Brandon Franklin returns to the podcast after a very long hiatus. You'll have to go back to Session 36 to hear his first appearance as a matter of fact.

It turns out that he's been doing a lot of innovative clinical work in that time. Currently, he is the Chief Behavior Analyst for the Lee Specialty Clinic and a Behavioral Consultant at Kramer Behavioral Health. In these roles, Brandon has implemented various interventions to help individuals with intellectual disabilities access routine medical and dental care.

If you're not familiar with this topic, it might sound pretty mundane, but as you'll hear, these populations really struggle to attend and participate in routine medical appointments, which, not surprisingly, has downstream negative health consequences. As such, interventions that improve on the current statistics can truly be considered life-saving.

In this podcast, we get into the following:

• Common phobias associated with medical treatments.
• Brandon's personal experience with aerophobia (the fear of flying), and what he did to improve it.
• The basics of desensitization strategies.
• How he and his team members use these strategies to improve the rate of successful medical appointment visits.
• And finally, the research on this topic that he is doing for his dissertation.

Brandon has generously compiled a list of references, which you can find here. He's passionate about this topic and is willing to talk with anyone about it, so feel free to hit him up on LinkedIn.

• Here's all of Brandon's contact info.
• Here's all the desensitization resources you could ask for.

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This is not a show about teaching eye contact. We'll get to that in a bit.

First though, I should note that the 22nd installment of the Inside JABA Series is coming out comically late. I apologize for getting us off schedule. The good news is that we already have a great paper to discuss for the 23rd Inside JABA episode that I think you're going to love, so I hope to have that one out later on in the spring.

Back to this episode. Drs. Danny Conine and Jenn Fritz join me to discuss a paper Danny wrote with his colleagues called, "Evaluating a screening-to-intervention model with caregiver training for response to name among children with autism."

There are so many great things about this paper, and listeners will be able to tell this from my enthusiasm in discussing it with Danny and Jenn.

As I noted above, this is not about teaching eye contact, but rather, a more generalized repertoire of responding to one's name (RTN). We get into why these two things are different, and, as Danny tells it, RTN repertoires have many benefits that directly impact learning and safety.

In this paper, he describes an elegant assessment and intervention that his research team implemented to develop RTN in the study's participants. In carrying out this study, they also employed a simple and effective assent withdrawal component, which we get into.

Then, they took what the skills they developed in a clinic setting, and taught the participant's caregivers to implement RTN procedures at home. As such, this paper provides a great example of how to generalize skills across settings. Very cool!

Along the way, Danny provides practical tips clinicians can consider for their own practice. All of this to say, I'm hoping you'll agree that the wait for this episode will be worth it!

Resources discussed in this podcast:

• Conine, et al. (2025). Evaluating a screening-to-intervention model with caregiver training for response to name among children with autism.

• Conine, et al. (2020). Assessment and treatment of response to name for children with autism spectrum disorder: Toward an efficient intervention model.

• Conine, Vollmer, and Bolívar (2019). Response to name in children with autism: Treatment, generalization, and maintenance.

• BOP Session 212 with Tim Hackenberg.

• Luczynski and Hanley (2013). Prevention of problem behavior by teaching functional communication and self-control skills to preschoolers.

• The Verbal Behavior Approach, by Dr. Mary Barbera.

• Links to Danny's faculty page, Research Gate profile, LinkedIn, and his lab's Instagram.

• Jenn's faculty page, Research Gate profile, LinkedIn, and the UHCL ABA Program page.

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