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. 2007 May;87(3):325-36.
doi: 10.1901/jeab.2007.39-05.

Discriminative control of punished stereotyped behavior in humans

Shannon S Doughty  1 , Cynthia M Anderson, Adam H Doughty, Dean C Williams, Kathryn J Saunders
Affiliations

Discriminative control of punished stereotyped behavior in humans

Shannon S Doughty et al. J Exp Anal Behav. 2007 May.

Abstract

The purpose of this experiment was to establish discriminative control of responding by an antecedent stimulus using differential punishment because the results of past studies on this topic have been mixed. Three adults with mental retardation who exhibited stereotypy not maintained by social consequences (i.e., automatic reinforcement) participated. For each subject, stereotypy occurred frequently in the presence of a stimulus correlated with nonpunishment of stereotypy and rarely, if ever, in the presence of a stimulus correlated with punishment of stereotypy. Latency measures showed that the antecedent stimulus correlated with punishment served as the discriminative stimulus for the suppression of stereotypy. These results are important insofar as they show that discriminative control by an antecedent stimulus develops with punishment, and because it sometimes may be desirable to establish such control of socially inappropriate behavior.

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Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Results of discrimination training for each subject.
Solid lines separate baseline from discrimination training. Dotted lines separate conditions within discrimination training. Numbers represent the component duration in minutes. “Rep” in PH's graph indicates the brief condition where the 1-s hands-down with reprimand was used before it was changed to a 10-s procedure without reprimand. Unfilled circles show data from the punishment component, and filled circles show data from the no-punishment component. The left, center, and right panels show data for Subjects TS, CB, and PH, respectively. The top panels show the percentage of intervals scored with stereotypy. The bottom panels show the percentage of the component that elapsed prior to the first interval scored with stereotypy. Only the final six sessions are presented for baseline (top graphs), and all other conditions contain data across the entire condition in three-session blocks.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Data for Subject CB when the punisher was present, withdrawn, and present again (separated by solid lines).
Numbers represent the component length in min. Unfilled circles show data from the punishment component, and filled circles show data from the no-punishment component. The top panel shows the percentage of intervals scored with stereotypy, and the bottom panel shows the percentage of the component elapsed prior to the first interval scored with stereotypy. Data are in three-session blocks. The data from the first condition shown are the same as those from the end of the 2.5-min-component shown in Figure 1, and are included for the purposes of comparison.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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