Affectively-Align & Culturally Aware ABA Notebook

This is just my opinion bro– Behavior change without emotional understanding is like teaching a robot to smile– it may look right, but it lacks the heart behind the action

Daffodil Epprecht-Lucio is a former teacher and wound care nurse who now spends her days substitute teaching while pursuing her MS in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). Passionate about the intersection of technology and social learning based on empathic-behaviorism, she dreams of becoming a conceptual researcher– developing reinforcement learning models that enhance play-based social inference training for neurodivergent individuals.

Inspired by her own and family’s lived experiences with ASD, Daffodil has seen firsthand the creative, and sometimes quirky ways neurodivergent minds navigate social cues across different environments. This drives her mission to design play-based interventions and explore how large language models (LLMs) also called Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPTs) can support adaptive, individualized social learning.

When she’s not knee-deep in research or scribbling intervention ideas on napkins, Daffodil advocates for teaching methods that honor neurodiversity– because social inference shouldn’t mean masking, but expanding the tools for authentic connection.

Follow her journey as she bridges ABA, AI and a little humor to rethink how we teach social skill especially social inference– seriously though– being able to read social cues save lives.

(Want to nerd out about reinforcement models or share your own insights? drop a comment– she’d love to chat!)

Below is my version of saying, “No, I do not use chatGPT—it did not do the thinking and writing process for me.”

I am a Filipino-American, an aspiring BCBA with English as my second language. The vision and core concepts in my open notebook is born from my unique ability in perspective-taking, keen observation to details that allows me to swiftly recognize gaps in patterns and protocols. To ensure their precision, I co-develop my work with a specialized, exceptionally fine-tuned language model that acts as the English department assistant of my grammatical usage. This tool serves as my foreman, ensuring the final brick-by-brick construction of my ideas—every sentence and argument—is precise, polished, and powerfully communicates the integrity of my original thought.