Seminar: Using Prosocial to Support Mental Health Services and Special Education: An Evolving Technology with Jordan Belisle & Dana Paliliunas

Abstract: Mental health service providers and special educators are essential to the wellbeing of society, supporting vulnerable community members who are disproportionately impacted by economic and social inequality. At the same time, employees in these roles experience elevated rates of burnout and low levels of job satisfaction that can lead to workplace attrition and impacted quality of life (Alenezi et al., 2022; Bottini et al. 2020). Prosocial is an approach to intervention that integrates elements of Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACTr), Ostrom's Nobel Prize winning core design principles governing effective communities, and multilevel selection within the evolutionary sciences. We adapted this broad approach to develop specific intervention technologies for use in mental health and special education settings across multiple empirical case studies. In the first study, we evaluated the efficacy of Prosocial workshops and collective problem solving on stress and burnout in special educators, showing positive changes in both variables along with increases in prosocial experiences reported by staff. In a follow-up study with the same group, we worked with a voluntary task-force to identify critical uncertainties to address the following school year, resulting in specific participatory research on strategies to increase the use of ACTr strategies by staff interacting with students, as well as the use of the ACT Matrix to target workplace performance. In the third study, we completed a relational density analysis to evaluate staff experience using a common school-based technology and adapted a Prosocial framework to lead a workshop to improve staff experience utilizing the technology in the workplace. This same intervention was replicated in a mental health service setting to support behavior analysts and behavior technicians working with Autistic learners. Finally, this approach was combined with qualitative interviewing with the same mental health service provider to improve overall workplace climate by targeting pivotal core design principles identified using a mixed qualitative and quantitive interview, and a briefer version of the relational density analysis. Results showed improvement both in the implementation of the technology and the overall workplace climate of the organization. Taken together, these results demonstrate the adaptability of Prosocial and present the opportunity to refine various technologies developed through this process.

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About the Speakers:

Dr. Dana Paliliunas, BCBA-D, is an Associate Teaching Professor at Ball State University and CEO and co-founder of Dynamic Behavior Science. She was the co-author of AIM: A Behavior Analytic Curriculum for Social-Emotional Development in Children  and author of over 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. Recently, Dr. Paliliunas has been evaluating Prosocial interventions and individualized supports rooted in Values-Based Self-Management to provide comprehensive programming at multiple levels.

Dr. Jordan Belisle, BCBA-D, is a Clinical Director at Entiva Behavioral Health and CSO and co-founder of Dynamic Behavior Science. He was a key content developer for the PEAK Relational Training System, a curriculum to support learning processes of Autistic learners and learners with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Dr. Belisle has also developed and research Relational Density Theory as an extension of Relational Frame Theory that has been integrated into his research on Prosocial and mental health supports.

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