 Motivating operations, here we go. Motivating operations, now I'm going to violate my own rule here a little bit. I just told you that in reality that behavior is this three-term contingency. There's a discriminative stimulus, there is a response, and then there's a consequence for that response, which is punishing, or I'm sorry, reinforcing or punishing or something like that. But what we've got here is we're saying that there might be something else to that. We have to think of the things that motivate people, right? So a motivating operation is something that simply changes the value of a reinforcing stimulus. So you can either increase the value of a reinforcer, or you can decrease the value of a reinforcer. And you guys may be already picking up on where I'm going with this. So again, slide here saying change the frequency of behavior that has been reinforced by those particular stimuli. That's what we're doing with reinforcement in general. The general is changing the frequency of behavior. But what we have in order to achieve those particular goals is again using these criteria of these things called motivating operations. So establishing operations are going to strengthen the value of a reinforcer. So it's going to be more effective at changing behavior. That's what an establishing operation is. So establishing operations are most easily done by withholding access to a reinforcer. So think about it in terms of M&Ms. I'm an M&M freak. I love them. So if I eat them all the time, they're not going to be as important to me. But if I only eat them once in a while, or if growing up my parents only gave them to me once in a while, that increases the value of those things. So if you always have your treats, then they're not going to be as valuable to you. So an establishing operation is about making something more valuable. The easiest way to do that is withhold access to that thing. We're going to come back and hit this issue when we talk about self-management because the real problem with self-management is really managing your motivating operations and managing your access to your reinforcers. So again, if you're trying to control someone else's behavior or modify someone else's behavior, you're saying, all right, I think this person really likes playing, I don't know, the PlayStation. So how can you use that as a reinforcer? Well, you can reduce the amount that they have access to that PlayStation. So now you've automatically made the PlayStation more valuable because they're not able to do it all the time. So then when they do a behavior that you want them to do, you can then give them access to the PlayStation. And that is going to hopefully reinforce whatever behavior it is that they did in order to get that PlayStation. And that's that contingency part right there, the get part. You have to do the behavior in order to get the reinforcer. So if I'm wanting a kid to do his homework or something, then you may say, all right, you only get access to your PlayStation after you've achieved your homework, after you've completed all your homework for the day. Okay, so again, you have to then be able to control access to that PlayStation. That's one of the ways that this can backfire on you is if you don't have control over the PlayStation. But if you do have control over the PlayStation, then you can say you can only access it when you complete your homework. And then even then for a limited time, because now you're making sure that you're keeping the motivating value of that reinforcer up so you're establishing the effectiveness of the reinforcer, hence the term establishing operation. The other one is an abolishing operation, pretty straightforward you can imagine, that we're going to reduce the effectiveness of a reinforcer. Oftentimes this is done by flooding. Giving somebody unfettered access to the reinforcer. So you get your PlayStation all the time, you can use it whenever the heck you want, so now using that as a reinforcer is probably not going to be as effective as what it used to be or what it could be if you limit the access to it. So abolishing operations again, gives somebody access to something, a lot of it. Let's think about an application of this. In the classroom a lot of times kids are reinforced by attention. And if the kid isn't getting much attention, it's going to be a very reinforcing thing. Now if the kid is engaging in inappropriate behavior and that's the only time that they get attention, then you can imagine that inappropriate behavior is going to be reinforced by that attention. But if you start to give them a lot of attention for other things, for positive behavior, for whatever, as long as it's not that inappropriate behavior, now you're decreasing the effectiveness of that attention. You're going to need to do something else, but likely it won't be as effective at maintaining that inappropriate behavior anymore. So what we've really done is changed the three-term contingency here to a four-term contingency. So we have EOs and AOs up front, or if you want just to make it short, MOs. Motivating operations are up front. They happen before this other stuff. Now the arrow here points directly to the SD. I don't really like that so much. I think I should probably change this so that the EO-AO should point to the reinforcer right here. Why? Well, simply because these things affect the value of this. They make that work better or not work as well. So in a sense it doesn't really point here, but they do happen beforehand. So in terms of time, this is the way it works. But what does it affect? It affects that stimulus out there.