Jonathan Tarbox – Acceptance and Commitment Training: Self-Care and Compassion in Applied Behavior Analytic Service and Delivery
About the presentation:
Careers in applied behavior analysis (ABA) can be simultaneously incredibly rewarding and
incredibly challenging. Behavior analysts are passionate about what we do and this can
contribute to the stress and burnout that many of us struggle with. The organizational behavior
management literature is replete with evidence-based practices for creating and maintaining
excellent job performance but relatively little research has been done on behavioral
approaches to addressing stress and burnout. Of course, stress and burnout are not mental
problems, they involve things we do. That is, stress and burnout involve overt and covert
behavior-environment relations, so the science of behavior analysis should have something to
say about them. Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) is a behavior analytic training
approach that has research support for improving resilience in other professions and is just now
being implemented for this purpose inside of mainstream ABA practice. Although ACT was
originally developed for use by clinical psychologists, it has broadened substantially and is now
commonly practiced by many disciplines outside of psychology. Implementing ACT does not
require psychotherapy and many of the ACT-based strategies for self-care in the practice of ABA
require no specialized training. This presentation will describe small self-care changes that we
can put into practice in our daily lives in order to help us thrive while we struggle in our work
lives.
Learning Objectives
Participants will be able to:
- Describe how to implement one values-based self-care procedure for behavior analysts
- Describe how to implement one self-compassion procedure for behavior analysts
- Provide how to implement one acceptance-based self-care procedure for behavior analysts
About the presenter:
Dr. Jonathan Tarbox is the Program Director of the Master of Science in Applied Behavior
Analysis program at the University of Southern California, as well as Director of Research at
FirstSteps for Kids. Dr. Tarbox is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Behavior Analysis in
Practice and serves on the editorial boards of several scientific journals related to autism and
behavior analysis. He has published four books on autism treatment, is the Series Editor of the
Elsevier book series Critical Specialties in Treating Autism and Other Behavioral Challenges, and
an author of well over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters in scientific texts. His
research focuses on behavioral interventions for teaching complex skills to individuals with
autism and applications of Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) inside of applied
behavior analysis.