Effective treatment of self-injurious behavior through a forced arm exercise.

Abstract

A forced arm exercise was investigated as a means of eliminating head-hitting in two children. During sessions restraints used to manage subjects were removed. After a baseline measure, required practice of repeated vertical arm movements was made contingent upon each response. Later, this procedure was combined with reinforcement under a differential reinforcement of other behavior schedule. Arm exercise alone produced a substantial decrease in head-hitting, while the combination treatment engendered near-zero levels. Subsequently, reduction of head-hitting was extended to several contexts by regular ward staff. This type of treatment appears as effective with self-injurious behavior as it is with stereotyped behavior.

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 — 57 citations exist upstream.