Effects of therapist gender and type of attention on assessment and treatment of attention-maintained destructive behavior

Adult attention frequently serves as a maintaining variable for problem beh avior (Iwata rt al., 1994). In addition, different aspects of attention suc h as the content of a statement or the person delivering the attention may moderate the rats of problem behavior and potentially affect treatment outc ome (Fisher, Ninness, Piazza, & Owen-DeSchryver, 1996). In the current stud y, we examined the effects of two variables hypothesized to affect the rate of attention-maintained aggression in an adolescent female with profound m ental retardation: gender of therapist and type of attention (physical vers us verbal). The initial study examined the results of functional analyses c onducted with therapists of different genders. An analysis was then conduct ed to determine the main and interaction effects of therapist gender and ty pe of attention on the effectiveness of noncontingent reinforcement. The re sults indicate that each variable affected the rate of problem behavior (i. e., main effects) and that the two variables combined to produce an even gr eater effect (i.e., interaction effect) for males than for females. Next, w e examined the impact of therapist gender on the effectiveness of an altern ative intervention (functional communication training with extinction). The results support the initial hypotheses that therapist gender impacted both assessment and intervention results for this adolescent female. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.