Week 3 Flashcards
What is contingency management?
Contingency management refers to the changing of environmental conditions with the aim of influencing the behaviour. This can either be antecedents or consequences which are assumed to work based on operant conditioning principles.
What is a behavioural contingency?
The entity that one set of antecedents, behaviour, and consequences form.
What is stimulus control?
Behaviour reliably occurs in the present of a certain stimulus yet not in the absence of it. For example, behaviour occurs only when father is present.
What are Sd and EO?
Discriminative stimuli indicate that either reinforcement or punishment are available for a certain behaviour. For example, a funeral is a discriminative stimulus indicating that punishment would follow the act of laughing.
Establishing operations change the reinforcing or punishing properties of behaviour. For example, when someone is sad this may increase the reinforcement that eating unhealthy would yield. Seeing the snacks in your house may be a Sd as the sight indicates that eating them (the behaviour) would lead to reinforcement now.
When are contingency management interventions inappropriate?
In case the behaviour is not governed by the antecedents and consequences but rather by a cognitive rule such as “If I go to the park, I will experience a panic attack”.
Give an example of an antecedent intervention!
Cue elimination: Especially in substance use and binge eating disorders. Remove those stimuli that precede the targeted behaviour.
Give an example of a consequence strategy!
Shaping: First rewarding broad behaviour in the right direction and then continuously discriminating to eventually shape behaviour to a target.
Premacking: You only engage in high-frequency behaviour after having previously performed low-frequency behaviour. Requires a lot of discipline lol
What levels of analysis are there?
Topographical analysis is the most detailled and usually includes one entity of ABC - a so-called behaviour contingency.
Functional analysis: examines the broader picture, starting with Sd and EO moving to personal variables and learning history, then behaviour, and short as well as long-term consequences.
The behavioural case formulation then represents the broadest analysis in which we provide a holistic theory about how ALL the problems are related.
How does the consequence coding system work that the lecturer introduced?
The plus or minus in the beginning signals an increase or decrease, while the plus or minus at the end signals reward or punishment. An O indicated the non-occurrence of something.
+C+ –> positive reinforcement
-C- –> negative reinforcement
+C- –> positive punishment
-C+ –> negative punishment
You see that when both signs are congruent it is always reinforcement.
