 Hey everyone, it's Veronica Howard. Welcome. This time around we're going to be talking about negative punishment and of all of the very simple behavior change procedures that we've talked about so far. Those include positive reinforcement, positive punishment. Negative punishment isn't too confusing for people to understand. There are just some small technicalities here that I want to discuss in our time together today. So this is a relatively straightforward procedure. People usually get this pretty quickly, but I want to make sure that I'm reviewing just a couple of pretty important factors. So first of all, remember that when we're talking about negative punishment, you may also hear this described as punishment by contingent withdrawal. Well, we're talking about as a procedure where a stimulus is temporarily withdrawn and that stimulus is one that has reinforcing value. The result is that the behavior that the loss is contingent upon decreases in the future. So I want to say that one more time because this is very confusing. Punishment by contingent withdrawal is the temporary withdrawal of any stimulus of reinforcing value with the result that the behavior that the loss was contingent upon decreases in the future. So you engage in a behavior, you lose something valuable and you're less likely to do the behavior that resulted in something valuable. Again, perfect example. Many people report that they will slow down when they are passing police officers very likely because people tend to exceed the speed limit. So if you are speeding past a police officer and you are pulled over and you receive a fine, a fine represents the loss of some money, you are probably less likely to engage in speeding past police officers in the future. There's a couple of important variables here. Note, first of all, that it has to be kind of a temporary withdrawal. So in the case of a fine, that one is more difficult because you don't actually get your money back. But in the case of like taking a toy away from a child for a few minutes, that's a kind of temporary withdrawal. That's what we're talking about. There has to be an opportunity for the learner or for the organism to get the stimulus back in the future. The other thing to note is that the stimulus that we are withdrawing in the situation and this part is important and very confusing for folks. The stimulus being removed is not necessarily the stimulus causing or maintaining the response. So it's not the reinforcer for the behavior that's going to decrease. It's a different stimulus of reinforcing value. It would be for instance like anytime my teenage son swears in front of Nana, I take away his Xbox for the day. Swearing in front of Nana has reinforced by an entirely different set of contingencies. The Xbox or getting access to the Xbox is not necessarily the reinforcer for swearing. It's a different stimulus of reinforcing value. So remember that when we're talking about negative punishment, we're talking really about just the removal of any stimulus of value. Thus that it's going to decrease the probability of this response in the future. And you want to bear in mind also that this is a different procedure that we're going to talk about in the future. So if what you're looking at is the permanent stopping of a reinforcer that's actually maintaining a behavior and you're seeing the behavior decrease, that's a different procedure. We're not going to learn that for a couple of topics yet. Right now we're just talking about the temporary removal of a stimulus of reinforcing value, not the reinforcer, but a stimulus of reinforcing value. Thus that behavior decreases. So let's go through a few different examples. I can give you some examples and some non-examples. Imagine that mom has started taking away Billy's TV privileges for a day. If she sees him playing computer games during study time, Billy's rate of game playing during study time decreases. In this case, the reinforcer or the stimulus of reinforcing value that's being removed is watching TV. And this is negative punishment because watching TV is not necessarily the reinforcer for studying behavior or whatever behavior was going on there. So you see there's no relationship between the target behavior and the removal of the stimulus. We're not actually withholding a reinforcer. We're taking away a different stimulus of reinforcing value. And we see that this removal is temporary because note that she's only taking the TV privileges away for a day. Let's do another example. So mom, however, is getting tired of all this sassiness, all this nonsense. She rigs up the computer so it actually won't let Billy access the games during study time. Over time, Billy no longer tries to play the computer games. In this case, what we have there is the reinforcer for trying to access the games is the game themselves. And this is not negative punishment because this is something else entirely. We see that the child is actually prevented from getting access to the stimulus of reinforcing value. So it's not that something is being removed. It's almost like something is being blocked. And because access to the reinforcer is being blocked, we see that this is a non permanent procedure. And this is an example of the thing that we're going to be coming back to in a few different topics. So this is not negative punishment because you don't have the behavior happening and then a stimulus being removed following the behavior with the result of the behavior decreases. What you have is the availability of the video game actually never occurs. So the person can't play with it. So they can't be distracted. This is something else entirely. This is not negative punishment. Okay, next one. Sam sends Toby a nude Snapchat photo of his downstairs departs. Toby completely ignores Sam for the next day. Sam is less likely to send these kinds of inappropriate photos to Toby in the future. In this particular case, we see that the stimulus of reinforcing value here was Toby's attention. We see that Toby stops interacting with Sam after the photo was taken. But ignoring him was only temporary. So is this negative punishment? I would say yes. I think that this is closer to the idea of negative punishment because what we have is a temporary removal of attention. Now it's possible that attention may have been the reinforcer for sending the Snapchat photos. It's also possible given the nature of the content that was being shared that maybe that wasn't the reinforcer. Maybe it was like an activity reinforcer that we don't talk about. But in any case, what we see is a temporary removal of a stimulus of reinforcing value. In this case, attention, contingent on an undesirable response. And one of the keys here is it is temporary. So this one is probably a pretty good example of negative punishment. So let's do one more. Toby and Sam just broke up. Sam keeps texting Toby asking to get back together. Toby ignores the messages. Sam eventually stops texting. In this case, we might say that the reinforcer could be Toby's reply to the messages or getting back together. But that never happens. It's permanently withdrawn. So we see Toby never reply to the messages. It's done. Done so absolutely gone. So this is not an example of negative punishment. This is the permanent removal of a reinforcer. So this is something else entirely. And again, we have not learned this procedure yet. So if you get some of these examples where it's kind of close, but it's missing some features, you can just put the word unknown because it's something that we haven't learned yet. And we'll continue to have some of these examples where the scenario that I'm giving you is close to, but not perfectly identical to something that we're learning because it misses some critical feature. Maybe the stimulus comes before. Maybe the stimulus that is driving the behavior is not actually a temporary removal, but a permanent removal. And in all of those cases, that's unknown. This is a procedure we haven't learned yet and we will come back to this. So stick around. We'll go through some variants on negative reinforcement next. We're actually going to talk about time out. So come on back and watch that video. I'll see you guys soon.