Using pretreatment and posttreatment assessments to enhance and evaluate existing treatment packages.
Slide a DRA for social skills and a brief chore into time-out to push a stalled DRO aggression plan further.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team took a ready-made DRO-plus-time-out package and gave it two boosts. They added DRA to pay kids for friendly talk and slipped a quick, dull chore into the time-out chair.
They ran the new mix with a small group and watched both aggression and nice social moves.
What they found
Aggression dropped even lower once the chore was tucked into time-out. At the same time, DRA pushed positive chatter up.
The tweaks beat the old package on both fronts.
How this fits with other research
Cohen et al. (1990) showed DRO plus Movement Suppression Time-Out worked when DRO alone failed. Martin et al. (1997) builds on that idea by adding DRA and a simpler chair task.
Linton et al. (2025) later moved the same DRO-plus-time-out logic to the playground. Unsafe play vanished after time-out was added, just like aggression did here.
Foster et al. (1979) looks like a clash: DRO once made stereotypy worse for one boy. The gap is about behavior type. Stereotypy can feel good on its own, so ignoring it sometimes backfires. Aggression, the target here, is more likely to shrink when attention and toys are timed just right.
Why it matters
If your DRO plan has hit a floor, bolt on DRA for the positive opposite and give time-out a quick, boring job. You may see both safer behavior and more prosocial talk without extra hours or staff.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Pretreatment assessment data were used to enhance an existing treatment package to reduce aggression and to increase positive social interactions between a young boy and his peers. Based on the results of pretreatment assessments, additional reinforcement (differential reinforcement of alternative behavior with adult attention) and punishment (performing a nonpreferred task during time-out) components were added to an existing nonresetting differential reinforcement of other behavior (access to peers unless aggression occurred) plus time-out procedure. A posttreatment component analysis of the additional treatment components indicated that the reinforcement component facilitated positive social interactions and the punishment component suppressed aggression towards peers.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1997 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1997.30-709