Stimulus control and resistance to extinction in attention-maintained SIB.
Remove the attention source for ten seconds when self-injury occurs and pay attention only for safe communication to cut attention-maintained SIB to near zero.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team worked with adults who had intellectual disability. Each person hit themselves to get staff attention.
They tested a two-part plan. First, the staff member left the room for ten seconds every time self-injury happened. Second, the staff gave brief, friendly attention only when the person asked for it in a safe way.
What they found
Self-injury dropped to almost zero once the staff removal rule was in place. Safe requests for attention went up.
The person serving as the 'attention stimulus' quickly lost power to trigger problem behavior when that person left right after each hit.
How this fits with other research
Nighbor et al. (2018) extends this idea. They showed that keeping the same people and rooms across training and extinction makes resurgence stronger later. Hanley et al. (1997) removed the person to crush the behavior now; Nighbor warns us that keeping the same context later can bring the behavior back.
Donahoe et al. (2000) used a similar attention-removal trick but paired it with non-contingent reinforcement. They teach us to run short probe sessions to check if the drop in behavior is true extinction or just satiation.
Okouchi et al. (2014) remind us that old stimulus control can hide and then reappear. Even after the person is removed today, past reinforcement history can pop up if cues return.
Why it matters
If simple attention extinction fails, physically remove the reinforcing person for a brief, fixed time while shaping any acceptable request. Do this across staff so the stimulus control is broken for everyone. Then plan for resurgence: rotate staff or change the room later, and keep measuring to catch any bounce.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A functional analysis of the self-injurious behavior (SIB) of a young man diagnosed with severe mental retardation demonstrated that SIB was sensitive to social attention as reinforcement. In addition, lower but consistent rates of SIB occurred in sessions where a person was present (Demand and Toy Play), and a gradual decrease in SIB was observed across sessions where a person was not present (Alone). Evaluation of the within-session trends of SIB during the functional analysis demonstrated that SIB maintained throughout each Social Attention session and declined within and across Alone sessions. This pattern of responding suggested that the presence of a person may have differentially affected rates of SIB independent of the programmed consequences for SIB. In a subsequent analysis, SIB was reduced to near-zero levels in the absence of a person, but maintained in the presence of a person even when attention was withheld, suggesting that the response was highly resistant to extinction. The results of these assessments then were used to develop a treatment to reduce the client's SIB. During treatment, a person was present and delivered attention only when the client appropriately communicated. SIB resulted in the removal of the antecedent stimulus that exerted control over the response (i.e., the person left the room). The findings of this investigation are discussed in terms of the differential effects of stimuli on interpretation of functional analysis results and the subsequent development of treatment.
Research in developmental disabilities, 1997 · doi:10.1016/s0891-4222(97)00007-3