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History

Ole Ivar Lovaas

Ole Ivar Lovaas is considered the grandfather of Applied Behavior Analysis. Lovaas devoted nearly a half a century to groundbreaking research and practice aimed at improving the lives of children with autism and their families. In 1965 Lovaas published a series of articles that transformed Autism therapy. The first two articles presented his system for coding behaviors during direct observations and a pioneering investigation of antecedents and consequences that maintained a problem behavior, a forerunner of what is now called experimental functional analysis. The subsequent articles built upon this methodology and reported the first demonstration of an effective way to teach nonverbal children to speak, a study on establishing social (secondary) reinforcers, a procedure for teaching children to imitate, and several studies on interventions to reduce life-threatening self-injury and aggression. Lovaas was cited in his early career to use low dosages of electroshock therapy to children with extreme self injurious behavior . In 1973, Lovaas published a long-term follow-up for ABA intervention and was dismayed to find that most of the subjects had reverted back to their pre-intervention behaviors. After these findings, Lovaas and his colleagues proposed several ways to improve outcomes such as starting intervention during the children’s preschool years instead of later in childhood or adolescence, involving parents in the intervention, and implementing the intervention in the family home rather than an institutional setting. Subsequent articles like 1987 ‘‘Behavioral Treatment and Normal Educational and Intellectual Functioning in Young Autistic Children,’’ and reinforce this proposal of early and intensive intervention paired with continual therapy yields the most effective results for children with Autism . Lovaas highly believed the support and involvement in parents applying therapy at home contributed to a higher success rate. Lovaas dedicated his life to the study of Autism and was a strong advocate for people with Autism even founding what is today the Autism Society of America .