Behavior Analysis
Lecture6
decreasing THE FREQUENCY OF BEHAVIOR –
Extinction and Differential Reinforcement
Review
 Most behavior problems fall into one of two categories
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Behavior that doesn’t occur enough
Behavior that occurs too much
 So far we have addressed how to increase the frequency of
behavior
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Reinforcement
Prompting, Fading, Shaping and Chaining are procedures used with
reinforcement to increase behavior rate
 Now we will learn how to decrease the frequency of
behavior
 In other words, in certain behavior problems the target
behavior occurs too much, we need to learn how to reduce
the amount of times the target behavior occurs
Review
 Can we think of any examples?
 Parents often complain that their kids
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Talk on the phone too much
Eat too much
Go out too much
Complain too much
Cost too much
 Teachers may complain that their students
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Walk around the room too much
Fight too much
Cry too much
Call out answers too much
 With these problems the task is not to strengthen behavior, but to
weaken it!
Today's lesson
 Today we discuss two procedures used for reducing
the frequency of behavior
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Extinction
Differential reinforcement
Extinction
 Operant behavior is maintained by its consequences.
 Therefore, preventing the consequences that maintain a
behavior should weaken it.
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In other words, problematic behavior is likely to pay off because the
consequences following the behavior are reinforcing
Therefore if we stop the reinforcing consequences then we would expect
the behavior to occur less often
 This is extinction
Extinction: withholding the reinforcers that maintain a
target behavior
Extinction
 Behaviorists often talk about a behavior as having
been‘extinguished’
 When they say this they mean that the frequency of
the behavior has been reduced by the extinction
procedure
 Note: extinction does not mean that the behavior no
longer occurs or is ‘extinct
 The effect of extinction is to reduce the frequency of
the target behavior
Example
 Nellie taps her fingers during work 5 or 6 times day.
 One day a co worker asks Nellie if she is ok. This leads to a
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conversation about Nellie’s feelings that Nellie finds
reinforcing.
The finger tapping therefore increase to around 30-40
times per day.
Then the co-worker moves to a different job.
The reinforcer is no longer available.
So the finger tapping reduces to pre intervention rates: 5 or
6 times per day
Lets look at some case studies:
Bill, the crier
 When young children cry after falling over, crying is
to be expected.
 However sometimes young children cry for no
reason, which may annoy others and interfere with
their own healthy development.
 Bill was one such child
Bill, the crier
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Bill was a normal healthy boy
He had above average intelligence and good social skills
However Bill cried more than any other child in school, around
5 to 10 times per morning
Near enough anything was enough to make Bill cry, and when
he cried, the whole school knew about it
Bill would only stop crying after the teacher comforted him for
several minutes
Teachers began to wonder if Bill cried because of the attention
he received when he cried
Hart et al (1964)
 Betty Hart agreed that attention might be the
reinforcer and decided to see if extinction might help
 To begin with, teachers measured each time Bill
cried with a pocket counter
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The target behavior was defined as crying that last for 5
seconds and could be heard from 50 foot away
 At the end of each day someone recorded the total
number of crying episodes on a cumulative graph
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The teachers did this for 10 days to get a baseline, there was no
effort to modify Bills behavior
Hart et al (1964)
 After 10 days, treatment consisted of putting crying on extinction
This meant that when Bill cried teachers were to look his way
to make sure that Bill was not hurt, after which they were to
pay no attention to him
Each time Bill had an unpleasant experience and did not cry,
then the teacher was to give Bill praise and attention
The results indicated that the frequency of crying fell
dramatically, so that after 5 days of extinction Bill was crying
only two times per day
In order to make sure that it was the intervention that powered
the change, the researchers employed an ABAB design. The
results held up.
Lets draw the graph!
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Extinction
 Extinction is basically a very simple procedure:
prevent the target behavior from occurring by
withholding consequences and it declines
 But, as with reinforcement, it can be difficult to
successfully apply
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In fact it can be pretty easy to make a mess of things
 There are some rules for extinction that will help you
 Define the target behavior
 Identify the reinforcers that maintain the target behavior
 Withhold all reinforcement of the target behavior
 Monitor the results
Define the target behavior
 Defining the target behavior is just as important
when it comes to decreasing the rate of behavior as it
is when attempting to increase the rate of behavior
 You must always have a very clear and operational
idea of what the target behavior is
Identify the reinforcers that maintain the target behavior
 If operant behavior occurs on a regular basis, you can safely
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assume that it is being reinforced.
To put the behavior on extinction, you have to identify the
reinforcer, so that you know what to withhold.
However this is easier said than done
 For example, it is unlikely that a child will say ‘I cry because in
the past crying has produced adult attention’.
Therefore in order to find the reinforcer you have to work it out
by observing the behavior and its consequences for a time
A number of consequences may follow a behavior, it is very
important to pinpoint the consequence that is functioning as a
reinforcer
Withhold all reinforcement of the target behavior
 Extinction involves the target behavior not being
reinforced
 However doing so can sometimes be difficult
 For example, it is difficult to withhold attention if
Bill has fallen over and hurt himself
Withhold all reinforcement of the target behavior
 A more serious example occurs when reinforcement
becomes too difficult to control.
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For example, imagine that every time Jonny shouts out in class, his
fellow students laugh. Laughing is the reinforcer here. To put this into
extinction you would have to stop the kids laughing at Jonny’s remarks
every time he shouts out. This would be very difficult.
 Notice the words ‘every time’ there. Extinction only works
if the reinforcer is with held every time the behavior occurs.
 Because occasional reinforcement can maintain behavior at
very high rates and can even make the behavior more
difficult to eliminate
Withhold all reinforcement of the target behavior
 This phenomenon is called
Partial reinforcement effect: increased resistance to
extinction following intermittent reinforcement.
 This means that it is not a good idea to start
extinction unless you can be sure that you can
withhold all reinforcement of the target behavior
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A good example of PRE is gambling behavior
Monitor the results
 The only way to make sure that extinction is working
is to monitor the results.
 For example if you have gone with the wrong
consequence that doesn‘t actually function as a
reinforcer then the only way to know is to monitor
the results
Problems with extinction – uncontrolled reinforcement
 The problem, as previously mentioned, is that the
target behavior may produce reinforcement from a
number of sources.
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And those sources may be difficult to control
 Another problem occurs when the activity is
reinforcing in itself. This makes extinction
impossible.
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For example, how do you extinguish a behavior when you
can’t reduce the level of reinforcement?
Problems with extinction –slowness
 Sometimes extinction can be very slow
 This is a problem because the longer it take for a behavior
to extinguish, the more likely people will give up.
 Also, imagine that the target behavior is severe, like head
banging. By the time the extinction procedure has worked
the kid could be blind!
 It is therefore hard to justify using extinction when the
behavior is harmful
 Another example is destruction of property – it is hard to
use extinction when things are being destroyed!
Problems with extinction – side effects
 Extinction can produce some dramatic side effects that can
be problematic
 The long term effect of extinction is a steady and
pronounced reduction in the frequency of a target behavior
 But the immediate effect of putting a behavior on extinction
is a sudden increase the target behavior
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For example, Bill might start crying a huge amount of times before the
reductions in target behavior began
 This is called an extinction burst
Extinction burst: a sharp increase in the frequency of the
behavior on extinction
Problems with extinction – side effects
 Extinction bursts can be a problem because you
might easily conclude that the extinction procedure
wasn’t working, and give up.
 It is therefore important to understand, and to
inform every party that the behavior may get worse
before it gets better
 Otherwise people are likely to go back to reinforcing
the behavior, which may make the behavior occur at
a higher rate
Problems with extinction – side effects
 There are two further side effects of extinction:
 Resurgence
 Spontaneous recovery
 Resurgence occurs when behavior that used to
produce reinforcement in the past reappears
Resurgence: the reappearance, during extinction, of
previously effective behavior.
Problems with extinction – side effects
 Imagine little harry learns at home that throwing things
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across the room gets him what he wants.
Then he learns in school that there are more socially
acceptable ways to get things i.e. be polite.
Harry grows up and gets married, but his wife annoys him
but leaving shoes around the place.
Harry politely asks her to stop, but one day she forgets
(being polite is put into extinction).
The next time his wife leaves shoes around the place Harry
yells and throw things across the room.
Here a behavior which used to produce reinforcement has
reappeared
Problems with extinction – side effects
 Resurgence can be compared to Freud’s idea of
regression. Freud suggested that immature behavior
may reappear later in life.
 From a behaviorist perspective, any behavior that
once produced reinforcement may reappear if
another way of obtaining reinforcement is put on
extinction
 Behaviorists therefore have to be very careful not to
reinforce unacceptable behavior that has resurged,
or it will strengthen
Problems with extinction – side effects
 Sometimes after the successful completion of an
extinction procedure, the behavior suddenly
reappears without warning, this is called
spontaneous recovery
Spontaneous recovery: the reappearance of the target
behavior following its extinction
 Spontaneous recovery is not a problem, as long as
the behavior is not reinforced when it reappears.
Problems with extinction – side effects
 The difference between resurgence and spontaneous
recovery is that in spontaneous recovery the behavior
that reappears is the behavior on extinction
 Whereas with resurgence the behavior that
reappears is some other behavior that has produced
reinforcement in the past
 As you can see there are problems with extinction.
However these problems can often be overcome is
they are used with other procedures. One of these is
called differential reinforcement.
Differential Reinforcement
 Differential Reinforcement is an umbrella term for several
procedures in which the rate of target behavior is changed
by the combined used of extinction and reinforcement
Differential Reinforcement: any procedure that combines
reinforcement and extinction to change the frequency of a
target behavior.
 Note: you can use DR to increase of decrease the target
behavior, today we concentrate on the latter
Kinds of Differential Reinforcement
 Although it may be difficult to understand how
reinforcement could reduce the frequency of a behavior,
some examples of the kinds of DR will help clarify the
situation
 Lets start simple, we are dealing with problems where the
behavior occurs too often.
 If we want the behavior to occur less often, then it can be a
good idea to provide reinforcement for the behavior when it
occurs less often. This is called differential reinforcement of
low rate (DRL)
DRL
DRL: the procedure of reinforcing the target behavior when it
occurs at a low rate.
 ‘But how can we reinforce behavior without making it
occur less often?’
 It sounds crazy but the key difference is that were not just
reinforcing the behavior, were reinforcing the behavior only
when it occurs at a low rate.
 Lets think of an example
DRL
 Imagine we have a child (Mike) who eats too fast
 We want him to eat more slowly
 This could mean that he currently puts food in his
mouth ten times a minute
 Using DRL we would choose a lower number, say 4
lots of food per minute, and reinforce that behavior.
 Therefore we are reinforcing the act of eating slowly
Differential Reinforcement of Alternate Behavior (DRA)
 The idea behind DRA is to put the target behavior on
extinction, whilst reinforcing some other behavior.
DRA: the procedure of reinforcing an alternate
behavior instead of the target behavior
 In DRA reinforcers that were available for the target
behavior become contingent of some more
acceptable alternate behavior.
 For example, whereas attention used to be given to a
child for screaming, now attention is not given for
screaming, but is given for playing quietly with toys
Differential Reinforcement of Incompatible behavior (DRI)
 Imagine I asked you to sit down and walk across the
room at the same time?
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Impossible right?
 Well that forms the basis for DRI
 One way to reduce the frequency of an unwanted
behavior is to reinforce other behavior that is
incompatible with that behavior
DRI: the procedure of reinforcing a behavior that is
incompatible with the target behavior
Differential Reinforcement of Incompatible behavior (DRI)
 For example, the chief reason why kids get out of their seat in school is
the attention that they get from the teacher
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Some teachers can reduce the frequency of such behavior by ignoring it: putting it on
extinction
 However this may take some time, especially if the students have
received attention for wandering for some time.
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DRI speeds up this process and avoids the negative side effects of extinction
 This is because DRI creates a situation where the child can still get
reinforcement, but they are getting it for a behavior that is
incompatible with the target behavior.
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Now students get attention for being in their seats
 DRI and DRA are very similar. The difference being that in DRA the
‘other’ behavior being reinforced is not necessarily incompatible with
the target behavior
Rules for using differential reinforcement
 Define the target behavior
 Put the undesirable target behavior on extinction
 Reinforce the desirable target behavior
 Monitor the results
Define the target behavior
 With DR, there are generally two target behaviors.
You're trying to reduce the frequency of one behavior
and increase the frequency of another.
 In some cases the target behaviors are different rates
of the same activity e.g. eating fast versus eating slow
Put the undesirable target behavior on extinction
 Here you need to identify the reinforcers that are
maintaining the problematic behavior.
 When you have done this you must prevent those
reinforcers from following the unwanted behavior
Reinforce the desirable target behavior
 While you have the undesirable behavior on
extinction, you reinforce the desirable behavior
 So you put the behavior you want to weaken on
extinction, and you reinforce the behavior you want
to strengthen
Monitor the results
 You need to make sure that your intervention is
producing the desired results.
 For example your reinforcer may be wrong, or
bootleg reinforcement may be causing problems.
 You will only know these things if you measure
what's happening.
Flash card
 Extinction
 withholding the reinforcers that maintain a target behavior
 Partial reinforcement effect
 increased resistance to extinction following intermittent
reinforcement
 Extinction burst
 a sharp increase in the frequency of the behavior on extinction
 Resurgence
 reappearance during extinction of previously effective behavior
 Spontaneous recovery
 reappearance of target behavior following its extinction
Flash card
 Differential Reinforcement
 procedure that combines extinction and reinforcement to
change the frequency of a target behavior
 DRL
 procedure of reinforcing the target behavior only when it
occurs at a low rate
 DRA
 procedure of reinforcing an alternative behavior instead of the
target behavior
 DRI
 procedure of reinforcing a behavior that is incompatible with
the target behavior
Flash card
 DRL stands for:
 Differential reinforcement of low rates
 DRA stands for:
 Differential reinforcement of alternative behavior
 DRI stands for:
 Differential reinforcement of incompatible behavior