 All right, so we're getting back into it. It's Veronica Howard. Let's talk about some of the side effects and ethical considerations that you need to have when we're talking about extinction. So I'm going to use one of my favorite memes here. You guys remember Game of Thrones, I'm sure. One of my favorite memes ever comes from this creator online called Behavior Man. He puts up this meme. It says, brace yourselves. Extinction burst is coming and it's got Eddard Stark holding this sword like just mocking this meme that we have of like brace yourself winter is coming. And what it's trying to communicate here is this idea that extinction and the side effects of extinction can be a real pain. They can be aversive for everybody involved. Extinction is not a procedure that you really want to undertake lightly. What I mean by that is there's a lot of side effects. Those side effects are aversive. They're aversive not only for the client but for the folks around the client. Some of the side effects, some of the things that come with extinction are things like an increase in the frequency of behavior. This can be when the learner tries to do the behavior again and again and again and again to see if the behavior will pay off for them. You can also see an increase in behavioral variability. So for instance, if I'm trying to get my card to start, I put my key into the ignition and I turn it. An increase in frequency is I want to click click. I'm going to try to get it to go. But if for whatever reason turning the key more doesn't work, I can try other things. Maybe I'll take the key back out and put the key back in again or maybe I'll take the key out and I'll lean down and I'll blow into my ignition to see if something's happening or I'll pop the hood. So now we're into a totally different class of behaviors. I'm going to pop the hood and see if maybe the battery's not connected. Now coming up with all these different kinds of behaviors to try to get to the same outcome, which was the car turning on. You can also see things like a reemergence of other behaviors that were previously reinforced for that learner. So in this case, if a person has no history whatsoever in managing a car that doesn't turn over, they may not have a repertoire to go back to. But I have a little bit of handiness. So like I said, maybe I'm going to pop that hood. I'm going to look and see if the battery is connected. I'm going to try reconnecting the jumper cable or the posts on the battery or maybe I'll check and see if any of the spark plugs have come loose. I'm going to try some stuff that I know that in the past has helped me turn the car on that could maybe help now. Now that's a pretty functional way of dealing with it. But remember, function is in the eye of the motor. It produces a particular outcome. So for applying extinction, maybe to a behavior that's kind of annoying for us, but it still works for the client and helping them contact a reinforcer, maybe they're going to go to something else that's a little bit less socially acceptable. Let me give you an example. So maybe this person has learned that the way to get like teacher attention is to raise their hand, right? So I'm going to raise my hand, I'm going to wait for the teacher to call on me. But for whatever reason, the teacher is not going to call on that student. So they raise their hand and they try it, you know, maybe they increase the magnitude. Oh, calling me calling me, you get the variability of kind of swinging the arms. But that's not paying off, right? Teachers like I'm not going to call on that behavior. What else can you do? Well, you could be disruptive in class, you could punch a classmate, you could do a lot of stuff that's not socially acceptable that potentially can contact other reinforcers. And you might see some of the reemergence of problem behavior that you've gotten under control if you're using extinction. And this is one of the problems with extinction. This is one of the bad side effects of it. We also see that there can be emotional responding. There can be, people will have actual meltdown behavior, tantrums and screaming and aggression. Clients can be violent when they're experiencing extinction. One of the examples of this I provided in the study guide, and if you haven't already, check out this video. I'm not going to play it here in our presentation, but it's a really beautiful example of a young learner whose response has been placed on extinction. If I remember this correctly, that the little person wanted to ride a one of those coin operated horses outside of a restaurant. And in this particular case, the parents said, no, so they were deprived of the activity reinforcer. And you can see there's a lot of kind of counter control behavior going on here. And God bless this parent. They are doing their best with the situation. And I have all the sympathy in the world for this parent. He'll want to check this video out. This highlights the fact, however, that extinction is a really, really aversive procedure. It's especially aversive for the client who's experiencing it. Because remember, we're withholding a reinforcer, and reinforcers are incredibly important. So we have to talk ethically about how to use extinction. The problem with this is that extinction can be dangerous, both for the person whose behavior is being placed on extinction, the client themselves, it can also be really dangerous for any teachers or caregivers or people around the client, right? Like I mentioned, you can have aggression, you can have emotional responding, it's going to be really difficult to use extinction and to use extinction with fidelity. So when we're talking about ethics, you got to think about that. You have to ask yourself, is the juice here worth the squeeze of the effects that we're going to see for using extinction? You want to bear in mind that this is incredibly uncomfortable for the client, it's going to set the occasion, it's going to provide an opportunity for them to engage in all kinds of emotional, desperate behaviors. Because essentially, we're depriving that person of a reinforcer. But you don't want to do that. You don't want to necessarily deprive people of what they're seeking. You don't want to deprive them of their reinforcers. We want to find a better way. We want to find a way to methodologically and quantifiably teach people how to seek reinforcers appropriately. Or to use another meme here, one does not simply use extinction without teaching a replacement behavior. So we're actually going to come back and we're going to talk about differential reinforcement. When you're talking about behavior change procedures, differential reinforcement can be a behavior deceleration technique. You can decrease the rate of one response while increasing the rate of another response. And ethically speaking, that's the better way to go. Because a good behavior analyst is always going to combine extinction for an undesirable behavior or problem behavior with reinforcement for something else, right? You want to teach a person not to not do this behavior. You want to teach a person what to do instead of this behavior that's going to be placed on extinction. So I'm going to give you a few more examples here about how extinction as a behavior deceleration technique is different from other behavior deceleration techniques like punishment. But come on back. In the next topic, we're going to talk about differential reinforcement. We're going to talk about some of the ethical ways in which you actually can decrease problem behavior. I'll see you guys next time.