New Zealand ABA

By Anne Macaskill
The New Zealand Association for Behaviour Analysis (NZABA) is a community of people working, teaching and researching in behavior analysis in, or with a connection to, Aotearoa New Zealand.
The focus of NZABA is to host an annual conference in late August. In 2023 the conference was held at Victoria University of Wellington, returning to a tried-and-true venue. A primary purpose of the conference is to support graduate students to share their research in a positive, supportive and collegial atmosphere. Given this focus, we like to share the names and topics of student prize winners in this report. The topics of the awarded talks and poster also showcase the evolving variety of topics in experimental and applied behavior analysis discussed at our conference.
In 2023, the judges awarded prizes to Lana Perich (Auckland University) for her talk entitled Effectiveness of Training Videos and Behaviour Skills Training to Teach Dog Training Skills to Dog-Rescue Foster Volunteers, Liam Crowley-de Thierry (Victoria University of Wellington) for his talk entitled Investigating Emotion Expression of the Body through Generative Modelling of Human Gait, Svetlana Daly (Auckland University) for her talk entitled Soft Skills: What does the sector want?, Jack Drummond (Victoria University of Wellington) for his talk entitled The Implications of Nudging to Encourage Pro-Environmental Behaviour: The Moderating Effects of Biospheric Values and Carbon Footprints, Stephanie Xie (Auckland University) for her talk entitled Behaviour analysis as a tool to support and understand sustainability related behaviours, and Chris Pouwels (Victoria University of Wellington) for his poster entitled the Effects of “Should” and “Would” Decision Framing on Probability Discounting of Rewards for Self and Others.
The NZABA conference also hosted a symposium run by our sister organisation the Society of Behaviour Analysis Aotearoa New Zealand, focused on professional practice issues of particular relevance to practitioners in Aotearoa. This continues to be a fruitful collaboration for both groups, and we plan to co-host another symposium offering CEUs.
In 2024 our conference will be held in Auckland, hosted by the Auckland Institute of Technology (AUT). Auckland is directly accessible from many international destinations. Our website at nzaba.wordpress.com/ provides up-todate information about how to register and will post the conference program once available. You can join NZABA via a form on our website; we do not charge a membership fee. Members automatically join our emailing list and will receive occasional updates and announcements. Our Facebook group at facebook.com/newzealandaba for hosts more informal discussion and shares links to items of general interest to those working in the field of behavior analysis.