WHERE WOULD ABA BE WITHOUT EAB? AN EXAMPLE OF TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH ON RECURRENCE OF OPERANT BEHAVIOR AND TREATMENT RELAPSE

Abstract

Treatment relapse may be defined as the recurrence of previously eliminated behavior or the failure of desired behavior to recur when the conditions of treatment change. Therefore, producing treatment effects that are durable through time and generalized across contexts is a critically important goal in applications of behavior analysis. However, traditional approaches within applied behavior analysis (ABA) in which technological development is divorced from basic findings in the experimental analysis of behavior (EAB) have yielded only modest progress towards this goal. Alternatively, translational research connecting basic science on the recurrence of operant behavior to applied problems of treatment relapse have led to improved understanding of the behavioral processes involved in relapse and technological innovations to reduce its probability and magnitude. This paper briefly contrasts the technology–driven and the translational approaches and then reviews the translational literature on recurrence and treatment relapse.