Lovaas O I, Smith T
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles 90024-1563.
J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry. 1989 Mar;20(1):17-29. doi: 10.1016/0005-7916(89)90004-9.
Although behavioral treatment is the most effective intervention currently available for autistic children, there have been no attempts to present a comprehensive behavioral theory of autistic children since Ferster (1961). The present paper is intended to fill this gap. Behavioral work is distinguished from traditional work with autistic children in three ways: (a) it focuses on specific behaviors rather than on the diagnostic entity of autism; (b) it emphasizes the immediate environment rather than etiology or early history; and (c) research is inductive rather than hypothetico-deductive. The behavioral theory derived from such work has four tenets: (a) autistic children's behaviors are consistent with laws of learning derived from the behavior of other organisms; (b) autistic children have many separate behavioral difficulties best described as a developmental delay; (c) despite their difficulties, many autistic children learn as much as other human beings in certain environments; and (d) their difficulties can be viewed as a mismatch between a deviant nervous system and average or typical environments rather than as a disease. A number of practical and theoretical problems remain that require further research and that would add to the present theory.
尽管行为治疗是目前可用于自闭症儿童的最有效干预措施，但自费斯特（1961年）以来，尚未有人尝试提出一种全面的自闭症儿童行为理论。本文旨在填补这一空白。行为学研究与针对自闭症儿童的传统研究在三个方面有所不同：（a）它关注特定行为而非自闭症的诊断实体；（b）它强调直接环境而非病因或早期经历；（c）研究是归纳性的而非假设演绎性的。从这类研究中得出的行为理论有四个原则：（a）自闭症儿童的行为符合从其他生物体行为中推导出来的学习规律；（b）自闭症儿童有许多单独的行为困难，最好将其描述为发育迟缓；（c）尽管有困难，但许多自闭症儿童在某些环境中与其他人学得一样多；（d）他们的困难可被视为异常的神经系统与普通或典型环境之间的不匹配，而非一种疾病。仍存在一些实际和理论问题，需要进一步研究，这些研究将丰富当前的理论。
