Kendra Thomson

Kendra Thomson
Verified
Kendra verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Verified
Kendra verified their affiliation via an institutional email.
Brock University · Applied Disability Studies

PhD

About

57
Publications
14,908
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
812
Citations
Additional affiliations
September 2014 - July 2018
Brock University
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
September 2013 - August 2014
York University
Position
  • PostDoc Position
September 2007 - May 2011
University of Manitoba
Position
  • PhD Student

Publications

Publications (57)
Article
Parents of autistic children are at a higher risk for mental health problems, including anxiety, depression, and stress. Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) that targets children's emotion regulation may have an indirect influence on parent outcomes, especially if they play a supporting role in their child's intervention. However, most CBT interventio...
Article
Full-text available
Although behavior analysts have published calls to action related to diversity, equity, interprofessional collaboration, and social justice, the field's understanding and application of cultural humility remains unclear. Cultural competency frameworks , although aiming to enhance cross-cultural and interdisciplinary efficacy, often fail to address...
Article
Full-text available
Objective Adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) experience high rates of poor mental health and challenges accessing timely and high-quality services. There is limited interprofessional training on mental health care for this population. Methods A virtual, synchronous program based on the Project Extension for Community Hea...
Poster
Full-text available
Autistic children often receive support for mental health and emotional challenges through community-based group-format cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). CBT is manualized, but in community settings, interventions tend to not be delivered as intended. Inherent individual preferences and behavioural challenges in autistic children often lead to i...
Poster
Full-text available
Challenges with functional communication (e.g., language use in situational contexts), are a core feature of autism. Challenges in functional communication are related to social interaction difficulties and may impact engagement in interventions such as cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). CBT is a common intervention used to support emotion regula...
Article
Full-text available
Background The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted the mental health of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). During this period of uncertainty and need for up-to-date information, various virtual training programmes demonstrated the role of tele-mentoring programmes. Aim The aim of this paper is to describe the educa...
Article
Full-text available
Background Autistic children often experience socioemotional difficulties relating to emotion regulation and mental health problems. Supports for autistic children involve the use of adapted interventions that target emotion regulation and social skills, alongside mental health symptoms. The Secret Agent Society Small Group (SAS: SG), an adapted co...
Article
Full-text available
Background Violence in the healthcare workplace has been a global concern for over two decades, with a high prevalence of violence towards healthcare workers reported. Workplace violence has become a healthcare quality indicator and embedded in quality improvement initiatives of many healthcare organizations. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Hea...
Poster
Full-text available
Background: Autistic children typically experience challenges when navigating social and emotional contexts, and these experienced difficulties can subsequently have notable effects on their mental well-being.1 The Secret Agent Society: Small Group (SAS:SG) program is a multi-component manualized intervention for autistic children between 8-12 ye...
Article
This study applied behavioral economic methods to assess the effects of regulatory cost on demand for the opportunity to practice behavior analysis in Ontario using a hypothetical purchase task. The provincial government of Ontario recently passed legislation to expand the psychology regulatory body to include behavior analysts. Professional regula...
Article
Full-text available
This article describes the long and winding road to regulation of behavior analysts in Ontario, Canada over the past 25 years. It is written from the perspective of some of the many volunteers of the professional association (Ontario Association for Behaviour Analysis) who have contributed to this goal. The information has been corroborated by hist...
Article
Purpose This study aims to describe patients presented in an interprofessional, virtual education program focused on the mental health of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), as well as present interprofessional recommendations for care. Design/methodology/approach In this retrospective chart review, descriptive statistic...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background Violence in the healthcare workplace has been a global concern for over two decades, with a high prevalence of violence towards healthcare workers reported. Workplace violence has become a healthcare quality indicator and embedded in quality improvement initiatives of many healthcare organizations. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Hea...
Article
Full-text available
Behavioral skills training (BST) delivered synchronously via telecommunication (telehealth) has been shown to be effective for training mediators supporting children with autism. A limitation in the literature is that many published training protocols are evaluated under analogue or highly controlled conditions; therefore, further evaluation is nee...
Article
Few dance instructors receive formal training on how to teach dance skills using behavioral coaching methods and may employ an authoritarian teaching style that utilizes coercive feedback, which can adversely affect dancers’ experiences. A behavior analytic approach to dance education may provide dance instructors with strategies that increase the...
Article
Introduction Health and social service providers have limited expertise with regard to assessing and treating psychiatric disorders in adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The aim of this study was to describe the development and pilot evaluation of a virtual capacity-building program (Project ECHO) focused on supporting the men...
Article
Research demonstrates that exercise can decrease depressive symptoms, yet it is infrequently prescribed as an intervention. Self‐management techniques offer an effective and cost‐efficient approach to increase engagement in physical activity. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of goal setting, self‐monitoring, and feedback for i...
Preprint
Full-text available
BACKGROUND Workplace violence is an increasingly significant topic, particularly for staff working in mental health settings. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada’s largest mental health hospital, considers workplace safety a high priority and consequently has mandated staff safety training. For clinical staff, key components o...
Article
Full-text available
Background Workplace violence is an increasingly significant topic, particularly for staff working in mental health settings. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Canada’s largest mental health hospital, considers workplace safety a high priority and consequently has mandated staff safety training. For clinical staff, key components o...
Article
Full-text available
Little consensus exists on whether repetitive behaviors that are topographically similar in obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are indicative of a comorbid diagnosis of OCD or overlapping symptoms subsumed under ASD. This ambiguity in the cause and/or function of the behavior often results in challenges for clini...
Article
Providing mediator training using a telecommunication format increases access to training by reducing geographical and financial barriers, while maintaining or increasing efficiency. Limited research has implemented this format to train facilitators in acceptance and commitment training (ACT), an empirically supported intervention. The aim of this...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose of review This systematic review examined research on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for caregivers of children with neurodevelopmental disabilities (NDDs). Specifically, we examined ACT delivery format, inclusion of treatment fidelity, facilitator/intervention acceptability measures, and effectiveness of the intervention immediate...
Article
Background Workers supporting adults with intellectual disabilities experience significant stress in their essential role during COVID‐19. The purpose of this study was to describe the experience of these workers and determine predictors of emotional distress. Methods Eight hundred and thirty‐eight workers supporting adults with intellectual disab...
Article
Alarmingly, nearly half of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) engage in behaviour that causes separation from caregivers. More than half of these children go missing for a concerning duration of time and/or enter into dangerous situations. Caregivers often do not feel prepared to address these serious concerns. This study evaluated the ef...
Article
This study included a component analysis of behavioral skills training (BST) for teaching volunteers how to use this training method to support individuals with developmental disabilities in a physical education program. In an alternating treatment design embedded within a multiple baseline design across five participants, the number of BST steps t...
Article
Teaching with acoustical guidance involves auditory feedback (e.g., a click sound when a desired behavior occurs) as part of a multicomponent intervention known as TAGteach. TAGteach has been found to improve performance in sport, dance, surgical technique, and walking. We compared the efficacy and efficiency of the standard TAGteach error‐correcti...
Data
Table S1. Descriptive statistics and internal consistencies of baseline measure. Table S2. Treatment versus waitlist group comparisons of clinically significant psychiatric diagnosis at randomization for full sample (N = 68). Table S3. Primary and secondary treatment outcomes for treatment completers (n = 60) controlling for pretreatment scores a...
Article
Full-text available
Limited research has explored how to best train caregivers to support their child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) despite caregivers being well suited to promote generalization and maintenance of their child’s skills in the natural environment. Children with ASD have been shown to benefit from social skill training, which is not always conducte...
Article
Full-text available
Background Mental health problems are common among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and difficulties with emotion regulation processes may underlie these issues. Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is considered an efficacious treatment for anxiety in children with ASD. Additional research is needed to examine the efficacy of a transdi...
Article
Full-text available
Despite growing literature in evidence-based practice (EBP) for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), there is limited research on best practices for training the practitioners that provide EBP. In traditional clinical psychology, training often includes self-study of intervention materials followed by ongoing supervision. Although behavior...
Article
Background: Special Olympics (SO) is commonly cited to play an important role in the lives of individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID). The purpose of the current review was to (a) synthesise key findings regarding the physical, psychological/emotional, social and/or intellectual/cognitive correlates of SO participation for individuals with...
Article
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often present with comorbid psychopathology including problems with emotion regulation. The goal of the present research was to investigate the feasibility of a multicomponent manualized cognitive behavior therapy treatment program for improving emotion regulation in youth with ASD 8-12 years of age. Thi...
Article
Full-text available
We evaluated a self-instructional manual supported by an online Computer-Aided Personalized System of Instruction (CAPSI) for teaching Discrete-Trials Teaching (DTT) to university students. During baseline and post-training, five participants taught three tasks commonly taught to children with autism spectrum disor-ders to a confederate role-playin...
Article
Full-text available
Emotion regulation (ER) difficulties are a potential common factor underlying the presentation of multiple emotional and behavioral problems in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To provide an overview of how ER has been studied in individuals with ASD, we conducted a systematic review of the past 20 years of ER research in the ASD po...
Article
This article examines the convergence of factors that led to behavior analysis taking root, flourishing, and bearing fruit in a prairie province of Canada. In the latter half of the 1960s, Garry Martin and Joseph Pear began teaching behavior-analytic courses at the University of Manitoba. They and their students then initiated behavioral treatment...
Article
A widely used method for teaching children with autism is applied behavior analysis (ABA), and a main component of ABA programming is discrete-trials teaching (DTT). Using a modified multiple-baseline design across participants, we assessed the effectiveness of a DTT self-instructional package (Fazzio & Martin, 2007) for teaching four pairs of newl...
Article
The purpose of this research was to evaluate a self-instructional package (Fazzio & Martin, 2007) to train parents of children with autism to conduct discrete-trials teaching (DTT). In Study 1, we investigated the effectiveness of a self-instructional manual and a self-instructional video for teaching five parents of children with autism to correct...
Chapter
The term behavior analysis refers to the scientific study of laws that govern the behavior of human beings and other animals (Pear, 2001). Behavioral sport psychology involves the use of behavior analysis principles and techniques to enhance the performance and satisfaction of athletes and others associated with sports (Martin & Tkachuk, 2000). In...
Chapter
The purpose of this chapter is to review intervention strategies that have been researched for teaching adaptive and social skills to children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). We hope that the chapter will be useful for practitioners and that it will also stimulate further research. Before beginning our review, we briefly describe ASDs (a mor...
Article
We assessed the reliability and validity of the discrete-trials teaching evaluation form (DTTEF), a 21-item checklist for assessing instructors conducting discrete-trials teaching (DTT). In Phase 1, six consultants in an applied behavior analysis program for children with autism rated the 21 components of the DTTEF with a mean of 6.2 on a 7-point s...
Article
Full-text available
Early intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) has been identified as the treatment of choice for children with autism spectrum disorders. A common strategy for conducting EIBI is discrete-trials teaching (DTT). There is a demand for research-based, economical, rapid training techniques to teach tutors and parents of children with autism to conduct...
Article
Full-text available
There is considerable need for rapid training procedures to teach staff and parents to conduct applied behaviour analysis training sessions with children with autism. We used a multiple-baseline design across participants to evaluate a self-instructional package to train four university students to implement discrete-trials teaching (DTT) to teach...
Article
Four-year-olds' sensitivity to differences among faces in the spacing of features was tested under 4 task conditions: judging distinctiveness when the external contour was visible and when it was occluded, simultaneous match-to-sample, and recognizing the face of a friend. In each task, the foil differed only in the spacing of features, and spacing...
Article
Full-text available
Discrete-trials teaching (DTT) is a frequently used method for implementing Applied Behavior Analysis treatment with children with autism. Fazzio, Arnal, and Martin (2007) developed a 21-component checklist, the Discrete-Trials Teaching Evaluation Form (DTTEF), for assessing instructors conducting DTT. In Phase 1 of this research, three experts on...
Article
The single-stimulus (SS) preference assessment procedure has been described as more appropriate than the paired stimulus (PS) procedure for "lower functioning" individuals, but this guideline's vagueness limits its usefulness. We administered the SS and PS preference assessment procedures with food items to seven individuals with severe or profound...

Network

Cited By