Azrin, Nathan H.

Birthplace

I was born on November 26, 1930, in Boston, Massachusetts, as part of a family that included five siblings, both parents, and grandparents.

Early Influences

My immigrant parents placed the highest priority on education for their children in their view of America as the land of limitless opportunity. As children, we were all expected to obtain paid employment as teenagers, as well as work in the family grocery.

Education History

I attended Boston University from 1948, where I majored in psychology, obtaining a BA in 1951, an MA in 1952, and continued in the PhD program in personality and social psychology. Because of my early interest in behavioral psychology, I transferred to Harvard University for the express purpose of studying under B. F. Skinner, receiving a PhD in 1956 from Harvard.

Professional Models

Like so many others, my initial interest in the field of psychology was inspired by Freud's writings. An undergraduate course by Dr. Leo Reyna solidified my decision to major in psychology by his elucidation of how quantitative methodology could experimentally evaluate psychological treatments and beliefs. The book by F. Keller and N. Schoenfeld on laboratoryderived principles of reinforcement offered a conceptual model for human applications, as did the studies by Skinner.

At Harvard University, I conducted studies in Skinner's animal lab, where I learned, as I intended, laboratory methodology with animals and Skinner's focus on descriptive analysis. Skinner was interested in my enrolling at Harvard since he had just finished his book Science and Human Behavior, the thrust of which coincided with my interest in applying learning theory to practical human problems. The only human research I conducted at Harvard, however, was to serve as Skinner's research assistant in evaluating the effectiveness of the “teaching machine,” which Skinner conceived at that time.

Other professional models for me were O. H. Mowrer, for his imaginative animal studies with clinical implications and his development of the first behavioral treatment in the pad-and-buzzer method for enuresis. Kurt Lewin was a model for me of how to conduct human experiments in his group dynamics research.

Major Contributions to the Field

A small number of others (Ivar Lovaas, Ted Ayllon, Don Baer, Montrose Wolf, Todd Risley) and myself are generally considered the founders of the field known as behavior modification or applied behavior analysis, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Prior to that time, experimental evaluations of clinical and other applied procedures were conspicuously absent, as noted by H. Eysenck, L. Krasner, and others in their writings.

My most popularly known contribution is probably the development of a very rapid and effective toilettraining program for normal children, described in a book still widely used, Toilet Training in Less than a Day. I developed this procedure as an extension of my development of effective training programs, including toileting, for profoundly retarded adults who had previously been classified as “untrainable.” The other effective training programs I developed for this “untrainable” population were dressing, proper selffeeding, and nighttime continence, all of which are currently in use with this population. The nighttime continence program, known as “dry-bed training,” followed the same sequence as the daytime toileting program in that I developed a program for nocturnal enuresis of normal children after having been fortunate in developing a similar program for the “untrainable” retarded.

...