CHAPTER 17SEVERE AGGRESSIVE & SELF

DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR: MENTALISTIC ATTRIBUTION

STEVE HOLBURN

TINA DASSCALDWELL COLLEGE

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).

INTRODUCTION

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.

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.

MENTALISM

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.

BEHAVIORISM

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.

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?

MENTALISTIC ACCOUNTS

Lazy Angry

Low self-esteem

Poor motivation Depressed

Tired

HYPOTHETICAL CONSTRUCTIONS

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?

HYPOTHETICAL CONSTRUCTION

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 returnedResults: 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)

STAFF ATTRIBUTE PROBLEM BEHAVIORS TO MENTALISTIC

ATTRIBUTIONS.

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?

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.

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

WHY MENTALISM?

INNER CAUSAL TRAPSCIRCULAR REASONING

Conclusion

Premises

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

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 diff erent textures.

These techniques claim to repair defective nervous system integration and neural pathways, but only behavior is measured before and after treatment.

CIRCULAR REASONING

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)

If behavior originates inside the person it must somehow exit.

THE NEED TO RELEASE

Build up inside

Blow up/ go offVenting

Acting out

Get it out of the

system

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

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.

THE NEED TO RELEASE

FC is amazing because it has surpassed all other junk science fads, affecting families, schools, universities, the law, and even the arts. --Brian J. Gorman

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 eff orts if they are viewed as entities that reside in people.

Attention should be on correcting behavior-environment interactions.

REIFICATION

Environmental accounts of problem behavior do not deny the existence of anxiety and rage in aff ecting 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.

CONCLUSION

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 assesment in 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 Appl Behav 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.

 

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 Appl Behav 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.