PROFESSIONAL FIELD AND CERTIFICATION IN APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS: SPAIN AND EUROPE
understand and improve socially significant human behaviors. Its subject of study is behaviors and their relationship with environmental independent variables (Baer, Wolf Risley, 1968) Applied behavior analysis can not be completely understood apart from a specific approach to science, and from its basic counterpart, the experimental analysis of behavior. The behavior analytic approach to science is characterized by determinism, empiricism, explanatory parsimony and experimentation. The publication of The Behavior of Organisms by B. F. Skinner in 1938 was a landmark of the field. This work presented an approach to behavior which emphasized antecedent, and particularly consequent environmental variables in explaining behavior. The so called three term contingency (antecedent behavior consequence) was the core feature of this analysis. This approach enabled the author to explore basic learning processes as discrimination and reinforcement. It was not until decades later when the first applications of the experimental analysis of behavior drove the start of applied behavior analysis. A year of importance to this crucial step was 1968, when the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis was first published. In Spain, interest in behavior analysis dates back to the PROFESSIONAL FIELD AND CERTIFICATION IN APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS: SPAIN AND EUROPE