Abstract This article describes the clinical process of an interdisciplinary team approach to the comprehensive assessment and treatment of Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome (PANS) and Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcal infections (PANDAS). These complex conditions present with abrupt-onset behavioral and psychiatric symptoms that require simultaneous medical and behavioral intervention. The clinic’s overall process is described, along with the roles and responsibilities of each team member, and emphasis is placed on how behavior analysts are integrated into this health-care setting. Also discussed are challenges to interdisciplinary collaboration, along with methods employed by the team to maintain and deliver cohesive, patient-centered care.

Abstract Many social skills, such as empathic responding, social referencing, and facial emotion recognition, require a variety of conditional discriminations under a wide array of stimulus conditions. Proficiency with these responses in the natural environment would involve the ability to identify a variety of emotions across a wide array of faces, genders, ages, ethnicities, and contexts. Using empirically validated stimuli within assessment contexts that represent a wide spectrum of diverse variations across relevant features increases the likelihood of teaching stimulus discriminations necessary for broadly applicable emotion tacting skills. Currently, there is little guidance in behavior analysis on how to conduct a comprehensive assessment of emotions tacting across diverse demographics using empirically validated stimuli. Therefore, this manuscript provides an example process we adopted to create a preliminary assessment of facial emotion recognition that includes empirically validated stimuli representing a multitude of diverse faces, which we named the “Measurement of Emotions Tacting for Empathic Responding” (METER). It is our hope this assessment tutorial will help bring awareness to the importance of identifying appropriate validated and demographically diverse stimuli, the issues that may arise from overlooking the importance of the stimuli we use to assess and teach complex social skills, and to encourage researchers and practitioners to develop inclusive assessments for a variety of social skills using validated and diverse stimuli to aid in developing both targeted and socially valid interventions.