The effects of reinforcement on the modification, maintenance, and generalization of social responses of mental patients.
Prompt, fade, and thin any strong reinforcer to teach greetings that last months and spread to new people.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Three long-stay mental patients who never greeted staff became the subjects.
The team used three steps: first they gave a verbal prompt like "say hello," then they faded the prompt, and finally they thinned the cigarette rewards from every time to once in a while.
They ran an ABAB reversal design to prove the greetings only happened when the program was on.
After the last phase, they stopped all training and checked the men three months later.
What they found
All three men learned to say "hello" or "good morning" to nurses and doctors.
The skill stuck around for three months with no extra sessions.
Even better, the men started greeting new staff they had never met before.
How this fits with other research
Milby (1970) shows the same idea works with social praise instead of cigarettes.
Yamamoto et al. (2024) tried the same prompt-fade steps with autistic adults but used written prompts and got weaker results.
Wichnick-Gillis et al. (2019) used script fading with autistic kids and also saw the greetings carry over to siblings at home.
Périkel et al. (1974) used the same reversal design to teach sentence structure to an autistic child, proving the method works across ages and targets.
Why it matters
You can teach any withdrawn client to greet others with just three moves: prompt, fade, and thin the reinforcer.
Pick any strong reward the client likes, not just food.
Once the skill is solid, you can walk away and it will still be there months later.
This saves you from endless booster sessions.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Social greeting responses of three withdrawn, chronic schizophrenics were experimentally modified. Initially, none of the subjects spoke to an experimenter. Prompts and cigarette reinforcement were employed to produce increases in the rates of greetings. Then, the prompts were faded so that the greetings came under the control of the presence of the experimenter. Reversal and subsequent reinforcement procedures were employed to demonstrate that the responses were controlled by their consequences. Next, the schedule of cigarette reinforcement was leaned out so that greetings continued to occur in the absence of cigarette reinforcement. However, low or zero rates of greetings occurred in the presence of a second experimenter. Five new experimenters employed the prompting, fading, reinforcement, and schedule-leaning procedures. Subsequently, all subjects emitted appropriately high rates of greetings in the presence of the second experimenter. Without further application of the experimental procedures, greetings were still occurring in the presence of both the first and second experimenters almost three months later.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1968 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1968.1-307