An evaluation of resurgence during treatment with functional communication training.
Resurgence is routine when you thin FCT, but signaled multiple schedules can prevent most of it.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team taught five children to ask for what they wanted instead of hitting or screaming.
They then slowly removed the reward for asking.
They watched to see if the old problem behavior came back.
What they found
Four out of five kids started hitting or screaming again when the reward for asking stopped.
The return of problem behavior is called resurgence.
It showed that resurgence is a real risk after FCT.
How this fits with other research
Muething et al. (2021) saw the same rebound in 41% of thinning steps.
Briggs et al. (2018) found it in 76% of steps.
Fuhrman et al. (2016) and Whiting et al. (2015) show you can dodge most of this risk.
They used signaled multiple schedules instead of plain extinction.
Kids kept low problem behavior and kept asking.
So the 2009 warning still stands, but newer work shows how to soften the blow.
Why it matters
Expect resurgence every time you thin or stop rewarding the FCT response.
Build a safety plan before you start.
Use signaled multiple schedules or booster FCT sessions.
Track both problem behavior and communication during thinning.
If you see a spike, pause and re-train the request before moving on.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Extinction-induced resurgence is the recurrence of previously reinforced behavior when another behavior is placed on extinction (Lieving, Hagopian, Long, & O'Connor, 2004). This phenomenon may account for some instances of treatment relapse when problem behavior recovers during extinction-based treatments. The current study sought to determine whether resurgence of problem behavior would reliably occur with 5 participants who received treatment with FCT. Results showed that problem behavior reemerged for all but 1 participant when the communicative response was exposed to extinction or thin schedules of reinforcement. These findings suggest that resurgence may account for some instances of response recovery during treatment, and that the described procedure may be useful for the further study of resurgence and eventual prevention of this phenomenon.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 2009 · doi:10.1901/jaba.2009.42-145