 All right everybody, let's talk about the complexity of human experience. Okay, that's very deep. But what I mean is let's talk about the fact that when we are considering the person as they exist in their environment, we have to recognize that sometimes there are bi-directional relationships between different actors in the environment. What I mean by that is, for instance, you are a part of my environment. I'm the organism, you're my environment. And vice versa, when considering your behavior, I'm a part of your environment, which means that we can bi-directionally influence one another. Sometimes when analyzing these situations, it can be really difficult to figure out whose behavior are we even really talking about? What's going on here? And how then can we develop these kind of interlocking behavioral contingencies between different actors that might account for why some behaviors are increasing or decreasing relative to one another or relative to other people in the environment? So to really understand what the content that we're going to be talking about is, I recommend that you come and you watch the video from the study guide that describes the relationship between a parent and child. Now if you have not yet watched that video, go ahead and pause this and go ahead, go over, watch that video now so you understand what we're about to go through. So remember in this video, you've got two actors. You've got parent and child. You've got the child reaching for a remote, mom takes it away, child cries, mom returns the remote. But you have there are two human actors and each of their behavior is influencing one another. And you're trying to break that down, you're trying to account for each of the different humans in this scenario. You've got the child, their behavior is crying, and you've got mom who eventually will return the remote. Well, why? Well, antecedent is like, where and under what circumstance this stuff happens and consequences is how the environment has changed as a result of it. So let's try to analyze this. We see that the child has the remote, mom takes it away, right? So in this case, the antecedent is the child's remote is taken away. And then that sets the occasion for them to cry. And then when they cry, mom's like, oh, no, let me give you back that remote, right? So we see one full ABC analysis here, remote, remote, child cries, mom returns remote. We're going to watch this video one more time when we talk about functional analyses. This can help account for why the child may cry again in the future when something is taken away from them. We see that in the past, their behavior has produced the consequence of getting the thing back. Well, what about for mom though? Why did mom return the remote? Well, to understand that, we have to go and look at the child's behavior. Remember the child cried. So when the child is crying, mom's like, oh, no, she returns the remote. What effect does that produce for mom? Well, we saw in the video that the child stopped crying immediately. And so when we're analyzing these two different interlocking behavioral contingencies, remember, people work together, people live together. And so what we're looking at here on top is we have a situation where the child is receiving positive reinforcement or rather, excuse me, I should clarify, remember, linguistic language can be really lazy. We see that the child's behavior of crying has contacted positive reinforcement. And we see for mom on the bottom here that the returning the remote has contacted negative reinforcement. So when you're looking at some of these scenarios, look really carefully, right? So let me give you another one. Billy Wines, anytime mom asks him to clean up his room. Mom started by making him sit in the corner until he stopped whining, but Bobby's rate of whining has increased. So mom is likely to stop asking him to clean his room. So she's not going to ask him anymore. What's happening to Bobby's behavior? So we break this down. Let's look at Bobby's behavior. Bobby's behavior is whining. When he whines, what happens? Well, mom tried to make him sit in the corner, but now really what's happened in the long term is she's just less likely to ask him to do stuff. So what's happened here is negative reinforcement. What that means is by engaging in the whining behavior, Bobby has successfully made it so that he's less likely to get things asked of him. This is a classic negative reinforcement or escape maintained paradigm. But what about for mom? What's going on for mom's behavior? Well, let's look at mom's behavior. Mom initially began with asking him to do something. So clean your room. What happened as a result of that behavior? Well, then Bobby whined, right? And the whining led to her trying to put Bobby in the corner, but eventually he sees she just stops asking him to clean his room. So if we see a decrease in the rate of behavior because a stimulus was added, in this case the stimulus being added, was Bobby's whining behavior. What do we have? This is positive punishment operating on mom's behavior. And so really what we're kind of looking at here is this complex phenomenon known as a negative reinforcement trap. So negative reinforcement trap refers to this kind of independent reinforcement cycle that multiple people are involved in. And at least one of the parties in this paradigm is going to be, their behavior is going to be maintained through negative reinforcement. And unfortunately what we come to find is that there's going to be this kind of coercive or undesirable relationship happening between people. So we've got Billy on top upon receiving a request on the parent objection or whining. The consequence though is that the parent relents and doesn't ask for the child to do that anymore. So Bobby here on top is receiving or experiencing a negative reinforcement procedure. The negative reinforcement procedure is operating on that whining behavior. Mom on the bottom upon experiencing the whining relents removes the request, the child stops whining. So we might see that this is negative reinforcement. It reinforces the relenting. You could even go back and reframe this from the perspective of the request itself as being punished. It has the whining being added. You see it's kind of this long slipstream of behavior. But what we have here is a kind of undesirable, her coercive relationship between Bobby and his mom. Such that mom's not going to ask Bobby to clean his room anymore. And if asked to do other things, you might see that the child actually, you see the behavior happening in other places. So more whining behavior to kind of escape or avoid doing the unpleasant task. Another example of this could be, for instance, when you have parents interacting with their kids in such a way that maybe they use punishment or threat of punishment. So maybe you have a child who engages in some inappropriate behavior. The parent, the person being displayed on top here uses punishment or threats to use punishment like you better or else. And you see the immediate decrease in problem behavior from the child. But for the child, the antecedent is the threat of punishment. We see the decrease in the inappropriate behavior. And you can see some avoidance of future punishment or threats. And again, we're seeing this kind of coercive behavior between these two actors, such that remember the the aversive control procedures, negative punishment and and or excuse me, any kind of punishment and negative reinforcement are really aversive. They're very addicted because they work really fast. So negative reinforcement trap again, just refers that idea of a coercive cycle of relationship or it's a coercive pattern of negative reinforcement between two different actors. And you want to be able to break down for each person what's happening, under what circumstances do what behaviors occur and what effects do they produce so you can better understand those relationship dynamics between individuals. Let me know if you guys have any questions. Otherwise, I hope that this content is easy to understand. If not, remember you can always post a question in the great question form.