>Is applied behavioral therapy a genuine cure? <To get this out of the way, absolutely not.The reason why it's so popular is that people think that it increases autism score and language as oppossed to vaguely or broadly defined "social skills". It's a whole can of worms but the science is unequivicably against this.
Firstly, behaviorist theory fails on a very basic level, as even in simple tasks like choosing one ball over the other or motivation to do chores, at the very least, rely more on observational learning, than reward or punishment, to be taught (Fiorito 1995, Rogoff 2024) with the former coming at the cost of latter, amd vice versa. I would go further to hypothesize that behavior doesn't exist, in the sense that there is no direct connection between an organism's activity and stimuli, and such activity is necessarily more sensitive to internal qualities such as language and emotion even in an extremely specific case like "little albert"; Albeit, I will not prejudice against the contrary theory, until further evidence is given.
This is why 90% of ABA therapists only work on very young children (18-36 months), who have severe language or intellectual problems, and usually for less than 20 hours a week for a year (or about 1,120 rendered hours total) using the Early Start Denver Model (Or ESDM); Even in a case similar to this, there was no long term improvements in either verbal or nonverbal autism score compared to a group which had almost no ABA whatsoever. The same is probably true for language as a lot of items on the communication section of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale are language based. The results of general "social skills" were mixed (Estes 2015). As well the original sample was randomized(Cidav 2017), so the results here are more relevant than, say, Lovaas's 1987 study, which is very widely used.
And yes, you do have to prove that it does something to this calibur considering that it has been suggested to cause PTSD (Kupferstein 2018) and prompt dependence (Milley 2012). It's already a problem even in adults who are 'high-functioning' (Wilson 2014) who probably haven't recieved ABA specifically, so it could actually be even worse for those with more severe problems.
As well, it is questionable whether or not autistic children have social communicative deficits period (Li 2023). Nonverbal autistic people, likewise, must be presumed to have competence, as they at least have an acceptable performance autism score (Courchesne 2015), but are also have decent language skills, as evident by their literacy (Jaswal 2024)
And finally, to steelman, I will presume that behaviorists apply some compromised version of Relational Frame Theory (RFT) instead of trying making the child more "sociable" or getting rid of "problem behaviors". In a nutshell RFT is the theory that language is arbituary, as opposed to having a pre-existing mental concept, and is, ultimately built from simpler "behaviors"; While not direcrly calling for therapy, it is why ESDM exists, as well as why some behavioral elements can be found in programs like JASPER and TEAACH. RFT, however, is potentially harmful in that it can lead to people teaching an extremely simplified simulation of language as opposed to the actual thing, demonstrated by the failure to consider that there are at least some pre-linguistic cognitive processes, which can be presumed to be articulated later in life (Starr 2013, Kanakogi, 2022)
Research into this area of psychology is very complex, but when I bring up studies like this, and put the burden of evidence on myself people are like "B- But MUH LIVED EXPERIENCE" as if science cares that whether or not you're an autistic mother of autistic children, working with autistic children; It's funny that people say this when the point of behavioral psychology is to be as objective as possible (Albeit, the behaviorists have failed miserably in this respect).
Citations
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