Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Case Study

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Autism Spectrum Disorder as compared to a toddler or adolescent. With that being said one must now look at the treatment options for someone with Autism Spectrum Disorder. There are a lot of options for treating Autism Spectrum disorder including behavioral interventions and medications. The behavioral intervention is the one that shows the most promise in treatment. In Abnormal Psychology (Whitbourne,2014) a man named Ivar Lovaas is spoken about. Lovaas was one of the first to use this behavioral method that will be discussed. Lovaas believed in teaching the young adolescents of their own shortcoming due to this disorder in the way of positive and negative reinforcement. Lovaas would scaled the two groups of nineteen students for bad behavior …show more content…

This was met with the positive reinforcement of positive speaking and pats on the back. After forty hours a week of this treatment for two years while the other group got 10 hours a week for two years. The group that got the 40 hours had an amazing performance increase of 20 IQ point as compared to the group that received ten hours of treatment a week. In this behavior treatment method in modern day, the person is brought into a clinician and using a lot of operant methods is taught the difference between good behavior, unique behaviors that the individual is not repeating or doing on a schedule, from the bad behavior, the repetitive behaviors that have burdened the life of the individual or impair the individual from learning or interacting with another individual. This treatment is not only for the individual with the disorder but at the same time the family and friends of the person with disorder are also brought in to help with the treatment and given counseling in order to help the immediate family with challenges they may be facing when dealing with this individual. This way of treatment shows a great deal of success because it is a very invasive way of treat that requires the

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