Aggression as positive reinforcement in people with intellectual disabilities.
Aggression can reward itself, so when social functions test negative, treat it like stereotypy with matched sensory enrichment.
01Research in Context
What this study did
May (2011) wrote a narrative review. The author asked: can aggression feel good all by itself?
The paper pulls evidence from ABA labs and brain studies. All participants had intellectual disability.
No new experiment was run. Instead, past findings were woven into one story.
What they found
Aggression can supply its own built-in reward, like food or a drug hit.
When social pay-offs (escape, attention, items) are ruled out, the behavior may still thrive because it is automatically reinforcing.
How this fits with other research
Allison et al. (1980) showed the opposite: two children's aggression stopped as soon as tasks were removed, proving an escape function. May (2011) does not reject this; it simply adds a second lane—nonsocial reinforcement—for times when escape tests come up empty.
Hamilton et al. (1978) previewed the idea. They found that physical restraint, usually thought aversive, worked like candy for kids who hurt themselves. May (2011) widens the lens, claiming the aggressive act itself can deliver the same built-in payoff.
Lord et al. (1997) and Rajaraman et al. (2022) succeed by treating aggression as purely escape-driven. Their strong results show social interventions still work for socially maintained cases; May (2011) reminds us to test first, because a silent automatic loop will dodge these fixes.
Why it matters
If you run a standard functional analysis and all conditions look flat, do not default to "attention" or "escape" treatment. Add alone sessions, scatter trials, or sensorimotor matched leisure. When the behavior stays high with no audience, treat it like stereotypy: enrich the environment, provide matched stimulation, and withhold the sensory payoff. This dual-path view keeps you from spinning your wheels with social fixes that cannot touch automatic reinforcement.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
From an applied behavior-analytic perspective, aggression in people with intellectual disabilities is mostly maintained by social reinforcement consequences. However, nonsocial consequences have also been identified in functional assessments on aggression. Behaviors producing their own reinforcement have been labeled "automatic" or "nonsocial" in the behavior-analytic literature, a label that bares a striking resemblance to biobehavioral explanations of reward-seeking behaviors. Biobehavioral studies have revealed that aggression activates the same endogenous brain mechanisms as primary reinforcers like food. Therefore, integrating brain-environment explanations would result in a better understanding of the functional mechanisms associated with nonsocial aggression. The purpose of this paper was to explore aggression as a reinforcing consequence for reinforcement-seeking behaviors in people with intellectual disabilities. First, the literature establishing aggression as reinforcement for arbitrary responding will be reviewed. Next, the reward-related biological process associated with aggression was described. Finally, the paper discusses what might be done to assess and treat aggression maintained by nonsocial reinforcement.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2011 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2011.05.029