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Psychology · Studypool

negative reinforces

Post ID: 3478103

You probably have experienced many motivators in your life that impacted your behavior. Perhaps you completed chores as a child for money that you learned to save to buy something you wanted. Or you may have learned to try food you didn’t care for because it meant you could leave the dinner table. Unknowingly at the time, you were learning lessons with the help of positive and negative reinforcement.

Last week, you examined positive reinforcement. As you discovered, positive reinforcement works by presenting motivating reinforcers to the individual after the desired behavior is exhibited, making the behavior more likely to happen in the future.

Another behavioral analysis approach is negative reinforcement, which removes a stimulus after a behavior is exhibited, making the behavior more likely to happen in the future. Not to be confused with punishment, negative reinforcement is similar to positive reinforcement in that both attempt to increase the frequency of a behavior.

For this Discussion, you will consider a scenario that may lend itself to negative reinforcement. Based on the circumstances of the scenario, you will determine how negative reinforcement can be applied. You will also identify a behavior in your own life that lends itself to negative reinforcement.

To Prepare

  • Review the Learning Resources for this week, including the required weekly media programs, to gain an understanding of negative reinforcers. Note: It is critical for you to review all media for this week prior to completing this Discussion.
  • Consider the following scenario:

You are working on improving communication with a child with autism who is relatively high functioning (i.e., IQ higher than 100). When you implement your treatment to get the child to maintain eye contact with you, he looks toward the ground, shakes his head, and mumbles something that you cannot understand. This behavior occurs on most occasions when your treatment focuses on eye contact. You eventually give up and move on to another activity with which the child readily complies.

Resources

  • Cooper, J. O., Heron, T. E., & Heward, W. L. (2020). Applied behavior analysis (3rd ed.). Pearson.
    • Chapter 12, “Negative Reinforcement” (pp. 287–300)