 All right everybody, it's Veronica Howard. So we're going to talk a little bit more about some examples of escape and avoidance. Remember that this content really is the most challenging content. I find that students really struggle here semester after semester because negative reinforcement is really difficult to wrap your head around. This idea of doing a behavior to prevent or escape something that's currently happening is, it's not intuitive. So we're going to take a little time here. I'm going to give you a few different examples. We're going to identify if we're looking at an example of negative reinforcement. If we're looking at escape or avoidance, we're also going to try to identify the behavior that is changing, as well as the reinforced error in these upcoming behavior change procedures. So we've got Marcy. Marcy's been arrested for possession of illegal drugs. During the first month of her sentence, she agrees to turn state's evidence and snitch on some friends who are selling heroin to help reduce her own charges. This is an example of what? Let's say this is probably an example of negative reinforcement. The behavior that we're seeing more of is the testifying behavior. And remember, we were having zero of it before. Now we're going to get her to testify. And the reason that we might be seeing this is because this is an example of escape. What that means is Marcy's already been caught. She's serving time. So she's already experiencing the jail time. And presumably it's aversive because she's willing to work to escape or avoid it. So this is probably an example of negative reinforcement. And what we're looking at here is specifically escape because the aversive stimulus, the negative reinforcer is already present. And now she's going to work to get away from it. Let's do another example. Most of us pay taxes in April. We try to prevent the consequences from not paying our taxes, like losing our property, going to jail. What is this? Well, I would say that this is probably also an example of negative reinforcement because we see that the taxes part, filing your taxes or paying your taxes is the behavior. And we get more of it. It's got a very specific schedule. And remember, we'll come back and talk about schedules in a future topic. But what we have here is probably avoidance. And I'm going to do a little asterisk here because we'll talk about some situations in which maybe it's not negative reinforcement. However, if you're paying taxes, if you're actually filing your taxes and paying off a balance, we're probably looking at avoidance. And then we're seeing an increase in the behavior of filing those taxes to escape or avoid, or excuse me, to avoid exclusively some sort of investigation or to keep your items from being taken away. Let's do another example. If you've ever gotten a bad headache, you know that sometimes taking an aspirin or some ibuprofen can help you feel better. What is this? Well, I would say this is also negative reinforcement because we have an increase in the taking medication behavior with the effect that it's going to allow us to escape the headache. The headache is already present. We're engaging in a response to escape or avoid the headache after it's arrived. So this is an example of escape behavior. But not all medication taking behavior is escape maintained. We could also have, like Diamante takes a trip to a medication every day to prevent migraines from developing. Is this escape or avoidance? I would say in this case, this is probably avoidance with a condition like migraines taking the medication to prevent something from happening means that you're working to prevent the delivery. You're working to avoid it. You never want it to come. So this could be migraine medication or blood pressure medication or, you know, antidepressants. Like you're working actively to prevent something from ever coming your way. So we're circumventing or we're nipping the bud before it ever gets delivered. And so this is an example of avoidance maintained behavior. Now, part of the difficulty here is that with some of these examples, you could make a strong case that there are possibly multiple reinforcers going on. So for instance, in the example of paying taxes, well, some people pay their taxes to avoid being audited. But others complete their taxes because they're receiving a tax refund. And in that case, yeah, one could potentially make the case here that we have an increase in behavior paying taxes or filing taxes. But it could be because of two totally different consequences. For some folks, it's going to be the avoiding the audit. And for others, it's going to be receiving the refund. And so what you have here is negative reinforcement, avoiding the audit versus positive reinforcement, receiving a tax refund. We might also see, for instance, what happens if you're really active, you're physically active, you keep in good health. Some people, if they're exercising for good health or because it makes them feel good, we might be talking about positive reinforcement. But if other people are exercising because they like that trim physique or they want to avoid or prevent any health problems from developing, maybe we're talking about negative reinforcement. And this can also be a challenge. To know which of these is actually the reinforcer for the behavior, we might have to do something called a functional analysis. And we're going to come back to understanding function a little bit. But remember that that really helps us identify and isolate the specific variable that's going on here. Now, if you're getting a question and you're not quite sure, are we looking at positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, ask yourself is something being added or something being removed. If it asks for a general procedure, you can just tell me reinforcement. If you see behaviors increasing, reinforcement. But if you have any questions, go ahead and email me or post them in the great question forum. We'll come back, we'll talk about more advanced examples of negative reinforcement in a moment.