive (40 hrs or round the clock including generalization) application of ABA in a comprehensive and targeted educational program that had significance in developing adaptive replacement repertoires early and thus amending the trajectory of “infantile autism” or “childhood schizophrenia”, in some cases to achieve developmental outcomes indistinguishable from those of typical peers. From my reading, earlier work by the UCLA group found that application of ABA to older students with autism was efficacious, but gains tended not to maintain at the same level nor to achieve the optimal outcomes potentially available when the intervention started at the ages of 2-3.

Thank you Jim Todd, you seem to be everywhere where a misconception needs to be resolved.

Lisa, thank you for opening up for such contributions.

thanks, all, for your contributions. this is a complex topic, and as a writer/parent I am not deeply versed in the history of psychology. as I’m sure you (readers) are aware, the experience most of us have with ABA and behaviorism is day-to-day rather than historical. your depth of knowledge and willingness to share is much appreciated!

Lisa