Ole Ivar Lovaas
Ole Ivar Løvaas was a Norwegian-American clinical psychologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is most well-known for his research on behavior modification in children, particularly with the use of strong punishments such as electric shocks. Lovaas would shout at, beat, and shock autistic children, sometimes with a cattle prod, to punish them for displaying autistic behavior. He encouraged the children's families to do the same at home. Lovaas used the same techniques in attempt modify behavior in homosexuals and gender-variant children, becoming one of the first researchers in the now discredited gay conversion therapy. His experiments in the use of punishment to modify the behavior of a feminine male child may have caused the child's later suicide.
Lovaas' claimed that his methods could make 47% of autistic children "indistinguishable from their peers". However, later research challenged this claim and found serious flaws in the study's methodology. Lovaas also claimed that his methods could make many homosexuals "indistinguishable from their peers", but this claim was later disproved. Lovaas' research has been adapted to produce a variety of applied behavioral analysis interventions for autistic children which call themselves the "Lovaas method", or "Early Intensive Behavior Intervention". While promoters of EIBI programs argue that they are highly effective in helping autistic children, much of the research used to justify these practices is flawed. One study recommended that all programs labeled as EIBI be regarded with skepticism.
Lovaas' techniques were not effective in modifying the behavior of gay and gender-variant children, but were effective in modifying the behavior of some autistic children. He is considered a pioneer of applied behavior analysis due to his development of discrete trial training. Despite their efficacy in reducing autistic behaviors, the ethics of his methods have been questioned. Neurodiversity advocates have argued that the goal of reducing autistic behavior is misguided, and that it amounts to forcing autistic people to mask their true personalities on behalf of a narrow conception of normality. While the use of aversives to modify behavior is highly controversial, a number of facilities continue to use them. The Judge Rotenberg Center was the last remaining facility to use electric shocks to modify behavior in people with disabilities before the practice was made illegal in 2020.
Lovaas received widespread acclaim for his work during his lifetime. In 2001, he was given the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Distinguished Career Award. He received the Edgar Doll Award from the 33rd Division of the American Psychological Association, the Lifetime Research Achievement Award from the 55th Division of the American Psychological Association, the Award for Effective Presentation of Behavior Analysis in the Mass Media by the Association for Behavior Analysis International, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the California Senate Award, which is an honorary doctorate. He was named a Fellow by Division 7 of the American Psychological Association and was given the Champion of Mental Health Award by Psychology Today. Lovaas also co-founded the Autism Society of America. His work influenced how autism is treated.
Personal life
Lovaas was born in Lier, Norway on May 8, 1927 to Hildur and Ernst Albert Lovaas. He had 2 siblings: an older sister named Nora and a younger brother named Hans Erik. He was a farm worker during the 1940s Nazi occupation of Norway. Lovaas often said that the nazis had sparked his interest in human behavior. After graduating high school, he served in the Norwegian Air force for 18 months. After the war, Lovaas moved to the United States for college and entered the field of psychology. Lovaas married Beryl Scoles in 1955, and together they had four children. He later divorced his wife and remarried.Education
Lovaas attended Hegg Elementary School in Lier from 1934 to 1941. He attended junior high school at Drammen Realskole until 1944, and then moved on to Drammen Latin School for high school, graduating in 1947. Lovaas attended Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, graduating in 1951 after just one year with his BA in sociology. He received his Masters of Science in clinical psychology from the University of Washington in 1955, and his Ph.D. in learning and clinical psychology from the same school 3 years later.Career
Early in his career, Lovaas worked at the Pinel foundation, which focused on Freudian psychoanalysis. After earning his PhD, Lovaas worked at the University of Washington’s Child Development Institute, where he first learned of behavior analysis. He began teaching at UCLA in 1961 in the Department of Psychology, where he performed research on children with autism spectrum disorder at the school’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. He started an early intervention clinic at UCLA called the UCLA Young Autism Project, which performed experimental interventions inside the children's homes. He was named Professor Emeritus in 1994. Lovaas also established the Lovaas Institute for Early Intervention, which performs interventions based on his research. Lovaas is considered a pioneer in the field of applied behavioral analysis for autism.Lovaas taught now prominent behaviorists, such as Robert Koegel, Laura Schreibman, Tristram Smith, John McEachin, Ron Leaf, Doreen Granpeesheh, Jacquie Wynn, and thousands of UCLA students who took his "Behavior Modification" course during his 50 years of teaching. He also co-founded what is today the Autism Society of America. Lovaas published hundreds of research articles and several books, and received many accolades for his research. He forced a number of school districts to adopt his programs. His work influenced how autism is treated.
Background
In 1961, at UCLA, Lovaas began experiments on language learning by working with Beth, a nonverbal 9-year old at Camarillo State Hospital. Between Lovaas and his students, they worked with Beth six hours a day, five days a week repeating vocabulary exercises using positive reinforcement, to teach Beth dozens of words. After months of the this intensive work, Beth began to violently bang her head against walls and furniture. On one occasion, after she hit her head against a metal edge, Lovaas spanked her. Although he was shocked and shamed at this own behavior, he realized that it had worked. He then considered negative reinforcement as a method with other children in his experiments.It was during the 1960s that he "pioneered autism-specific Applied Behaviour Analysis ". Then, based on ABA principles, Lovaas developed an "intensive scientific program" —the Early Intensive Behaviour Intervention which did not "require a specific time-commitment or programmatic format. The EIBI program "requires at least forty hours a week of structured one-on-one ABA work, which generally consists of proscriptive teaching methods to promote systematic incremental learning", In his landmark 1987 paper published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, he said that he said that after receiving forty hours of EIBI over a two-to-three year period" "47% of study participants in the control group" achieved "normal intellectual and educational functioning, with normal-range IQ scores" and "successful integration into a first grade mainstream school classroom." Prior to his 1987 study, people with autism, who were generally treated by psychiatrists, were often held in mental institutions. Lovaas' study provided an alternative. Following the publication of his 1987 paper, Lovaas ABA and EIBI became a popular option for "treating autism in North America".
In the late 1950s Lovaas, began experimenting with the use of aversive techniques, such as shouting at, hitting, and applying electric shocks to autistic children to discourage inappropriate behaviours. Lovass argued that autistic people should be exempt from the usual ethical considerations in regard to brutal forms of punishment. He would shout at, hit, and apply electric shocks to autistic children as punishment for autistic behaviors, and encouraged their families to do the same. The electric shocks were often applied with cattle prods.
In their 2006 article in The Behavior Analyst journal, the authors wrote that cultural values had begun to change starting in the 1970s, which influenced Applied Behavioral Analysis values, and was "particularly apparent in the history of the aversives controversy." Reform movements in education called for mainstreaming. Human rights movements included client rights and protections. By the 1980s, Positive Behavior Support was supplanting the aversive techniques in the wake of controversies over Lavaas' methods. The influence of cultural values on ABA is particularly apparent in the history of the aversives controversy.
Lovass argued that autistic people should be exempt from the usual ethical considerations in regard to brutal forms of punishment. He would shout at, hit, and apply electric shocks to autistic children as punishment for autistic behaviors, and encouraged their families to do the same. The electric shocks were often applied with cattle prods. Lovaas used a similar system of punishment and reward in attempt to cure homosexuality, as one of the early researchers of the now discredited gay conversion therapy. The use of aversives is now controversial, but remains in practice.
Matthew Israel, the founder of the Judge Rotenberg Center, referenced Lovaas' use of a cattle prod on autistic children as justification for his own use of the Graduated Electronic Decelerator to apply electric shock to children with disabilities. The graduated electronic decelerator, and the center's use of electric shocks as behavior modification, have since been banned.
Lovaas stated on multiple occasions that he did not see autistic people as fully human.
"You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense—they have hair, a nose and a mouth—but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person."
Lovaas lamented that he was not allowed to beat the children harder, and only gave up the use of corporal punishment when pressed to do so by the authorities.
Lovaas' claimed that his methods could make 47% of autistic children "indistinguishable from their peers", and that it could even accelerate their delayed development and raise their IQs. However, later research found fatal flaws in his methodology that invalidated the results. His studies were flawed on multiple levels, but in particular, Lovaas did not randomize his trials. This produced a quasi-experiment in which he was able to control the assignment of children to treatment groups. His manipulation to the study in this way may have been responsible for the observed effects. The true efficacy of his method cannot be determined since his studies cannot be repeated for ethical reasons. Regardless, these claims are often cited unskeptically by supporters of his methods. Lovaas also claimed that his methods could make many homosexuals "indistinguishable from their peers", but this claim was later disproved.
Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA)
Lovaas' research has been adapted to produce a variety of applied behavioral analysis interventions for autistic children which call themselves the "Lovaas method", or "Early Intensive Behavior Intervention". The use of aversives varies considerably between such programs. While promoters of EIBI argue that it is highly effective in helping autistic children, one study noted severe methodological flaws in the research used to justify these practices. The study also noted that defenders of EIBI typically refuse to acknowledge the existence of any flaws in the research, and recommended that EIBI programs be regarded with skepticism.Recent research has suggested a link between ABA and PTSD in autistic people. However, the main study that supported this link was criticized for its methodological and conceptual flaws.
Proponents of neurodiversity dispute the value of eliminating autistic behaviors. Michelle Dawson and Ari Ne'eman, among others, claim that it forces people with autism to mask their true personalities based on a narrow conception of normality. Some advocates have compared the practice of trying to normalize autistic behavior to gay conversion therapy.
In a 2009 case study, Edward K. Morris of the University of Kansas, said that ABA critics misrepresented ABA goals and the standard practices of behavior analysts.
Experiments on gender-variant children
In addition to his extensive work with autistic children, Lovaas co-authored four papers with George Rekers, a psychology professor at the same university, on children with atypical gender behaviors. The subject of the first of these studies, a 'feminine' young boy who was homosexual of 4 and half years old at the inception of treatment, committed suicide as an adult; his family attribute the suicide to this treatment. Following his suicide in 2010, the man's sister told the news that she read his journal, which described how he feared disclosing his sexual orientation due to the abuse he received from his father at Lovaas' instruction. His father would spank him as punishment for feminine-like behavior such as playing with dolls.Reviews of his contributions
In 2001, Lovaas was given the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Distinguished Career Award. He received the Edgar Doll Award from the 33rd Division of the American Psychological Association, the Lifetime Research Achievement Award from the 55th Division of the American Psychological Association, and the Award for Effective Presentation of Behavior Analysis in the Mass Media by the Association for Behavior Analysis International. He was also awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and the California Senate Award, which is an honorary doctorate. He was named a Fellow by Division 7 of the American Psychological Association and was given the Champion of Mental Health Award by Psychology Today.A 1965 article in Life magazine, which reported on his U.C.L.A centre, where he and his team worked with autistic children, described how children were physically punished for exhibiting unwanted behaviors.
According to his 2010 New York Times obituary, his methods, which included slapping children and in some cases using electric shocks, had been criticized early on.