Punishment of responding under schedules of stimulus-shock termination: effects of d-amphetamine and pentobarbital.
Drug effects on punished behavior flip depending on the reinforcer maintaining the response—check your contingencies before predicting outcomes.
01Research in Context
What this study did
McKearney (1976) tested how two drugs change punished behavior. Rats pressed a lever for two different pay-offs: food pellets or escape from a warning signal plus shock. Every 30th press also produced a brief electric shock as punishment.
The team first trained each rat on one reinforcer type. Then they gave either d-amphetamine or pentobarbital before sessions. They counted how drug changed response rate under punishment.
What they found
The same drug did opposite things depending on what kept the rat pressing. With food, d-amphetamine increased punished presses while pentobarbital decreased them. With shock-escape, the pattern flipped: amphetamine now decreased presses and pentobarbital increased them.
In short, drug effects reversed when the reinforcer changed.
How this fits with other research
Burgess et al. (1986) later showed a similar flip with morphine. Monkeys given a history of both punished and unpunished components later increased punished responding under morphine. Together, the two studies say the same thing: behavioral history and reinforcer type decide how a drug will act.
Kruper (1968) found that punishment simply cuts response rate by a fixed percent, no matter how rich the food schedule is. McKearney (1976) adds that this percent cut can grow or shrink once drugs enter the picture.
Lea et al. (1977) showed that brain-stimulation reinforcement resists punishment more than food. McKearney (1976) extends this idea: not only do different reinforcers resist punishment differently, they also steer drug effects in opposite directions.
Why it matters
Before you predict how a client on stimulants or sedatives will react to a punishment procedure, ask what is maintaining the behavior. A token economy, escape contingency, or social reinforcer can each swing the drug effect another way. Run a brief functional analysis first, then adjust the punishment intensity or choose a different intervention altogether.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Responding maintained in squirrel monkeys under 5-min fixes-interval schedules of either food presentation or termination of a visual stimulus associated with electric-shock delivery was suppressed by presenting an electric shock for every thirtieth response (punishment). In monkeys responding under the schedule of food presentation, d-amphetamine sulfate only further decreased punished responding, and pentobarbital sodium markedly increased punished responding, as expected from previous reports. In monkeys responding under the schedule of stimulus-shock termination, however, the effects of the two drugs were opposite: d-amphetamine markedly increased punished responding, whereas pentobarbital only decreased responding. Thus, the effects of these drugs on punished responding were different depending on the type of event maintaining responding. These and previous results indicate that it may be misleading and inaccurate to speak of the effects of drugs on "punished responding" as though punishment were a unitary phenomenon. As with any behavior, the effects of drugs and other interventions on punished responding cannot be accurately characterized independently of the precise conditions under which the behavior occurs.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1976 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1976.26-281