 Greetings, everyone. It's time to talk about punishment. Yes, there we go. Okay. So the first thing we're going to talk about is decreasing behavior with punishment, right? So punishment is not really the opposite of reinforcement, but you have a functionally in opposite in terms of how it looks on behavior. So it's the decreasing of a behavior by contingent application of a stimulus. Of course, we're talking about positive punishment there, right? So we'll talk about that in a second. So my definition is a little bit off. That definition is more appropriate for positive punishment. Again, so punishment is just the decreasing of a behavior with a contingent application or removal of a stimulus. So that captures both of them. This is where it gets a little weird. Most people think that punishment requires an aversive stimulus or aversive something you don't enjoy, a spanking, a cold shower or soap in your mouth or whatever it may be. But we typically, I mean, typically that's right, that it is an aversive stimulus that is a punishment. But it doesn't have to be. Sometimes in odd situations, something nice, something friendly can be a punishment, right? So we often call that patronizing. It's like, oh, you're patronizing me. But again, it doesn't have to be an aversive stimulus. It's just commonly thought of as an aversive stimulus. Really, punishment is suppression. Extinction is about getting rid of a behavior, right? So that reduces it to near zero. But punishment suppresses the behavior. So it sticks around as long as the punisher, the person doing the punishment sticks around. So it's very context specific. So you learn that it's okay to do something in one context and not in another. A classic example, this is my buddy's dog. He was getting on the couch all the time. Everybody lives by himself. And he's got a wonderful, I think it's a golden retriever. Anyway, the dog was getting on the couch while he was at work and he'd come home and the couch would be all hairy and blah, blah, blah. And so he went to his vet and he asked the vet, why? You know, what can I do to get the dog to not be on the couch? And the vet looked at him very simply and said, Do you mean why you're not there? And the point is simple. It's like, well, he can get you can train the dog not to be on the couch while you're not there. No problem. You just got to punish it a little bit maybe, right? For getting on the couch. But that's not going to do a damn thing to the dog when the dog is not, when the owner is not home. So kids, it's the same type of thing. They'll learn that one behavior is going to get punished in the context of one particular person, but it won't generalize. It won't go to new situations. So it's a very sensitive context. Again, we have to focus on that immediate effect. You know, if we don't see the change in behavior as a result of what we thought was a punisher, then it wasn't punishment. So if I spank a kid for a particular behavior, and that behavior does not decrease, then it was not punishment. It's that simple types of punishers, two different types, just like what we have with reinforcement, we've got positive punishment. So pain inducing. So positive punishment, when we're talking is what we're talking about here is adding a stimulus following a behavior to reduce that behavior. So the stimuli that induce pain are going to be your unconditional punishers. Those typically work quite well. So getting punched, getting spanked, getting shocked, getting the working to shock our children or anything like that. But you get the idea. Reprimands, though, are conditioned punishers. You had to learn that those things are punishers. So the word no, that can be a punisher, but it's usually because it was paired with something else, paired with pain in the past. So when a parent says no, and then the child then immediately touches the hot stove, they learn right quickly that the word no is something bad. So again, a reprimand, a verbal reprimand or something like that, or a visual reprimand is a conditioned punisher. It's not something you automatically respond to. You have to learn to respond to that one. Negative punishment, and this is often thought of as response cost. This is where the loss of a stimulus will decrease a behavior. So a response is going to cost you something. That's the easy way to think of it. A response leads to the loss of something. This is most simply like a fine, excuse me, a traffic ticket. That traffic ticket by itself is not generally anything. It's a rather neutral stimulus, but it's not neutral the moment you pay the fine, or the moment you pay the increased insurance premiums for getting a ticket. So that loss of money is a negative punisher. Timeout is another example of negative punishment, and it only works if you do what's in parentheses. Timeout from reinforcement. That's the real definition of timeout, by the way, is that timeout is a short, not the definition, that's the real title for timeout. Timeout, as we typically say, is a very short version of the real definition, which is timeout from reinforcement. It's just nobody wants to say the damn thing. So losing access to reinforcers is a negative punisher, and that's what timeout is all about. You put somebody in a little room or something like that, or you remove them from the context, and they're losing access to reinforcers. We have two different types of timeout. I'm just going to brush over these really fast, because we're going to cover them heavily later on. So it's an exclusionary timeout, we're removing the person for a short time, and I put a bland environment here. The reason being is you don't want anything in that environment to be potentially reinforcing at all. And I've got some fun stories to tell you about what some teachers thought was bland and didn't work so well, because they were trying to use timeout and they just didn't work, and they couldn't figure out why, and it ultimately ended up being that the environment in itself could produce some reinforcers. So the other one, non-exclusionary. So using the stimulus to indicate that a certain reinforcement source is not available, this is, again, we'll go into more depth here, but basically it's signaling, if you've got a kid in the classroom, this would signal to the stimulus, it would signal to the teacher that the child X is not going to get any attention for the next three minutes, or something like that. So it's not exclusionary. You're not removing them from the context, you're leaving them in the context, but you're not giving them the particular reinforcers for that particular time. And it's contingent upon a behavior, so that's what makes it punishment.