The ABA & OT Podcast #14: Picking, Pulling, Biting: Addressing Habitual Behaviors

Habitual behaviors can be interruptive on a student's development. In this episode, Mandy and Adito discuss the case of Matt's detrimental nail biting and skin picking and the effective strategies they use to reverse it.  

Mandy shares her own struggles with nail-biting and her own personal strategies to extinguish this behavior. Mandy and Aditi also dive into the deeper reasons behind these automatic behaviors and how the differences between attention-maintained behaviors, habits, or something else can modify the best approach to replace them. 

HIGHLIGHTS

03:57 Shoutout to Dr. Rick Kubina

06:01 Matthew's nail picking: Strategies to address nail biting 

16:53 Mandy's strategies for nail-biting habit reversal

30:28 Applying reinforcement and environmental strategies

GLOSSARY

Comprehensive model of behavioral management - Has 5 categories: sensory, cognitive, affective (emotional), motor, and place and environment. 

Automatic escape maintained behavior - Any behavior that primarily happens to avoid, delay, or end something unpleasant. Over time, the behavior is maintained or persists because it was effective at escaping or avoiding the unpleasant thing in the environment.

RESOURCES

Join our The ABA and OT Podcast Facebook Group to get access to the following resources:

Facebook group link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/397478901376425

EXTERNAL RESOURCES

Aditi's Website

QUOTES

09:29 "We're talking about, in this episode, about behavior that is automatically maintained or habitual in nature which means they're not doing it for someone's attention or to get out of demands but it is repetitive and embedded behavior that the individual's no longer aware of."

12:28 "When you are engaging that behavior, it stops you thinking about something unpleasant for periods of time. That's one. So a behavior analyst would call automatic escape maintained behavior."

24:29 "If a behavior is not reinforced it will extinguish so having someone do something else that is a replacement behavior can result in extinction of that original behavior."

37:33 "His behavior was very much attention-maintained. So yeah, that's another thing to look at. Is the behavior maintained by something else occurring in the environment, not just habit."

38:43 "You allow the student to engage in a behavior and you provide different consequences so you run sessions of it being reinforced with escape from a demand or reinforced with attention. Or the student is just left on their own and you look at the rates of that behavior in that session time and you see where the rates are at their highest."