 Hey everybody welcome back it's Veronica Howard. Let's talk about some real world published empirical examples of differential reinforcement. Remember differential reinforcement is just absolutely hands down the best way to decrease problem behavior by replacing it with something else. And here are just a few of my favorite published studies that show you this in action. So Hanley and colleagues in 1997 were looking at two young kids who were in treatment because they had this really problematic behavior of severe destructive behavior. We're talking about like knocking over TVs and breaking stuff that's really expensive in their homes. The children acted out and they were busting things up potentially to get the attention of adults and the researchers figured this out by doing a functional assessment by actually looking at the circumstances under which the target behavior occurred. So they're not just speculating that attention was the reinforced they actually did a mini experiment to make sure that that was the case. In the baseline condition researchers would do things like give rapper mans whenever a target destruction behavior occurred things like don't do that. And the target behavior here was I think destruction of things like simple paper stuff that you could destroy but without like actually putting someone out of a lot of resources. On screen here I'm showing you some data on the y-axis is the number of destructive behaviors per minute or per unit of time. And on the x-axis along the bottom I'm showing you sessions. So destructive behavior the rate of it per minute across time and how often those behaviors were occurring. You can see in the baseline condition when the researchers are saying don't do that there was a fair amount of destructive behavior five destructive behaviors per minute that would be something like in this lecture it'll probably be five or six minutes long it'd be me destroying 30 things it's a lot of destructive behavior. In the next condition in the treatment condition these differential reinforcement the researchers told kids that they could get the experimenter's attention for an alternative response of physically different behavior. You could get attention from the researcher if you ask for it and the researchers then went and provided some training on like what does that mean to ask how do you request attention from people like how do you use your words to make sure that kids actually knew how to do it so they modeled and they played you know they went through the process they did some trials and then they went into the treatment condition. Once the kids demonstrated that they actually had the behavior in their repertoire once they could do it the researchers then switched into the full differential reinforcement for alternative response condition. So DRA means that you're going to get the reinforcer for an alternative response that isn't the problem behavior in this case the problem behavior is destruction attention is available if you ask for it the alternative behavior and so DRA asking for attention will produce reinforcement acting out destroying stuff behaving aggressively is not going to contact attention it's not going to result in any attention from the researcher. So let's see what that actually did we'll return to the graph remember I'm showing you the baseline condition where we saw maybe on average three or four destructive behaviors per minute in this differential reinforcement for alternative behavior condition the destructive responses dropped to zero and they were consistently zero for four days in a row but remember we don't take this on faith we don't take this on gospel right now we're looking at just a comparison design anything could have happened in there so being good researchers they went back to a baseline condition where they in the baseline condition remember every time destructive behavior happened they go oh don't do that and you see once providing that attention contingent on destructive behavior we see a huge increase in the destructive behavior in fact look at this huge the the session number 12 there were almost 13 destructive behaviors per session this is something called a contrast effect where when you have behavior suppressed for a while and then reinforcement becomes available you just do it a lot you go crazy so we obviously don't want to leave it there being good researchers they went back to a reversal condition where attention is no longer available contingent on destructive behaviors this is a perfect example of differential reinforcement for an alternative response and I think this helps highlight some of the rules that you want to keep in mind when you're using differential reinforcement first of all this alternative response actually asking for attention was an easy behavior and you want to make sure that when you're using differential reinforcement you make that alternative response you make whatever it is you're going to reinforce very very easy to contact the reinforcer you want to make it as easy as possible so it's not harder to get the reinforcer than it was to get the reinforcer for problem behavior so simple is better and you want to make sure that if the client is not earning the reinforcer you're not really doing the procedure so make sure that you're using lots of reinforcement for the alternative response remember matching law says you want to have tons lots a ton of reinforcement available for the behavior that you want and none at all available for the behavior that you don't want if those numbers are off if you're not using extinction for the undesirable behavior or if it's harder to get the reinforcer for the desirable behavior than the undesirable behavior it's not going to work in fact you can see the behavior get a little bit worse if the client is going to act out to earn the reinforcer and then that's easier for them and you also want to make sure that if the behavior problem behavior starts to occur less likely and you get that replacement behavior then then and only when when they start to become more fluent can you kind of make the replacement behavior a little bit more difficult progress slowly track your data go slow wait a while make sure that they're earning lots of reinforcement for an alternative response compared to the previous problem behavior that was very easy to pay it off for the person consistently but remember I said that extinction and and even extinction when you're using differential reinforcement can be difficult let's look at an example that I think most people can relate to we're talking about a kid maybe acting up in a store maybe they want snacks they're like mom can I have a candy bar what's the reinforcer for that well if the person is requesting a candy bar maybe throwing a little bit of a tantrum you can probably speculate that the thing that they were asking for is the reinforcer in this case begging for snacks it could indicate that the behavior that we're looking at here is reinforced by access to snacks and I'm going to put a little optional video for you below where this child is just impeccable at getting the attention of other people and making it really aversive for the caregiver they don't want to use the extinction procedure whatever but what I want you to bear in mind is that this is aversive using that procedure with fidelity is aversive in this case if we're going to use extinction it means that you have to completely completely withhold reinforcement for the begging behavior and potentially make the the reinforcer contingent on something else right but the process of withholding the reinforcer can be really really difficult and you might have seen like these babies this this baby's having a bit of a moment they're having just just they're taking a second uh we've all seen a kid completely lose their stuff at the store and what I want you to bear in mind when you're looking at this when you're seeing another caregiver trying to implement those behavior change procedures when they're trying to potentially use differential reinforcement the best thing that we can do as a community is just be cool ourselves don't make it aversive for the parent who's trying to implement that procedure maybe mind our own business or even ask the parent express you know solidarity say it's really tough but you're going to get it don't make it any more difficult for the parent or caregiver to use this kind of non-aversive behavior change procedure because very often if the parent is feeling judged if everyone is stopping and looking and laughing or recording the parent they're not going to implement the procedure with fidelity they're going to stop or they're going to escalate to a more aversive behavior change procedure they could spank they could stop trying they could implement with poor fidelity that's going to result in problems further on so you've seen it you're going to see it again you're going to see children having a bit of a moment this is the only response in their repertoire that helps them contact the reinforcer that they want so how do we use differential reinforcement right how do we think ahead how are we planful how are we mindful of how we're actually going to use our science to get the results that we want well if you've got a kid who has a history now of begging for snacks of throwing a tantrum in the store of being really inappropriate to get the things that they want to need you have to think ahead and you have to have an alternative plan the alternative plan can be as simple as if you sit quietly then you get the snack or if you don't beg for a period of time remember this is differential reinforcement of other behavior then you get the snack but you have to have something you have to have something in mind what amount of time could you ask them to wait if a child for instance demonstrates they can sit for two minutes then maybe you make your initial goal really easy to reach you make it one minute and after the child is consistently reaching that goal and they're getting a little snack every time you go shopping then you can kind of bulk up you can kind of go okay you did one minute you're a champ let's go up to two minutes right if they can make two minutes great if they can't make two minutes well maybe we need to go back a little bit an example of this is the study by Herd and Watson from 1999 so in this case the researchers were interested in understanding how do we keep older adults from wandering away from a care facility we know that wandering from a care facility can be incredibly dangerous it can lead to losing the person the person being exposed to abuse or to harm to physical injury to even death especially here in alaska if a person wanders away from their home during the winter and we can't find them in time they could freeze to death how do we keep the person from wandering away from the facility by providing a reinforcer in this case they're using a DRO procedure a DRO procedure is one where you provide the reinforcer if a target behavior does not occur during a period of time in this case the target behavior that we don't want to see is wandering away or being away from a particular area and the researchers were looking at what happens if we have a baseline condition where we see how many people are kind of up and wandering around throughout the facility and then what happens if we have a social attention condition where if the person is present and not engaging and wandering for a period of time if they haven't gotten up and move down to the facility or range of our observation where do they go in the baseline condition when there's no programmed consequences we see that the intervals or the amount of time per session that folks were wandering was quite high but when providing social attention for the client if they were not up and wandering if they were staying kind of put we see the amount of wandering decreases again we want to be good researchers so we go back up we remove the intervention to make sure that's our intervention and only our intervention that's causing the behavior change we see an increase again in the second baseline condition and then they reapply they want to be good stewards they want to protect the client they don't want to leave them in a baseline condition so they use the DRO procedure again if you're interested I will post a link to this study in the study guide so you can have a look and I'll also post it in the video description below it's a really really excellent study I encourage you to check it out but here are some of the empirical ways in which differential reinforcement has been used and I encourage you to check it out differential reinforcement is the most ethical most humane and most effective way of changing behavior especially for talking about decreasing problem behavior so I encourage you to check it out I'll see you guys next time