Further evidence of renewal in automatically maintained behavior

Falligant and his team looked back at the kids who had stayed in an inpatient unit for self-injury.

All of the kids’ behavior was kept going by internal sensations, not by attention or toys.

The staff had run full functional analyses, then later moved the kids to new rooms.

The authors counted how often the self-injury came back, or renewed, after the move.

Renewal happened in about one out of every three cases.

That rate matched the team’s earlier outpatient report.

Kids whose self-injury was labeled Subtype 2 renewed twice as often as Subtype 1.

In plain words, some automatic self-injury is more likely to rebound when the setting changes.

Morgan et al. (2017) showed that arm-splint plus belt can stop self-injury cold.

Their effect looked huge, but Falligant warns the gain may vanish if you change rooms.

Kamlowsky et al. (2021) used latency-based FA to find the true function before treatment.

Falligant used the same FA logic, then tracked what happened after the treatment room — a next step the 2021 paper did not take.

Retzlaff et al. (2020) taught RBTs to read FA graphs on a screen.

Falligant’s data remind us that even perfect graphs can’t predict renewal; you still need to probe new settings.

If you treat automatically maintained self-injury, plan for relapse the moment the client leaves the therapy room.

Probe in the lunchroom, the playground, and the family car.

Watch Subtype 2 cases extra close; their renewal risk is double.

One quick probe session now can save you from a big setback later.