The measurement and reinforcement of behavior of psychotics.
Tokens quickly boost daily living skills; remove them and skills fall, but reinstate tokens and the gains return immediately.
01Research in Context
What this study did
THOMPSON et al. (1965) ran a token economy on a hospital ward for adults with psychosis.
Staff gave plastic tokens when patients showed clean clothes, polite talk, or on-time meals.
Later they stopped the tokens, then brought them back, to see if the skills stayed.
What they found
Adaptive behaviors rose when tokens were given and fell when tokens stopped.
The moment tokens returned, the behaviors bounced back to high levels.
The system worked without fancy gear—just tokens and a prize cabinet.
How this fits with other research
Kohlenberg et al. (1976) later copied the ward-wide plan with teens in a detention cottage and saw the same lift in rule-following for over a year.
Beahm et al. (2023) now supersedes the old plastic-token method: their phone app handed digital points to adults with developmental disabilities and still lifted work engagement for six weeks.
Fisher (1979) seems to disagree—he found tooth-brushing dropped a little after big token phases—but his focus was long-term maintenance, not the quick bounce-back T et al. showed.
Why it matters
You can trust a simple token board or an app to jump-start adaptive skills in almost any setting. Start with clear, countable targets, deliver tokens right away, and watch the graph climb. If behavior dips, re-issue tokens and the improvement usually returns—no need to rebuild the program from scratch.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
An attempt was made to strengthen behaviors of psychotics by applying operant reinforcement principles in a mental hospital ward. The behaviors studied were necessary and/or useful for the patient to function in the hospital environment. Reinforcement consisted of the opportunity to engage in activities that had a high level of occurrence when freely allowed. Tokens were used as conditioned reinforcers to bridge the delay between behavior and reinforcement. Emphasis was placed on objective definition and quantification of the responses and reinforcers and upon programming and recording procedures. Standardizing the objective criteria permitted ward attendants to administer the program. The procedures were found to be effective in maintaining the desired adaptive behaviors for as long as the procedures were in effect. In a series of six experiments, reinforced behaviors were considerably reduced when the reinforcement procedure was discontinued; the adaptive behaviors increased immediately when the reinforcement procedure was re-introduced.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1965 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1965.8-357