Archive for the 'Increasing responding' Category

If it isn’t the most misunderstood concept in the analysis of behavior, “negative reinforcement” has got to be among the top two or three. (Suggest competitors in the comments!) People often misuse this term, employing it as a synonym for “punishment.”

For grins, I located a couple of examples illustrating this problem. They follow:

1. In an article for the Daily Pennsylvania under the headline “Negative reinforcement aggravates excessive behavior in dogs, studies find,” Greg Rollman published these paragraphs:
   

   An owner’s instinctual response to a dog’s aggressive behavior might be to act aggressively toward the dog, but a new study shows that this could actually exacerbate that behavior.

   Meghan Herron, lead author and resident at the behavior clinic at the School of Veterinary Medicine’s Matthew J. Ryan Veterinary Hospital, surveyed 140 dog owners who sought treatment for their dogs at the clinic. She analyzed the owners’ disciplinary methods using different types of reinforcement – the owner’s positive, negative or neutral reaction to a dog’s behavior.

   Negative reinforcement, such as growling, yelling or hitting, tended to cause aggression in a high percentage of dogs. Positive reinforcement or neutral techniques, on the other hand, caused a negligible increase in dogs’ aggressive behavior.

   Mr. Rollman’s treatment is available here.

2. In Men’s Fitness under the headline “Could you be insulted and belittled into getting fit? One outrageous Denver gym owner has built a thriving enterprise saying, ‘Yes, you can, chubby,’” Megan Michelson reported about the techniques employed by a fitness trainer:

“It’s not my job to kiss your [hindquarters],” says Anti-Gym owner Michael Karolchyk. “If you want positive reinforcement, go to Richard Simmons or Oprah. Both of them are fat and make millions of dollars by making fat people feel good about themselves.”

Karolchyk’s style of extreme negative reinforcement–complete with degrading insults, embarrassing nicknames and throwing toy fish at clients–has garnered both praise and criticism.

Ms. Michelson’s report is available here. Be sure to read what the “experts say.”

For the record: Negative reinforcement occurs when a behavior results in the removal of a feature of the environment and that behavior increases (usually in frequency). There are lots of sources on the Internet that present it correctly.