Sidney W. and Janet R. Bijou Fellowship Recipients
2007: Melania Bachmeyer, University of Iowa
Melanie Bachmeyer received her Master’s degree in Educational Psychology with an emphasis in Applied Behavior Analysis from Georgia State University (2005) while working at the Marcus Institute (2001 to 2005) under the direction of Cathleen C. Piazza, Ph.D. and Wayne W. Fisher, Ph.D. During her training at the Marcus Institute, she had the opportunity to collaborate with applied behavior analysts and contribute to the behavior analytic literature in the area of assessment and treatment of pediatric feeding disorders. She has co-authored peer-reviewed studies published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Behavioral Interventions, and Research in Developmental Disabilities. Her Master’s thesis, On the Relative Effects of Matched Extinction Techniques in the Treatment of Multiply Controlled Inappropriate Mealtime Behaviors, received the Outstanding Master’s Thesis in Educational Psychology Award from Georgia State University (2006). Following her training at the Marcus Institute, she joined the doctoral program in School Psychology at The University of Iowa in August 2005 and has continued to pursue areas of programmatic research in pediatric feeding disorders under the direction of Linda J. Cooper-Brown, Ph.D. and David P. Wacker, Ph.D. Her collective educational and clinical experiences have firmly established her commitment to an operant perspective of child development.
Her primary research and clinical interests involve the assessment and treatment of pediatric feeding disorders. Of particular interest presently is the role of positive reinforcement in the treatment of feeding problems. Specifically, she is interested in evaluating under what conditions and for which topographies of feeding problems positive reinforcement procedures will compete with negative reinforcement maintaining food refusal. She has recently conducted a study evaluating the use of a positive reinforcement procedure in the treatment of one child’s food selectivity and another child’s inadequate food intake. Manipulating the quality of the positive reinforcer resulted in an increase in food acceptance in the absence of escape extinction. In addition, she is currently conducting a study evaluating the effects of positive reinforcement on the production of responses exceeding required demands within a hierarchy of feeding demands. A second area of research is the evaluation of alternative methods to treat total food refusal. Although numerous studies have demonstrated the importance of escape extinction, negative side effects associated with escape extinction often occur. Thus, she is interested in developing and evaluating the effectiveness of alternative procedures to treat total food refusal. Finally, she will be conducting research evaluating the interaction between biological and environmental variables in the treatment of feeding problems. Although interventions to medically resolve or attenuate the adverse effects of medical conditions are typically implemented prior to behavioral treatments, ongoing biological variables (e.g., constipation or physiological deficits such as oral motor dysfunction) may influence the effectiveness of interventions designed to address the environmental variables maintaining the feeding problem. Therefore, she is interested in evaluating such biological variables as potential motivating operations in the treatment of food refusal.
Other 2007 Recipients:
Sarah Bloom, the University of Florida
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