Chapter 6 Aversive Control of Behavior

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Chapter 6Aversive Control of Behavior
Prepared by Brady J. Phelps, South Dakota State
University
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Aversive events

• Primary aversive stimuli
• Conditioned aversive stimuli (Save)
• The naturally occurring punishing contingencies
  of the physical world

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Classes of Reinforcing and Punishing Stimuli
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Contingencies of Punishment

• Positive punishment occurs when a stimulus is
  presented following an operant and the rate of
  response decreases. ex. Spanking
• Negative punishment occurs when a stimulus is
  removed reliant on a response. Negative
  punishment should not be confused with extinction.

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Contingencies of Punishment

• Relativity of reinforcement and punishment
• The Premack principle states that the opportunity
  to engage in a higher frequency behavior will
  reinforce a lower frequency response. Essentially
  reinforcement is relative and not absolute. This
  also applies to punishment.

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Reinforcement and Punishment

• A reinforcement can be either the presentation of
  a desirable item such as money or food, or the
  removal of an unpleasant stimulus, such as verbal
  nagging or physical pain.
• A punishment can be the removal of a desirable
  condition such as driving privileges or the
  presentation of an unpleasant condition such as
  physical pain.

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Reinforcement and Punishment

• All things being equal, most people will respond
  better to both immediate reinforcement and
  immediate punishment.
• Most punishments in American society are given
  for behaviors that are immediately reinforcing,
  (drug use) while the threat of the punishments
  for these deeds is delayed and uncertain.

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Reinforcement and Punishment

• Punishment, by itself, tends to be ineffective
  except for temporarily suppressing undesirable
  behavior. Only very severe punishment can produce
  long-term suppression of behavior
• Mild, logical and consistent punishment can be
  informative and helpful.

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Effectiveness of Punishment

• Manner of introduction
• Intensity of punishment
• Immediacy of punishment
• Schedule of punishment
• Schedule of reinforcement
• Availability of other reinforcers
• Response alternatives

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Making Punishment Most Effective

• Abrupt Introduction of punishment
• Pigeons suddenly received a moderate shock
  (80V)which irreversibly suppressed responding
  whereas a gradually increasing the shock
  intensity (60V-130V) responding would continue
  past the moderate shock intensity.
• Intensity of punishment
• High intensity positive punishment may
  permanently suppress behavior due to the
  organisms discontinue of responding
• If organisms do respond after punishment,
  behavior eventually recovers to prepunishment
  levels.

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Making Punishment Most Effective

• Immediacy of punishment
• Punishment is most effective at reducing
  responses when it is presented shortly after the
  behavior
• Schedule of punishment
• Punishment delivered continuously is more
  effective versus intermittently. As the rate of
  punishment increases the response decreases.

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Delay of Punishment The longer the delay between
response and punisher, the less effective the
punishment will be. Response -------------------
------gt Punisher Ex) Solomon et al (1968) with
dogs 15 sec delay --gt Suppression for 3
minutes 5 sec delay --gt 8 days 0 sec delay
--gt 2 weeks
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Procrastination Humans (and animals) tend to
behave in ways that produce delayed punishment
over immediate punishment, even if the delayed
punisher is of greater intensity. Ex) Cramming
for an exam Study some now -------gt Small
punisher now Cram a lot later -------gt Large
punisher later
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If using punishment

• If you are punishing a specific behavior, the
  reinforcement for that behavior should be
  discontinued,or at least reduced or made
  available contingent upon some other appropriate
  behavior.
• Punishment only teaches one thing What NOT to
  do. What kind of teacher would only try to teach
  by just saying No!?

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Motivation and Punishment

• When motivation is reduced the punishment is most
  effective.
• Azrin trained pigeons to peck a key on a VI
  schedule and later they introduced 160V shock for
  every 100th response. The response rate continued
  at 60, 65, 70, 75 and 85 of the pigeons free
  feeding weight. At 85 of free feeding weight the
  responding stopped.
• Behavior may be completely suppressed when the
  motivation to respond is low.
• Research suggests when motivation is increased
  after punishment, responding will not recover to
  prepunishment levels.

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Contingencies of Negative Reinforcement
Escape responses Avoidance responses A negative
reinforcer Shock-shock interval Response-shock
interval
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Escape vs. Avoidance

• Negative reinforcement occurs whenever an operant
  results in the removal or prevention of a
  stimulus and the operant subsequently increases
  in rate
• Negative reinforcement contingencies control
  escape and avoidance
• The actual distinction between what is escape and
  what is avoidance is difficult to maintain as the
  aversive stimulus from which a subject may escape
  will re-occur with high probability in an operant
  chamber (the shock-shock interval) and with
  somewhat less probability in the natural
  environment
• In general, a subject will acquire escape before
  avoidance
• Avoidance responses are VERY resistant to
  extinction

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Escape vs. Avoidance

• Escape responding is reactive, it is acquired
  more readily than avoidance responding.
• Avoidance responding is proactive and will only
  be acquired after a history of escape.

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Types of Avoidance

• If a warning signal precedes the aversive
  stimulus and a response during this warning
  stimulus prevents the aversive stimulus delivery,
  this constitutes discriminated avoidance.
• Discriminated avoidance can be very difficult to
  acquire, as the warning stimulus comes to be a CS
  that will elicit respondents that can interfere
  with the avoidance.
• If the avoidance response is part of an
  organisms species-specific behavior the
  avoidance response will be much more readily
  acquired than otherwise. Example Pigeons
  typically fly away from a threat or an aversive
  stimulus, hence flapping wings or flying will be
  easily acquired as an avoidance response.
  Pecking a key or pressing a foot-treadle would be
  difficult to acquire as an avoidance response.
  Likewise rats may innately freeze or leap/climb
  in response to a threat before running away.
  During the warning stimulus, either behavior
  would be incompatible with lever pressing lever
  pressing to avoid electric shock is hindered.

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Modaresi (1990)

• Rats learning a lever press to avoid shock with
  levers positioned at different heights
• Lever presses that avoided shock and resulted in
  a safety platform

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Nondiscriminated Avoidance

• If no warning stimulus precedes the aversive
  stimulus which itself occurs periodically, this
  constitutes nondiscriminated avoidance or Sidman
  avoidance. In the operant chamber, the subject
  must perform the avoidance response periodically,
  once every 60 seconds or so, to prevent the
  aversive stimulus from occurring.
• Many behaviors of clinical interest are avoidance
  responses to unseen or unsignalled aversive
  events, most obvious in obsessive compulsive
  disorder. The behaviors of Freuds patients were
  avoidance responses controlled by interpersonal
  (family, relationship, marriage) aversive events.
  The behaviors were labeled as dissociative or
  conversion but they cannot be explained as being
  due to the condition. A label for a behavior
  cannot be used to explain the behavior. A person
  who displays/performs different personalities is
  said to have dissociative identity disorder.
  When asked why the person displays the different
  personalities, one cannot logically say it is due
  to the dissociative identity disorder.

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Shock Frequency and Avoidance

• Shock-Shock or S-S interval 10 secs for example
• Response-Shock or R-S interval 15 seconds for
  example, thus a response delays a shock but some
  responses still followed by shock
• If the R-S interval is greater than the S-S
  interval, there will be an overall reduction in
  frequency of shocks. Avoidance is maintained by
  an overall reduction in frequency of shock
• The R-S interval has to be greater than the S-S
  interval for avoidance responding to be learned.

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Herrnstein and Hineline

• Hineline and Herrnstein programmed contingencies
  such that in a two-second interval, the p. of a
  shock was .3 in the absence of a response but was
  reduced to .1 in the next two seconds if a
  response occurred. Hence responses were still
  followed by shock but at lower probability. With
  shock occurring at random intervals, these
  contingencies produced avoidance responding in 17
  of 18 subjects. Overall reduction in shock
  frequency was enough to maintain avoidance
  responding.

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Long-term effects of negative reinforcement

• Disruption of other behaviors outside the setting
  in which aversive consequences were delivered

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Side Effects of Aversive Procedures

• Skinners view of punishment
• Behavioral persistence Since punishment can be
  so effective, it is reinforcing for the user, the
  user can come to rely on it too much.
• Why are escape and avoidance responses so very
  resistant to extinction?

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• Seligman
• Repeated exposure to aversive events that are
  unpredictable and uncontrollable can have
  debilitating effects, learned helplessness and
  depression.

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Learned helplessness

• An animal experiences learned helplessness when
  it is exposed to an aversive stimulus and is
  unable to escape. After several pairings of this
  condition the animal gives up and stops
  attempting to escape. When given the opportunity
  to escape, learned helplessness is demonstrated
  by the animals failure to make a response.

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Helplessness and Depression

• Helplessness is involved with and is a model for
  depression. Depression may arise when a person
  feels inescapable of abuse.
• Helpless dogs (have previously learned
  helplessness) which are forced to make a response
  that escapes shock begin to make that response on
  their own. Depressed individuals may go through
  treatment in which they are not allowed to fail.
• In this situation, the person may learn to emit
  appropriate responses in the presence of aversive
  events

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Helplessness and Depression

• Although animal experiments shed light on human
  behavior, there are differences
• Human verbal behavior allows a person to talk
  about his/her problems and attribute them to a
  cause (internal or external)
• Attributing a problem to internal causes (e.g.,
  I am a failure) could function as a
  discriminative stimuli for giving up or losing
  hope
• Neuroscience models of learned helplessness

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Social defeat, aversion to social contact and
behavioral neuroscience

• Dopamine brain systems and depression, social
  phobia and PTSD
• Rodent model of defeat, i.e., social
  punishment/bullying
• Antidepressant drugs effects relative to those of
  anti-anxiety drugs
• Dopamine, BDNF neurons in the VTA and NAc

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Aggression

• Reflexive aggression occurs when painful stimuli
  are presented to two organisms and the organisms
  attack each other. This may also be known as
  pain-elicited aggression. The probability of
  aggression increased as more and more shocks were
  presented. This result of aggression to aversive
  stimuli applies to humans

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Operant Aggression

• When one person punishes anothers behavior, the
  punished individual may retaliate, a strategy
  known as operant aggression
• One way to escape aversive stimulation is to
  eliminate/neutralize the behavior of person who
  is delivering it
• Operant aggression is shaped and maintained
  through negative reinforcement

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Aggression breeds more aggression

• Operant and respondent principles suggest that
  the presentation of an aversive stimulus may
  elicit or set the occasion for aggressive
  behavior
• The sailors game
• Consider the interactions of the Israelis and the
  Palestinians For every Palestinian attack, there
  is an Israeli counterattack to punish and
  prevent any further such attacks.
• Every Israeli attempt at punishment and
  prevention simply leads to yet another
  Palestinian attack.
• Are the Israelis technically using punishment
  upon a specific target behavior and specific
  individual?
• Skinners principles are confirmed by controlled
  experiments showing that both physical and verbal
  provocation produces aggression

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Social Disruption

• When punishment is used to decrease behavior, the
  attempt is usually made to stop a particular
  response
• Hopefully unpunished behavior is not affected,
  but two factors work against this
• The person delivering the punishment
• The setting
• Both become conditioned aversive stimuli (Save)
• This negative side effect is known as Social
  Disruption
• Also, a social agent who frequently uses
  punishment becomes a conditioned punishing
  stimulus, whose presence can disrupt all ongoing
  operant behavior

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Coercion and its Fallout

• Murray Sidman, a prominent behavior analyst, has
  researched the social disruptive effects of
  aversive control
• Coercion Use of punishment and the threat of
  punishment to get others to act as we would like,
  and to our practice of rewarding people just by
  letting them escape from our punishments and
  threats
• Involves the basic contingencies of punishment
  and negative reinforcement

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Coercion and its Fallout

• Dropping out is an escape contingency, and a
  major social problem
• People drop out of education, family, personal
  and community responsibility, citizenship,
  society, and even life
• Sidman notes the common element between these
  forms of conduct is negative reinforcement
• Once involved in an aversive situation, a person
  can get out by removing themselves from the
  situation, thus strengthening the behavior of
  dropping out