Suppression of self-stimulation: three alternative strategies.
Overcorrection beats time-out and DRO for instant self-stim suppression, but DRO can backfire.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four boys who kept rubbing, rocking, or flapping got three quick treatments.
Each day the therapist switched among overcorrection, time-out, and DRO.
They counted how many self-stim moves happened in short sessions.
What they found
Overcorrection stopped the moves fast for every boy.
Time-out helped a little, but not as much.
DRO backfired for one boy—his self-stim went up.
How this fits with other research
Cohen et al. (1990) later showed DRO plus movement-suppression time-out worked for adults.
Linton et al. (2025) found the same on a playground: DRO alone was weak, adding a 30-second time-out fixed it.
Shawler et al. (2020) swapped overcorrection for RIRD and still beat toys, proving the strong method keeps winning.
Why it matters
If you need to cut motor self-stim right now, start with overcorrection.
If you pick DRO, watch data closely—some kids get worse.
When DRO stalls, add a brief time-out before the behavior grows.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Four boys with autistic-like behavior were treated for self-stimulatory behavior with three different treatment procedures--time out, differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO), and overcorrection. All four boys showed a rapid response to the overcorrection procedure. Three boys demonstrated some evidence of decrement in responding with time-out. During the DRO procedure, one showed a modest decrease, two showed no change, but one exhibited a consistent increase in responding under this condition. A multiple baseline applied to one of the subjects failed to reveal any generalization of suppression from one setting to another. A strong but not perfect relationship was found between a frequency and a duration measure of self-stimulation. There was some evidence of negative side effects for one boy during overcorrection and for another during time-out. None of these negative side effects was enduring. There was also some indirect evidence that overcorrection facilitated appropriate play.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1979 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1979.12-185