Brian Boyd, Ph.D., is the William C. Friday Distinguished Professor in the UNC School of Education and interim director of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Restricted, inflexible behaviors are part of the core diagnostic criteria for autism. Increasingly, autistic individuals are asking researchers and clinicians to reconsider their treatment approaches for these behaviors. Furthermore, research is pointing to associations between repetitive behaviors and co-occurring conditions found in autism, such as executive functioning differences and sleep disturbances. This suggests that researchers and clinicians may need to reconceptualize repetitive behaviors in autism. This presentation will describe novel approaches for the assessment and treatment of challenging inflexible behaviors in autism.