Behavior Modification or Aversion and Punishment

[Deborah]

It's my belief that most parents don't understand BM. I think it would be useful to have some dialog on this topic. And to explore and consider if the methods used are actually BM or aversion therapy and punishment.

Consider this from a college psych textbook.

PUNISHMENT- in many ways opposite of reinforcement*. Lowers the probability of an undesirable response [behavior] by adding an unpleasant (pain-producing or otherwise aversive) stimulus or by removing a pleasant one [consequences] when the undesirable response is made.
*Reinforcement (negative) increases the probability of a desired response by removing an unpleasant stimulus when the correct response is made. An example: grounding.
Grounding a kid until his/her room is clean is a negative reinforcer, and considered the desirable approach. Grounding a kid for a week or weekend for not cleaning their room is punishment- an undesirable approach.

APPLICATION- spanking, scolding, disapproving looks, withholding affection and/or attention, removing privileges, imprisonment.

DISADVANTAGES- Skinner argued that punishment does not extinguish undesirable behavior; but rather, only suppresses it when the punishing agent is present. Too often indicates which behavior is unacceptable but fails to help develop more appropriate behavior. The ?punished? often becomes fearful and feels angry and hostile toward the ?punisher? leading to a desire to avoid or escape the punisher and/or retaliate. [from personal experience and observation I would say that is can also lead to self destructive tendencies- child internalizes the punishment and then self punishes- cutting, anorexia, etc.] Being subjected to punishment frequently leads to aggressive and/or violent behavior.

CONCLUSION- Parents and teachers should explore other means of handling misbehavior. If administered, it should not be excessively harsh.

I contend that sending a child to a residential facility is punishment, a harsh punishment.
I agree with Skinner, that punishment does not extinguish undesirable behavior, and puts parent/teacher in the role of behavior police. We only have to look at juvenile prisons to confirm this fact. However, when punishment is consistent and unreasonable, I believe the child will internalize this conditioning and come to punish him/herself. Some would view this as ?success? initially, and would not associate subsequent self-destructive behaviors with the conditioning by punishment.

RTCs and TBSs  overuse/abuse punishment and can cause harm. When administering BM, controversial even when admistered 'appropriately'; prileges are consider to be- tv, video games, extra-curricular activities, hanging out with friends, going out, using the car, etc.  Programs consider, contact with parents and family, privacy in written and spoken communications, unmonitored access to phones, contact with the outside world, adequate nutrition, access to toiletries, visits home, among other things, to be privileges. They are, or should be, Rights.

From the text: the most basic generalization concerning positive and negative reinforcement is that we will ?perform acts of behavior? in order to gain pleasure and ?escape pain?. A ?primary? reinforcer is one that fulfills a ?basic physical need for survival? and does not depend on learning. Examples: food, water, sleep, sex,  termination of pain. [I would add, close connections with other people]  
Pay attention here- Fortunately, learning does not depend solely on primary reinforcers. If that were the case, we would need to be hungry, thirsty, or sex starved [isolated and lonely] before we would respond at all.  Bingo! Connecting the dots?

I think RTCs and TBSs are actually a form of ?Aversion? therapy- used to rid clients of harmful or socially undesirable behavior by pairing it with an extremely painful, sickening, or otherwise aversive stimulus. Ex: electric shock, emetics, etc. until a strong  negative association is formed and the person comes to avoid that behavior.

Throughout the section on BM it is frequently repeated that it works best in an institutionalized situation.

Then we have brilliant thinkers like Dorothy Corkille Briggs, author of ?Your Child?s Self-Esteem?, who encourages parents to consider a different approach altogether. To forgo punishment and rewards One which respects the child and if implemented correctly, eliminates the need for ?punishment?.
On isolation- Avoid isolating an angry child, unless he prefers to be alone. Being sent to his room (or isolation chamber) smacks of rejection, which only compounds negative feelings. The goal is to REDUCE emotional burdens, not increase them.

Parents have 3 options:
1)   Keep power- Authoritarian
2)   Abdicate power- Permissive
3)   Share power- Democratic
Many cannot share power because they need to make up for their own lack of self-worth. Controlling others gives them a sense of importance.
Methods of control- Physical violence (fear), Scolding/belittling (rejection, shame, humiliation), Withdrawal of love/attention (behavior manipulator, as children need love), denial of food, Withholding of privileges, Isolation, and Rewards (bribery and praise).
Authoritarianism is great training for children who will live under dictatorships, but far from adequate for children who will be expected to think independently- literally instructs not to trust their own capacity to reason and judge.

Behavior is caused. Whenever misbehavior is continuous, you must deal with its source to eliminate it. Chronic misbehavior is a child?s way of telling us that something is awry in his life. Take a serious inventory and eliminate the deficits you find. How you ?discipline? affects how your child lives his life.

[Anonymous]

Boys caged and beaten by parents say they're angry over 9-month jail term

Mon Jul 5, 3:36 PM ET  

COLIN PERKEL

OSHAWA, Ont. (CP) - Two brothers frequently kept caged and tethered in their family home over 13 years reacted bitterly Monday after their adoptive parents were sentenced to nine months in jail for treatment the judge said was horrendous but well-intentioned.

   

The boys, who were adopted as toddlers and raised in nearby Blackstock, said their parents deserved longer terms and complained the judge appeared to blame them in part for their ordeal.


"I don't feel (justice) has been served," said one boy, 17, as he stood shoulder to shoulder with his 18-year-old brother.


"I feel they should get more time."


The teens were rescued from their home three years ago in a case that horrified police and child-care workers, who found them after a tip from a relative.


Although the boys went to school, home regularly became a house of horrors on evenings and weekends at the hands of the couple they believed were their parents.


When investigators visited the ramshackle two-storey farmhouse northeast of Toronto, one boy was found in a makeshift cage that was padlocked and strapped to a wall.


After school, the boys were tied to their beds, sometimes handcuffed. At one time, one brother was forced to sleep in a dog cage.


They were kept in diapers because they couldn't get to the washroom, subjected to rectal examinations and regularly beaten with a variety of household implements.


Court heard the boys lived in such fear that they ate their own feces to hide evidence of accidents and, deprived of water, felt compelled to drink their own urine.


Ontario Court Judge Donald Halikowski blasted the couple's "ill-informed system of discipline" as demeaning and damaging to the boys.


However, Halikowski said their behaviour was "underscored by good intentions," and that there was no evidence the parents were sadistic.


Rather, he said, they were out of their depth when it came to handling boys. The defence said the boys suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and attention deficit disorder, diagnoses disputed by the Crown.


"There is no doubt they were difficult to raise," said Halikowski, although he added their treatment of the boys was "beyond comprehension."


He sentenced the couple to nine months for assault with a weapon, nine months for forcible confinement, and one month for failing to provide the necessaries of life. The terms all run concurrently, meaning they could be eligible for day parole in less than three months. They will also be on probation for three years.


The couple, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the boys, had pleaded guilty in January to the three charges.


On bail since their arrest three years ago, the two didn't speak as they were handcuffed and taken into custody after sentencing.

   



The defence called the sentence fair and balanced and, despite the evidence, suggested the abuse was not as frequent as child-welfare officials alleged.

"To suggest, as was the theory, that this abusive conduct took place every day for 12 or 13 years was a far-fetched fantasy. That was not the reality," said lawyer Alex Sosna.

"These children were tethered, these children were abused periodically, but not systematically on a daily basis."

Disappointed Crown attorney Soula Olver, who had called for penitentiary terms of up to eight years, refused to comment but said an appeal is under consideration.

Even close relatives of the couple denounced the sentence as too lenient given the judge's description of the boys' treatment as "near torture."

"What is (the judge) saying to the boys?" said their maternal grandfather.

"This really bothers me. It really does."

Olver had earlier contrasted the couple's treatment of the boys with the kind and loving care they gave their biological son, their grandchildren and even neighbourhood kids.

Child welfare workers rejected Halikowski's suggestion that the discovery of the boys may have caused them more emotional damage than the abuse from their parents.

"We are disappointed," said Wanda Secord of the Durham Children's Aid Society.

"We had hoped for a stronger sentence."

Court heard earlier the woman, 43, and her husband, 51, went to Saskatchewan in the late 1980s to adopt her sister's children because she was dying of substance abuse and couldn't care for them.

The younger brother has denounced his adoptive mother as a "stupid bitch" and said he didn't have a childhood "because of her stupidness."

The older boy has said the "unbearable" crib incidents continue to haunt him.

Both are in separate foster care and going to high school.

[cherish wisdom]

B.F. Skinner did much of his research on animals. The techniques employed in many teen therapy faciliites is inapporopriate for human children and minds.

Research by
 B. F. Skinner

In addition to the inherited instinctive behaviors demonstrated by animals as discussed in chapter 3, we cannot fail also to notice behaviors that are modified to fit the circumstances of each animal during its own lifetime. Biological evolution can account for the emergence of adapted instincts through the natural selection of organisms having useful behaviors. It is simply too slow, however, to generate new behaviors adapted to rapidly occurring changes in the environment. To keep pace with these environmental changes, organisms must be able to learn or acquire new behaviors during their lifetimes.[3]

The ability to modify behavior adaptively is most impressive among the more complex animals such as birds and mammals. In temperate forests these creatures must search for new sources of food as the seasons change and learn to avoid enemies and physical dangers. We have all seen how dogs, cats, and birds learn new behaviors that allow them to adapt better to the artificial world of their owners. The ability of humans to modify their behavior to acquire new job-related and leisure abilities, from computer programming and speaking foreign languages to bicycle riding and piano playing, is striking.

One of the major tasks that the field of psychology has set for itself is to discover the ways in which an animal's experiences lead to the acquisition of new behaviors. Countless worms, snails, rats, pigeons, monkeys, humans, and other animals have been subjected to a wide variety of experimental treatments to help us understand under what conditions and how this adaptive modification takes place. And although relatively little consensus exists today in the field of psychology concerning the mechanisms of learning, especially for the most intelligent animals such as dolphins, apes, and humans, it will be informative to consider a short history of psychological research and theory that have attempted to analyze learning into its basic components.

Pavlovian Conditioning
The first scientific attempts to study changes in behavior began during the 1890s at the Institute of Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg. There, Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) was director of what was at the time the world's best equipped physiology laboratory, with facilities to support a large number of dogs. Working with dogs into which stomach tubes had been inserted to collect gastric juices, Pavlov and his assistants observed that the animals would secrete gastric juices not only when food was placed in their mouths but also at the mere sight of food and even at the sight of anyone who regularly fed them. This was followed by the observation of Stefan Wolfsohn, a student in Pavlov's laboratory, that a dog that had repeatedly had sand injected into its mouth (causing salivation to remove the sand) began to salivate at the mere sight of sand. Anton Snarsky, another of Pavlov's students, then demonstrated that a dog could learn to salivate in response to completely arbitrary stimuli. One of Snarsky's experiments involved coloring an acid black and allowing the dog to see it before introducing it into the dog's mouth. After a few such repetitions, the dog would salivate profusely at the sight of any black liquid in a jar.

In this way research began on the type of learning that is still referred to today as Pavlovian conditioning.[4] It is said to have occurred when a neutral stimulus, for example a sound or a light that at first elicits no strong behavioral response, is paired with an unconditional stimulus that normally always results in a specific response, that is, the unconditional response. In Snarsky's experiment, the black acid placed into the mouth would be considered the unconditional stimulus and the secretion of saliva the unconditional response. The original unconditional response to the unconditional stimulus was not considered to be the result of any previous learning experiences (hence the term unconditional), but due instead to an inherited prewired reflex arc connecting the perception of the particular stimulus to a specific behavioral response. By repeatedly presenting a neutral stimulus such as the sounding of a bell immediately before the unconditional stimulus such as placing meat powder in the mouth, Pavlov's dogs soon learned to produce the response (in this case salivation) at the presentation of the previously neutral stimulus. In this way, the dogs would learn to salivate at the sound of a bell if the sound had regularly preceded the placing of food in their mouths.

It is criminal to steal a purse. It is daring to steal a fortune. It is a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases

--Schiller (1759-1805)

[Anonymous]

It's not that Skinnerian behavioral conditioning doesn't work on humans or is inappropriate for humans.  It's that the Programs are (if you believe the survivors and exposes--I do) doing it horribly.

The Program people have "gotten" the "consequences" part---they're all about consequences---but what they haven't gotten is that reinforcements/punishments have to be *immediate*---and you can't work on everything you want somebody to do at once.  You have to add one positive behavior or eliminate one negative behavior at a time---just like if you were training a puppy.

Human beings, particularly damaged ones, need reasons to live.  You have to have "good things" that happen to them randomly and for no apparent reason in along with the conditioning---things that are reinforcers just for being alive.

For most of us, those are the simple things---hearing the birds in the morning, a smile from a friend or a stranger, a kind word here and there.

How can you get a teen to behave like a compassionate, kind, thoughtful human being if what you model is capricious, overly harsh negativity?  How can you expect a teen to learn to trust if what you model is betrayal of fundamental confidentialities?

One of the places where I've seen residential treatment done *right* is the Georgia Retardation Center.  

When I was in college, one of my senior classes used the lab period to go around the city to places that were doing applied psychology or research psychology professionally and see it in action.

To be placed there, kids or adults had to have an IQ below a certain very low score.  They had no inappropriate admissions---you didn't fit the criteria, you didn't go.

The score was low enough that the patients couldn't function in society without *substantial* full-time caretaking.  That is, residential care was necessary and appropriate if there was no available full time caregiver who loved this person enough to make massive personal sacrifices to care for him/her *and* who was financially independent enough to be *able* to make those sacrifices.

They did use Skinnerian theories in behavior modification *but* what they did was as different from the Programs as night and day.

What they did was when the patient was doing something bad that they wanted to stop, they would  find something good the patient could do, or something neutral--neither good nor bad--that the patient could do, that *could not* be done while the patient was concurrently doing the Bad Thing.

They would then make a virtue out of that behavior that was incompatible with doing the Bad Thing.  They would reward that substitute behavior, and would reward it aggressively.

Result:  No more of that bad behavior, even when nobody's watching.  The patient goes out of his or her way to "get caught" doing the substitute behavior.

They did use restraints---very, very rarely and inside of very strict limits.  And they would go virtually any extra mile they had to to avoid having to use restraints.

I did see one kid who had had all his teeth pulled---because he had a condition where he *would* seriously injure himself with them.  Not the Programs' trumped up "self-injuring"--this was the Real Deal.

These were people who were very, very profoundly disabled who needed, and were getting, the most compassionate care that it was possible for a state institution to give.

It was closed in 1997, not over scandal like the Programs, but just because Georgia tries very hard to make alternatives to hospitalization (like group homes) work and, over time, has reduced the inpatient load enough to consolidate to fewer state hospitals.

Timoclea