Edward (Ted) Carr

The behavioral community was shocked and saddened by the news that Ted Carr and his wife (Ilene Wasserman) were killed by a drunk driver not far from their home on Long Island on Saturday June 20th 2009. Ted's research on the challenging behavior of persons with autism spectrum disorders was influential in leading the field of applied behavior analysis (and later the new discipline called “positive behavior support”) in important new directions. His work changed the way people assess and treat behaviors such as aggression and self-injury and remains at the forefront of these areas.

Ted was born on August 20, 1947 and grew up in Toronto, Canada in a typical middle class home. Several early stories about his childhood are revealing and seem to hold keys to understanding his later development. For example, he once shared a humorous but telling prank he pulled on his mother. One day she was outside a second story window of their home on a part of the roof, presumably washing the windows from the outside. A young Ted—perhaps 3 or 4 years old—was just inside watching her when something prompted him to close the window. As he told this story you could picture his devilish grin and the joy he must have experienced with his accomplishment. Unfortunately, his mother couldn't open the window and was now trapped on the roof. This so upset him that he cowered in the corner of the room, feeling powerless to help her. Finally, his mother caught the attention of some neighbors and they were able to get her back inside. When he told me this story we both laughed and I remarked, “She must have really punished you for that one!” He smiled ruefully and said, “In her eyes I could never do anything wrong.” This type of support and unconditional positive regard undoubtedly contributed to his later courage and confidence, helping him to break new ground in his research and writing.

Ted started his graduate career doing operant conditioning research on pigeons with George Reynolds (a student of B. F. Skinner) at the University of California, San Diego and he received his PhD in 1973. However, it was his post doctoral work with Ivar Lovaas at UCLA that would lay the foundation for his later work in autism. During his time at UCLA he met and worked with other pioneers in the field, including Bob Koegel, Laura Schreibman, Jim Halle, and the late Creighton (Buddy) Newsom and conducted research at Camarrilo State Hospital. He later contributed to the “lab manual” which most will recognize as the “Me Book” that served as the protocol for early intensive behavioral intervention efforts for years to come (Lovaas, 1981). He spent the rest of his career at Stony Brook University, becoming an assistant professor in 1976 and ultimately earned the rank of Leading Professor in 2000.

This was a productive time and his experiences led to his publishing a seminal paper in Psychological Bulletin that outlined behavioral views of self-injurious behavior (Carr, 1977). It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this paper. At the time of its publication, the field of applied behavior analysis had no generally accepted model for conceptualizing self-injurious behavior (as well as other disruptive behaviors). The de facto view of these behaviors was simply that they were excesses to be reduced. Ted's paper, which synthesized the importance of a growing empirical base, articulated how these behaviors could serve different functions such as to gain the attention of others (based on the pioneering research of Ivar Lovaas) or to escape from unpleasant situations. This latter concept of escape from demands was demonstrated in experimental analyses conducted by Ted and his colleague Buddy Newsom, a collaboration that would prove to be highly meaningful for the field (Carr, Newsom, & Binkoff, 1976, 1980).

For a while in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ted's research moved to a new area—teaching sign language to children with autism (Carr, Binkoff, Kologinsky, & Eddy, 1978; Carr & Dores, 1981; Carr & Kologinsky, 1983). However, his interest in understanding and treating challenging behavior re-emerged, and he and I conducted a number of studies on an approach we labeled functional communication training.

Our research over the next few years focused on demonstrating the procedures for and the value of teaching replacements to reduce problem behavior. The basic premise was that once you understood the function of a behavior, you could teach another behavior that served the same function and this new behavior could potentially replace the problem behavior. The first study was able to show that just teaching and reinforcing another behavior didn't reduce challenging behavior. Instead, the challenging behavior was reduced only when the student had another behavior that served the same function. In the first draft of our write-up, we called this approach “differential reinforcement of communication” (DRC) because it resembled other schedules of reinforcement (differential reinforcement of other behavior [DRO] and differential reinforcement of incompatible behavior [DRI]). Little did we know that this would trigger a firestorm of outrage by reviewers of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. Some suggested that our use of the phase implied that we believed we had discovered a new schedule of reinforcement—a form of behavioral heresy. In order to address these concerns, we experimented with different wordings and ultimately arrived at “functional communication training” (FCT) and the revision was accepted (Carr & Durand, 1985). FCT is now a major part of many positive support plans and is one of the most commonly used interventions for challenging behavior (Matson, Dixon, & Matson, 2005). FCT is one of the few skill-focused behavioral interventions cited as having extensive support from initial efficacy studies (Smith et al., 2007). During my time as a graduate student, Ted and I collaborated on several more studies on FCT, demonstrating its value in promoting generalized behavior change (Durand & Carr, 1991) as well as the mechanism for promoting maintenance (Durand & Carr, 1992).

Over the next decade or so a number of events in the field also conspired to shape Ted's work. The controversy over the use of “aversives” provides an interesting exemplar. Early in his career, Ted's view of interventions such as contingent electric shock was more empirical than philosophical (Carr & Lovaas, 1983). Later, he moved to object to punishment-based approaches on conceptual grounds, suggesting that they would not ultimately be effective because they did not directly address the functions of behavior (Carr, Robinson, & Palumbo, 1990). Perhaps it was his personal experiences as a husband and father, or his involvement in the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Community-Referenced Technologies for Nonaversive Behavior Management and its team of influential scientists (Horner et al., 1990) or some combination, but his philosophical objections to interventions that could be painful or demeaning began to develop and he started to focus his attention on “positive behavior support” (Sailor & Carr, 1994). He was influential in the creation of the Association for Positive Behavior Support (serving as president from 2003 to 2006) as well as the Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions. He coauthored a monograph and several conceptual papers on positive behavior support that helped define the field (Carr, 1997; Carr et al., 2002; Carr et al., 1999) but also caused controversy among those who disagreed with some of his arguments (Johnston, Foxx, Jacobson, Green, & Mulick, 2006). Ultimately he believed that that improving someone's behavior without improving his or her life is an empty success.

One of Ted's most enduring legacies may be his son Aaron, his only child. Aaron is now 20 years old, much too young to lose both parents. In one of our last conversations, Ted relayed how proud he was of Aaron, who was coming into his own as a mature and caring adult. In a break after high school, Aaron had taken a job at the Developmental Disabilities Institute on Long Island, the same center where Ted conducted most of his research over the years. His son was working with people who had severe challenging behavior and his compassion and growing set of values was a source of great satisfaction to his parents. In fact, Aaron had plans to go into the field of psychology like his father, and work with children with autism. After the death of his parents Aaron was interviewed by the local newspaper about his reaction. At first, he relayed that he was furious with the man who was driving the car that killed Ted and Ilene. But after just a few days he realized that such a reaction can be all consuming. “Life is very short,” he told the reporter, “and I don't want to live the rest of my life hating someone.”

Ted lived long enough to receive multiple awards, including the Applied Research Award for Outstanding Contributions to Applied Behavioral Research from the American Psychological Association (Division 25, Analysis of Behavior) in 2001 and the Distinguished Research Award for Career Achievement from the Arc of the United States in 1999. He was on the editorial boards of most of the distinguished journals in our field, including serving as a long-time member of the board for Child & Family Behavior Therapy and was invited to speak all over the world. He was typically one of the most thought-provoking as well as entertaining speakers at any conference. In fact, he won “teacher of the year” awards so many times at Stony Brook University, they eventually had to retire his name. His wit and analytical mind were invaluable to our field and they will be greatly missed.

Notes

Portions of this article are reprinted with permission from Behavior Analysis Today.