Negative Reinforcement Procedure Research Articles

A rat model of operant negative reinforcement in opioid-dependent males and females.

Avoidance of opioid withdrawal plays a key role in human opioid addiction. Here, we present a procedure for studying operant negative reinforcement in rats that was inspired by primate procedures where opioid-dependent subjects lever-press to prevent naloxone infusions. In Experiment 1, we trained rats (n = 30, 15 females) to lever-press to escape and then avoid mild footshocks (0.13-0.27mA) for 35days (30 trials/d). Next, we catheterized them and implanted minipumps containing methadone (10mg/kg/day) or saline. We then paired (4 times, single session) a light cue (20-s) with a naloxone infusion (20µg/kg, i.v) that precipitated opioid withdrawal. Next, we trained the rats to escape naloxone injections for 10days (30 trials/d). Each trial started with the onset of the opioid-withdrawal cue. After 20-s, the lever extended, and an infusion of naloxone (1 to 2.2µg/kg/infusion) began; a lever-press during an 11-s window terminated the withdrawal-paired cue and the infusion. In Experiment 2, we trained rats (n = 34, 17 females) on the same procedure but decreased the footshock escape/avoidance training to 20days. All rats learned to lever-press to escape or avoid mild footshocks. In both experiments, a subset, 56% (10/18) and 33% (8/24) of methadone-dependent rats learned to lever-press to escape naloxone infusions. We introduce an operant negative reinforcement procedure where a subset of opioid-dependent rats learned to lever-press to escape withdrawal-inducing naloxone infusions. The procedure can be used to study mechanisms of individual differences in opioid negative reinforcement-related behaviors in opioid-dependent rats.

Ventral hippocampus-lateral septum circuitry promotes foraging-related memory.

SUMMARYRemembering the location of a food or water source is essential for survival. Here, we reveal that spatial memory for food location is reflected in ventral hippocampus (HPCv) neuron activity and is impaired by HPCv lesion. HPCv mediation of foraging-related memory involves communication to the lateral septum (LS), as either reversible or chronic disconnection of HPCv-to-LS signaling impairs spatial memory retention for food or water location. This neural pathway selectively encodes appetitive spatial memory, as HPCv-LS disconnection does not affect spatial memory for escape location in a negative reinforcement procedure, food intake, or social and olfactory-based appetitive learning. Neural pathway tracing and functional mapping analyses reveal that LS neurons recruited during the appetitive spatial memory procedure are primarily GABAergic neurons that project to the lateral hypothalamus. Collective results emphasize that the neural substrates controlling spatial memory are outcome specific based on reinforcer modality.

Escape Extinction and Negative Reinforcement in the Treatment of Pediatric Feeding Disorders: a Single Case Analysis.

Pediatric feeding disorders are common among children with developmental disabilities and can have detrimental effects on growth and development. An escape extinction and negative reinforcement-based approach to treating food refusal was examined in a child with cerebral palsy. A changing criterion treatment design was implemented, which allowed the child to exit the treatment area contingent upon the acceptance and ingestion of a pre-determined number of bites. Food acceptance ranged from one to three bites at baseline and exceeded the pre-set criteria for mastery, at 14 bites during the final intervention phase.The study will contribute to the current literature on negative reinforcement procedures used in the treatment of pediatric feeding problems.The study will contribute to increasing the availability of literature pertaining to pediatric feeding problems among children with complex disabilities such as cerebral palsy.The intervention is brief with components to the treatment package which increases utility and ease of implementation.The study demonstrates the applicability of changing criterion design within clinical settings.

Enhancing Treatment Integrity Maintenance Through Fading with Indiscriminable Contingencies

School psychologists are often asked to develop treatment to remediate students’ academic skills or social behavior problems. When teachers implement treatment recommendations with high levels of treatment integrity, students benefit. Treatment integrity has been enhanced by use of direct training, performance feedback, and negative reinforcement procedures. Still, maintenance of treatment integrity has received limited systematic inquiry. This study investigated maintenance of treatment integrity over time by utilizing a systemic fading procedure with indiscriminable contingencies. The results showed that the teachers continued to implement treatment protocols at a high level after performance feedback was faded. Students also fared better when treatment integrity was high.

The analysis and treatment of problem behavior evoked by auditory stimulation

The current study aimed to identify specific stimuli associated with music that served as an establishing operation (EO) for the problem behavior of a 6-year-old child with a diagnosis of autism. Specific EOs for problem behavior evoked by auditory stimulation could be identified. A differential negative reinforcement procedure was implemented for specific conditions that evoked problem behavior. Using a changing criterion and a differential negative reinforcement of other behavior, exposure to specific stimuli associated with music was gradually increased, and resulted in reductions in problem behavior to near zero levels.

Effects of positive and negative reinforcement on daily living skills in chronic psychiatric patients in community residences

The effects of contingent positive and negative reinforcement on adaptive behavior and mood were examined in a sample of 36 chronic, psychiatric outpatients. Group 1 received contingent positive token reinforcement to improve daily living skills, group 2 received a negative reinforcement procedure based on removal of free-tokens, and group 3 was a no-treatment control. Subjects were assessed via a weekly daily living checklist and were pre- and posttested on the Profile of Mood States (POMS). Significant differences were found between the control and treatment groups on both total activities of daily living and among five individual targeted behaviors. Mood states did not differ among the groups, which indicates benign effects of negative reinforcement. The findings of this study are relevant to the treatment of the serious and persistently mentally ill.

Further avoidance studies with goldfish: Brightness discrimination and transposition

In two experiments using the shuttlebox apparatus and negative (shock) reinforcement, goldfish learned to discriminate between same color signals differing only in brightness and to choose the brightness level paired with shock-omission to avoid shock. Experiment 1 compared two signal presentation procedures, one presenting only one signal at a time but allowing for successive alternation of signals within a trial (SUC) and the other presenting both signals simultaneously (SIM). SIM performance was superior to SUC in acquisition and showed more positive transfer with signal color changed (CC), more negative transfer with brightness-level—shock pairing reversed (R), and, although attenuated, more negative transfer with both signal color changed and shock pairing reversed (CC + R). Further, SIM relearning following reversal was faster than SUC. In Experiment 2, using the SIM procedure, eight transfer groups were tested for transposition with one of their original acquisition signals replaced in transfer by a signal bearing either the same or the opposite brightness relationship to the retained signal. Four transfer groups showed positive and four showed negative transfer effects, but all eight groups showed transfer performances consistent with a transpositional expectation. The present two experiments alone do not elucidate the mechanisms accounting for either the SIM superiority over SUC in Experiment 1 or the transposition effect in Experiment 2. These experiments show only that the transposition phenomenon can be supported by negative reinforcement procedures, which has not been demonstrated before. Now that techniques exist for producing negatively reinforced transposition, work investigating the underlying mechanisms and comparing them with the mechanisms of positively reinforced transposition can begin.

Treatment of constipation-caused encopresis by a negative reinforcement procedure

During a baseline condition soiling and the cumulative number of bowel movements of a child suffering from retentive encopresis were recorded. Following this, a DRO (differential reinforcement of other behavior) alone, a DRO plus overcorrection procedure, and a negative reinforcement procedure were each evaluated using a reversal design. The negative reinforcement procedure, which involved having the child sit on the toilet three times a day for increasing time periods if no bowel movement occurred, suppressed soiling and led to regular unprompted daily bowel movements in a very brief period of time. The DRO alone and DRO plus overcorrection conditions produced only a small decline in soiling.

The use of a negative reinforcement procedure to increase the performance of autistic and mentally retarded children on discrimination training tasks

Abstract Because some mentally retarded and autistic children are unresponsive to positive events such as edibles and praise, their performance during educational activities is often sporadic. Such children are often labelled as being noncompliant or difficult to motivate. A negative reinforcement procedure plus edibles and praise was compared with edibles and praise alone as a method of increasing correct responding on discrimination tasks by four such children. In both conditions, a child was given an edible and praise when the correct response occurred within 2 s of a therapist's verbal prompt. The aversive stimulus used in the negative reinforcement procedure consisted of guiding the child through the correct response 20 times when no response occured with 2 s. The negative reinforcement procedure plus edibles and praise produced about 90% correct responding for all the children, while edibles and praise alone were much less effective. The use of a negative reinforcement procedure with noncompliant or difficult to motivate behaviorally disordered children appears to be an effective method of increasing their instruction-following.

Improving visual acuity in a myopic child: Assessing compliance and effectiveness

Improvements in visual acuity following vision training were evaluated for an 11 1 2 -yr-old myopic male. Initial increases in the distance at which the S could discriminate letters were found. However, performance began to deteriorate as training progressed. A negative-reinforcement procedure was employed in order to rule out motivational factors potentially related to this decreased performance. Using a changing criterion within an ABCBC reversal design, the distance at which the S correctly discriminated letters increased by more than 4 1 2 times and was clearly related to the reinforcement procedure.

The effects of negative reinforcement for irritable aggression on resident-intruder behavior

This experiment demonstrated that rats trained to display elevated levels of shock-induced aggression in a negative reinforcement paradigm displayed more boxing behavior than yoked control groups in a later test in which intruder rats were placed in the home cage of resident rats. Resident or intruder status did not affect the influence of the negative reinforcement procedure on the observed resident-intruder behavior of trained animals; however, naive intruders paired with trained residents displayed increased defensive behavior, suggesting that negative reinforcement for shock-induced aggression affected the behavior of these residents.

Success of covert negative reinforcement is not the result of operant conditioning.

In the covert negative reinforcement procedure, a client is asked to imagine an unpleasant situation and then to imagine performing the adaptive response whose frequency the therapist-wishes to increase. According to Cautela, the imagined adaptive response should increase in frequency because of its association with the termination of the unpleasant image, just as escape-conditioning leads to an increase in the frequency of a response that terminates a noxious stimulus. Using 27 college students who showed an aversion to harmless snakes, this investigation attempted to test Cautela's conditioning rationale by comparing covert negative reinforcement with a procedure containing all of the elements of covert negative reinforcement except for the theoretically essential pairing of the imagined unpleasant situation with the imagined adaptive response. Self-report and behavioral measures of snake aversion indicated no consistent differences in the effectiveness of these two treatments, although both treatments were significantly more effective than no treatment. Over-all, the results of this experiment were interpreted as contradicting the escape-conditioning explanation of covert negative reinforcement.

A case study: The end of the eve of destruction

A case study was presented about the behavioral modification techniques employed to stop the destructive chewing by a pet dog. Destructive behavior during the absence of an owner has long been a major problem for pet owners. A multitude of negative reinforcement procedures have been employed in an attempt to curtail the misbehavior, but all usually resulting in failure. Frustration and failure of negative reinforcement in the modification of destructive behavior prompted this case study in positive reinforcement with an l&month old male Irish Setter. The actual behavior modification proceeded through operant learning. Through reinforcement of a new response, any behavior other than destruction and defecation, to a known stimulus, the departure of the owner, the old response, destruction and defecation, was extinguished Initially, very short training sessions of 1 min were instituted to effect positive reinforcement before adequate time had elapsed to precipitate destructive behavior. The duration of the absences was gradually increased with profuse praise and a food reward as the positive reinforcement for each successful training session. The gradual increase in training session duration worked to effect the behavior modification by increasing the tolerance level to anxiety, reinforcing behavior that the trainer was confident the dog would elicit, and strengthening the relationship between good behavior and positive reinforcement. Training programs of this nature are not only effective in modifying destructive behavior, but also prove to be very rewarding to the owner and the pet for those who are sincere in their efforts.

Negative reinforcement to alter disruptive behavior of an adolescent in a day treatment setting

This report describes the treatment of disruptive behavior in an adolescent in a day treatment program (by a negative reinforcement procedure). The use of a negative reinforcer was necessitated by the unavailability of effective positive reinforcers.

The effects of modifying color-meaning concepts on racial concept attitudes in five- and eight-year-old children

Williams and Edwards (1969) found that changing the positive and negative evaluations given to color concepts by preschool children through reinforcement procedures over two sessions reduced their racial concept attitude scores measured during a third session. The present study replicated their negative reinforcement and control procedures with 5-year-old children, and extended their research to include 8-year-old children. The present results replicated the original findings and in fact showed a larger change in racial attitude scores. While the color-meaning concepts were modified to a greater extent in the older children, the effect of the negative reinforcement procedure on racial attitude scores was similar for the two age groups.

Characteristics and response-displacement effects of shock-generated responding during negative reinforcement procedures: pre-shock responding and post-shock aggressive responding.

Bar-pressing (Experiment I) or key-pressing (Experiments II and III) responses of monkeys were reinforced according to a fixed-interval schedule of negative reinforcement: the first response after a fixed interval of time terminated regularly spaced shocks for a fixed time designated as the reinforcement period. During extinction, shocks continued during the reinforcement period. That there were two types of responding generated by shock alone was indicated by (1) the level of responding maintained during extinction relative to conditions without shock, (2) the stability of two between-shock response patterns across reinforcement and extinction conditions, and (3) the development of these two between-shock patterns without a history of reinforcement. Subjects developed either a pre-shock or a post-shock response pattern when only the bar was available. However, when both a bite tube, an operandum requiring an aggressive topography, and a recessed key, an operandum that did not require an aggressive topography, were provided, the post-shock pattern was observed in tube biting and the pre-shock pattern was observed in key pressing. Removal of the bite tube produced post-shock key responding similar to that observed when only the bar was available. The displacement of post-shock, aggression-motivated responding confirmed the confounding effect of shock-generated responding in negative reinforcement procedures, and suggests that the use of concurrent response alternatives would reduce such confounding.

SHAPING AVOIDANCE BEHAVIOR IN RESTRAINED MONKEYS1

Lever-pulling avoidance behavior of 24 monkeys was actively shaped with a manual shock-control box and a closed-circuit TV system. A negative reinforcement procedure was used wherein a periodically occurring body shock was postponed each time the subject moved toward the lever. All subjects were trainable with this method, two-thirds of them in fewer than five, 1- to 2-hr sessions. Negative reinforcement was more effective than a punishment procedure.

Conditioning against Silences and Therapist-Directed Comments in Group Psychotherapy Using Auditory Stimulation

An attempt was made to condition the number and duration of silences and the number of therapist-directed responses in group psychotherapy, using an auditory stimulus as a negative reinforcer. Two experimental and one control group of newly admitted neuropsychiatric Veterans Administration inpatients were Ss. Both silences and therapist-directed responses were reduced during the negative reinforcement procedure in the experimental groups. There were no significant changes in the control group which received no negative reinforcement. Therapist-directed responses recovered but silences remained at a low level during extinction, especially for the experimental group receiving the greater number of conditioning sessions. This finding suggests the possibility of permanently eliminating certain responses if conditioning is carried out long enough and more adaptive responses have an opportunity to emerge and become established. Proposals and speculations for future research were discussed.