ELIMINATION OF BEHAVIOR OF MENTAL PATIENTS BY RESPONSE‐PRODUCED EXTINCTION1

Abstract

Mental hospital patients were conditioned to respond at a high rate. Then an attempt was made to eliminate the response by means of a mild punishment consisting of a period of timeout from reinforcement (response-produced extinction). When only one response was available for obtaining the reinforcement, the mild punishment was not effective in eliminating that response. When an alternative response was also made available for obtaining the reinforcement, the mild punishment was completely effective. It appears that even very mild punishment may be effective if the over-all frequency of reinforcement can be maintained by means of an alternative unpunished response.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 94 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.