Punishment: the interactive effects of delay and intensity of shock.
Delay eats punishment strength: every second you wait, you need a much bigger consequence to get the same stop.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with rats that pressed a lever for food. Every press got a mild shock. The twist was timing. Some shocks came right away. Others waited 7, 14, 21, or 28 seconds. The researchers raised the shock level until pressing stopped.
They wanted to know how much stronger the shock had to be when it was late.
What they found
Delay weakens punishment a lot. With no delay, 0.20 mA was enough. At 7–28 s delay, the rats needed 0.50 mA to stop pressing. Longer waits needed bigger jolts.
If you wait even a few seconds, you must make the consequence much harsher to get the same stop.
How this fits with other research
Hake et al. (1967) showed the same intensity rule a year earlier in monkeys. They proved punishment is graded, not all-or-none. Reynolds (1968) now adds the delay rule: the later the shock, the higher the dose needed.
Kaufman (1965) looked like a clash at first. That study found high shock stopped humans fast, but the effect vanished in session two. Reynolds (1968) never tested recovery, so the papers do not truly disagree. One asks “how much now?”; the other asks “how long does it last?”
Sailor (1971) followed three years later. They kept the intensity idea but showed side-effects. Medium shock briefly sped up extinction responses. Together, these four studies draw the same map: intensity matters, delay matters more, and bigger shocks bring unwanted ripples.
Why it matters
In practice you rarely use shock, but the rule still holds: any punisher loses power when it is late. If you must react, do it right away. If you are late, do not just crank up the consequence; instead, look at why the behavior keeps happening or switch to reinforcement for the right act. Immediate feedback keeps you effective and ethical.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A discrete-trial punishment procedure, with rats, was used to examine how delay-of-shock intervals of 0 to 28 sec and shock intensity interact to decrease the frequency and increase the latency of a positively reinforced response. For delay-of-shock intervals of 0, 7, 14, and 28 sec, there was a range of shock intensities, for some subjects, over which the punishing effect of shock was an increasing, monotonic function of shock intensity. For other subjects this transition was abrupt. Functions relating response frequency and latency measures to shock intensity were displaced toward higher values on the shock intensity axis with an increase in delay-of-shock interval. The effects of "gradual" and "abrupt" introduction to "severe" shock, as well as re-exposure to previously used shock intensities, were examined under both the immediate and delay-of-shock conditions. With delay-of-shock intervals of 7, 14, or 28 sec, shock intensities of approximately 0.50 milliamperes or greater were necessary to decrease substantially the number and increase the latency of the lever-pressing response. For the immediate punishment group this intensity was approximately 0.20 ma. These facts were related to Annau and Kamin's (1961) conditioned emotional response experiment in which a shock intensity of 0.49 ma or greater was required to suppress the rate of a positively reinforced response.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1968 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1968.11-789